They did not disappoint me: I was disconcerted, dazzled, transported. Apart from the rare exceptions I have mentioned, I regarded works of literature as historical monuments which I would explore with more or less interest, which I sometimes admired, but which did not concern me personally. But now, suddenly, men of flesh and blood were speaking to me with their lips close to my ear; it was something between them and me; they were giving expression to the aspirations and the inner rebellions which I had never been able to put in words, but which I recognized. I skimmed the cream of the Sainte-Geneviéve library; with fevered brow, my brain on fire, and my heart pounding with excitement, I read Gide, Claudel, Jammes. I exhausted the resources of Jacques’ private library; I took out a subscription to the ‘Maison des Amis des Livres’, in which Adrienne Monnier, in a long dress of grey home-spun, held court; I was so greedy for reading matter that I couldn’t be satisfied with the two-books-at-a-time rule: I would secretly slip half a dozen or so into my satchel; the difficulty was getting them back on the shelves, and I’m afraid I didn’t get them all put back. When it was fine, I would go and read in the Luxembourg Gardens; I would walk in the sun round the fountains in a state of exaltation, repeating phrases I liked. Often I would install myself in the reading-room of the Institut Catholique which offered me a quiet spot to read in only a few steps from home. It was there, seated at a black desk among pious students and seminarists in long robes, that I read, with tears in my eyes, the novel that Jacques loved above all others and which was called not Le Grand Môle but Le Grand Meaulnes. I found release in reading as once I had done in prayer. Literature took the place in my life that had once been occupied by religion: it absorbed me entirely, and transfigured my life. The books I liked became a Bible from which I drew advice and support; I copied out long passages from them; I learnt by heart new canticles and new litanies, psalms, proverbs, and prophecies and I sanctified every circumstance in my existence by the recital of these sacred texts. My emotions, my tears, and my aspirations were no less sincere on account of that: the words and the cadences, the lines and the verses were not aids to make-believe: but they rescued from silent oblivion all those intimate adventures of the spirit that I couldn’t speak to anyone about; they created a kind of communion between myself and those twin souls which existed somewhere out of reach; instead of living out my small private existence, I was participating in a great spiritual epic. For months I kept myself going with books: they were the only reality within my reach.

At the same time I persisted in my determination to be of service to humanity. I attacked Renan in my diary. I protested that a great man is not an end in himself: he will only justify his existence if he contributes to the raising of the moral and intellectual standards of common humanity. My Catholic upbringing had taught me never to look upon any individual, however lowly, as of no account: everyone had the right to bring to fulfilment what I called their eternal essence. My path was clearly marked: I had to perfect, enrich, and express myself in a work of art that would help others to live.

I felt I should already be trying to communicate the experience of solitude which I was then undergoing. In April I wrote the first pages of a novel. In the character of Éliane, I described myself wandering in a park with some of my cousins; I picked up a beetle out of the grass. ‘Let’s see!’ they cried. They thronged round me, but I struggled out of their grasp and ran away with the beetle jealously guarded in my hand. They ran after me; breathless, with pounding heart, I ran deeper and deeper into the woods until I shook them off; then I began to cry softly. Soon I dried my tears, and murmured to myself: ‘No one will ever know.’ I walked slowly back home. ‘She felt sufficiently strong in herself to defend her one possession against blows and blandishments, and to keep her fist tightly closed all the time.’

This little fable expressed my most obsessive worry: how to defend myself against other people [...]

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 effect on me. And besides, I had had too intimate a relationship with nature to be willing to see it brought down to the level of a summer attraction, as it was here. It was served up to me on a plate, and I was not allowed the necessary leisure or solitude to get close to it: if I couldn’t give myself up to it, it would give me nothing. Pine forests and mountain torrents meant nothing to me. We went on excursions to the Gavarnie amphitheatre and the Lac de Gaube, where my cousin Jeanne took snapshots: all I saw were mournful dioramas. These uselessly elaborate surroundings could not distract me from my grief any more than could the hideous spectacle of the hotels planted along the village streets.

