"Certainly, she was a girl like many others. For Aimery, the writer of these lines, and for most men, such girls are merely passing through their lives, figures to whom one feels only fleetingly attracted. This attraction lasts only a moment because the beauty and peace one finds in them do not correspond to what one had imagined for oneself; they are not where one expected to find them. They are simple girls, and they know it themselves. But simply because no one has wanted to discover the depths within them. What man has not made at least two or three such mistakes in his life?" Prix Goncourt 1974