Activity

In July I had put my name down for the Social Service Groups. The woman in charge of the women’s sections, a huge purple-faced individual, made me the head of the Belleville group. At the beginning of October she called a meeting of officers to give us our instructions. The young women I met at thi…

There was nothing startling about the luxury of the Laiguillon home: what I was really rejecting, and what I reproached Jacques with accepting, was the bourgeois status. Our understanding was based on an ambiguity which explains the incoherence of my emotions. In my view, Jacques was freeing himsel…

[...] didn’t know what he’d been doing exactly all the summer, but I assumed the worst: gaming, drinking, and what I vaguely called debauchery. There must be a good explanation for such behaviour: but I found it disillusioning to have to excuse him. I recalled the great fantasy of love and admirat…

When we got back to Meyrignac, I toyed with the idea of writing; I preferred literature to philosophy, and I wouldn’t have been at all pleased if someone had prophesied that I would become a kind of female Bergson; I didn’t want to speak with that abstract voice which, whenever I heard it, failed t…

My Aunt Marguerite and my Uncle Gaston, who with their children were spending the season at Cauterets, had invited my sister and me to join them. A year earlier, I would have been enraptured by the mountain landscape: but now I had withdrawn into myself and the world outside no longer had any effec…