Activity

It was a great relief to me not to see Jacques any more; I was no longer torturing myself over him. The first rays of spring sunshine were taking the nip of winter out of my blood. While I continued to work hard, I decided that I would have a little amusement. I went fairly often to the cinema in t…

[...] At the Sorbonne, my professors systematically ignored Hegel and Marx; in a big book on the progress of conscience in the western world, Brunschvig had devoted a bare three pages to Marx, whom he placed on the same level as one of the obscurest reactionary thinkers. He was teaching us about th…

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…