What had our relationship meant to Jacques? And what sort of person was he really? I was mistaken when I thought that his marriage showed him in his true colours and that after a period of youthful romanticism he was going to settle down calmly and become the bourgeois he had always been at heart. I occasionally saw him with his wife: their relationship was one of only moderate rapture. All connexions were broken off between our families, but later on I used to see him fairly frequently in the bars of Montparnasse, lonely, puffy-faced, with watering eyes, obviously the worse for drink. He produced five or six children and made reckless speculations. He moved his plant to the factory of a man in the same line of business, and had the old Laiguillon factory pulled down, intending to replace it with a large block of flats; unfortunately, after he had had the old house pulled down, he couldn’t manage to raise enough capital to build the block of flats; he quarrelled with his wife’s father and with his own mother who had both refused to be associated with him in this venture; Jacques spent his last penny on it, then had to mortgage, and finally sell his plant. For a few months he worked in his associate’s business but was soon given the sack.