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I argued a little longer, as mildly as possible, trying to persuade him of the value of his thesis and reminding him of earlier plans for papers and research. He answered politely, but my words had no hold on him. No, he did not belong to me anymore; not anymore at all. Even his physical appearance…

[...] “You will like her: she is a woman who has a job.” At long intervals she works as a script girl. I know these with-it young married women. They have some vague kind of a job; they claim to use their minds, to go in for sport, dress well, run their houses faultlessly, bring up their children p…

It is not a matter of energy, I said to myself as I left her: I just could not live without writing. Why? And why was I so desperately eager to make an intellectual out of Philippe when André would have let him follow other paths? When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from de…

There was still a question in her eyes—one that she did not like to put into words. I made the first move. “You know what I wanted to do—to start off with a consideration of the critical works published since the war and then to go on to suggest a new method by which it is possible to make one’s wa…

A cab took me to the Parc Montsouris, where I had an appointment with Martine. As I came into the gardens the smell of cut grass wrung my heart—the smell of the high Alpine pastures where I used to walk with André with a sack on my shoulders, a smell so moving because it was that of the meadows of …