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 to move me. What I dreamed of writing was a ‘novel of the inner life’; I wanted to communicate my experience. I hesitated. I could feel within me ‘masses of things to say’; but I realized that writing is an art and that I was not an expert. All the same I jotted down a few subjects for novels and finally I made a decision. I composed my first work. It was the story of an attempt to escape that came to nothing. The heroine was the same age as myself, eighteen; she was spending her holidays with her family in a country house where she was awaiting the arrival of her fiancé whom she loved in a conventional manner. Until then she had been satisfied with the banality of her existence. Suddenly she discovered that there was ‘something else’. A musician, a genius, awoke in her a realization of the real things in life: art, sincerity, disquiet. She felt that she had been living a lie; a strange, feverish longing took possession of her. The musician went away. The fiancé arrived. From her room on the first floor she could hear the joyous cries of welcome; she hesitated: was she going to keep, or lose for ever, what the musician had given her a glimpse of? Her courage failed her. She went downstairs and smilingly entered the drawing-room where the others were awaiting her. I had no illusions about the value of this tale; but it was the first time I had made myself put my own experience into words, and I took pleasure in writing it.

[...] 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 admiration that I had built round him when I was fifteen and I compared it sadly with the present state of my affection for Jacques: no, I did not admire him any more. Perhaps all admiration was self-deception; perhaps in the depths of every human heart one found only the same unreliable pretence; perhaps the one link possible between two souls was compassion. This pessimistic view did nothing to console me.

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 himself from his class because he, too, was suffering from a deep disquiet; what I did not realize was that this deep disquiet was the means which that bourgeois generation was employing in order to effect its own cure; yet I felt that at the very moment when marriage ought to have delivered him from the bonds of class, Jacques would at last coincide exactly with the persona of a young business man and head of a family. In fact, all he wanted was to play with conviction the role assigned to him by birth, and he was counting on marriage as Pascal had counted on holy water, to give him the faith he lacked. I was still not clearly conscious of all this at that time, but I understood that he looked upon marriage as a solution and not as a point of departure. There would be no question of us storming the heights together: if I became Madame Laiguillon I would be dedicated to ‘home life’. Perhaps that would not be absolutely incomparable with my personal aspirations? I distrusted all compromises, and that one in particular seemed to me to be dangerously suspect. If I were to share Jacques’ existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious. I tried to challenge his authority by having recourse to the evidence of my own passions and wishes: I often succeeded. But in moments of discouragement I was inclined to think he was right. Once under his influence and in order to gratify his desires wouldn’t I let myself be driven to sacrifice everything I thought worthwhile? I rebelled at the thought of such a personal mutilation. That is why all that winter my love for Jacques was such a painful one; either he was throwing away his talents, and I was hurt to see him drifting away from me; or he was trying to seek a certain stability in a bourgeois self-sufficiency which might have brought him closer to me if I hadn’t looked upon it as a fall from grace. I couldn’t follow him in his disordered ways, yet I didn’t want to live with him in an order I despised. We neither of us had any faith in conventional values; but I was determined to find some I could believe in, or else invent new ones; he could see as far as that; he wavered between dissipation and the depths of despair, and it was only by an acceptance of bourgeois values that he was able to pull himself together: he never thought of changing his way of life, but only of adapting himself to it. But I wanted to find a way out of it.

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 this gathering were depressingly like my ex-schoolmates at the Cours Désir. I had two assistants, one of whom was to teach English, the other gymnastics; they were close on thirty and never went out in the evenings without their parents. Our group had its headquarters in a sort of community centre administered by a tall, dark, rather handsome girl of about twenty-five; she was called Suzanne Boigue and I got on well with her. But my new activities gave me very little satisfaction. On one evening a week for two hours I would talk about Balzac or Victor Hugo to young working girls; I would lend them books and we would have discussions; they were fairly numerous, and regular attenders; but they mainly came in order to meet one another and to keep in with the centre, which provided them with more material benefits. There was also a men’s section, and the young men and women were brought together fairly frequently at social gatherings and dances; dancing and flirtation attracted them much more than study circles. I thought this was quite natural. My students were working all day long in fashion workshops or tailoring establishments; the knowledge, of a rather spasmodic nature, which was doled out to them had no bearing on their own experience and was of no use to them at all in their work. I saw nothing wrong in making them read Les Misérables or Le Père Goriot; but Garric was much mistaken if he imagined that I was providing them with Culture; and it was distasteful to me to follow instructions which called upon me to talk to them about human dignity or the value of suffering: I would have felt I was having them on. As for friendship, here too Garric had misled me. The atmosphere at the centre was a fairly happy one; but between the young people of Belleville and those who, like myself, had come to teach them there was neither intimacy nor anything in common. We came together to pass the time, that was all. My disillusionment extended itself to Garric. He came to give a lecture and I spent a good part of the evening with him and Suzanne Boigue. I had passionately wanted to have a chance to speak to him one day, as one grown-up to another: our conversation seemed utterly pointless now. He chewed over the same old ideas: friendship was to take the place of hatred; instead of thinking from the point of view of parties, trade unions, and revolutions we had to orientate our thinking from the point of view of trade, family, and region; the great problem was to preserve the dignity of man. I listened to him with only half my attention. My admiration for him had died at the same time as my faith in his work. A little later, Suzanne Boigue asked me to take over a correspondence course for sick children in the sanatorium at Berck: I accepted. I found this work, because of its modest aim, to be more effective. Nevertheless I concluded that action is a deceptive solution: by pretending to devote oneself to the welfare of others one was providing oneself with too easy a way out. I had no idea that action could take forms far different from the kind I was condemning. Because if I felt that the Groups were something of a humbug, I was all the same a victim of that humbug. I thought I was in real contact with ‘the people’; they seemed to be friendly, deferential, and willing to collaborate with their privileged superiors. This fake experience only served to aggravate my ignorance.

