"I hope, too, that you don't hate me for writing to you as I'm doing.  In any case, I'd promised myself to tell you that I loved you as soon as I'd left the convent..." Sylvie is a rebellious and impetuous schoolgirl of seventeen. Three months before she is due to take her Baccalaureate the convent of Sainte-Thérèse expels her - because she has fallen passionately in love with her teacher, the nun Julienne. So Sylvie retreats to the demi-monde of Paris in the 1950s: a world of bars, jazz and bohemianism. But she refuses to forget Julienne, bombarding her with letters, forcing her to confront a love which has for Sylvie the revelatory force of a religious experience. Sometimes she is in ecstasy, often in the depths of despair, always she is fervent, obsessed - until, driven by Julienne's ambivalence and the unyielding bourgeois world, she commits the rashest act of all...Eveline Mahyere was born in Geneva and lived most of her life in Paris working as a translator.  I Will Not Serve (1958), her only novel, was written shortly before she committed suicide at the age of thirty-two.  This translation by Antonia White was first published in 1959. The power and laconic self-mocking humor of Eveline Mahyere's writing, her forceful, poetic prose, have earned her, in France, the title of a 'female Rimbaud."