[...] 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 the history of scientific thought, but no one was teaching us about the adventure of humanity. The incomprehensible uproar going on in the world might be of interest to specialists; it was not worthy of the philosopher’s attention, for, when he had got to the point where he knew that he knew nothing and that there was nothing worth knowing, he knew everything. That is why I was able to write in January: ‘I know everything; I’ve gone all the rounds.’ The subjective idealism to which I was now giving my allegiance deprived the world of its solidity and originality: it is hardly surprising that even in my imagination I could find nothing to hold on to.

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 the afternoons; I usually went to the Studio des Ursulines, the Vieux-Colombier, and the Ciné-Latin; this was a little hall with wooden seats situated behind the Panthéon; a piano accompanied the films; the seats weren’t dear and they showed revivals of the best films of the last few years; it was there that I saw The Gold Rush and many other Chaplin films. On certain evenings my mother would accompany my sister and me to the theatre. I saw Jouvet in Le Grand Large, in which Michel Simon was making his first appearance, Dullin in La Comédie du bonheur and Madame Pitoëff as St Joan. I used to look forward to these outings for days; they irradiated my week. I can tell how much importance I attached to them when I think of how hardly the austerity of the first two terms weighed upon me. Now, during the daytime, I would visit all the exhibitions, and go for long prowls round the galleries of the Louvre. I would wander all over Paris, my eyes no longer brimming with tears, but looking at everything. I loved those evenings when, after dinner, I would set out alone on the Métro and travel right to the other side of Paris, near Les Buttes Chaumont, which smelt of damp and greenery. Often I would walk back home. In the boulevard de la Chapelle, under the steel girders of the overhead railway, women would be waiting for customers; men would come staggering out of brightly lit bistros; the fronts of cinemas would be ablaze with posters. I could feel life all round me, an enormous, ever-present confusion. I would stride along, feeling its thick breath blow in my face. And I would say to myself that after all life is worth living.

I began to have ambitions again. Despite my friendships and my uncertain love-affair, I still felt very much alone; there was no one who knew me or loved me completely, for myself alone; no one was, nor, I thought could anyone ever be ‘someone definite and complete’ to me. Rather than go on suffering because of this, I again took refuge in pride. My isolation was a sign of my superiority; I no longer had any doubts about that: I was somebody, and I would do great things. I thought up themes for novels. One morning in the library at the Sorbonne, instead of doing Greek translation, I began ‘my book’. I had to study for the exams in June; I hadn’t enough time; but I calculated that next year I would have more free time and I made a promise to myself that I would then without more ado write my very own book ‘It is to be a work,’ I told myself in my diary, ‘which will tell all.’ I often insisted in my journal on this necessity to ‘tell all’, which makes a curious contrast with the paucity of my experience. Philosophy had increased my tendency to seize the essence, the root, the totality of things; and as I was living in a world of abstractions I believed that I had discovered, once and for all, the truth of life. From time to time I would suspect that there was more to it than I had so far discovered: but only very occasionally. My superiority over other people came precisely from the fact that I didn’t let anything get past me: the peculiar value of my work would be the result of this exceptional privilege.