I had spent the year moaning over the vanity of human aims: but I had pursued my own with tenacious zeal. I passed in general Philosophy. Simone Weil headed the list followed by me, and then by a student from the Normale called Jean Pradelle. I also passed my certificate in Greek. Mademoiselle Lambert was exultant, my parents smiled upon me; at the Sorbonne, at home, everyone congratulated me. I was very happy. These successes confirmed the good opinion I had of myself, they assured me a brilliant future, I attached great importance to them and not for anything in the world would I have thrown them away. Nevertheless I didn’t forget that all success cloaks a surrender, and I thought my tears were justified. I kept repeating to myself with furious intensity the phrase which Martin du Gard puts into the mouth of Jacques Thibault: ‘This is what they’ve brought me to!’ I had been reduced to the persona of a brilliant, gifted student, when I was really only the pathetic absence of the Absolute! There was a certain self-deception in my tears; yet I don’t think they were just play-acting. In the hurly-burly accompanying the end of the summer term, I was bitterly conscious of the emptiness in my heart. I went on longing passionately for that something else which I couldn’t put a name to because I refused to give it the only name I knew for it: happiness.

Pradelle was a good listener; he had a meditative air and would reply in a grave voice: what a find! I hastened to lay bare my soul to him. I made an aggressive attack upon the Barbarians, and he surprised me by refusing to agree with me; he had lost his father, and got on perfectly well with his mother and sister and did not share my horror of family life. He was not averse to parties and sometimes went dancing: why not? he asked me with an innocent air which disarmed me. My manichaeism postulated a small band of the chosen in a great mass of people unworthy of consideration; according to him, there was some good, some evil in everyone: there wasn’t all that much difference between people. He disapproved of my uncompromising attitude, and his indulgence offended me. Apart from this, we had many views in common. Brought up, like myself, in a pious home, and now an unbeliever, he had been branded by Christian morality. At the École Normale he was classed among the talas* (Holy Willies). He disapproved of his fellow-students’ coarse manners, their indecent songs, rude jokes, brutality, debauchery, and cynical dissipations. His taste in books was almost the same as mine, with a predilection for Claudel and a certain disdain for Proust whom he didn’t consider to be ‘essential’. He lent me Jarry’s Ubu-Roi, which I couldn’t really appreciate because I couldn’t find in it a trace of my own obsessions. What I thought was most important was that he, too, was anxiously seeking for the truth: he believed that one day it would be revealed to him through the medium of philosophy. We discussed this hotly for a whole fortnight. He told me that I had been too eager to choose despair and I reproached him with grasping at straws: all the systems had something wrong with them. I demolished them one after the other; he finally gave in on every point, but retained his confidence in rational humanity.

The tensions between my parents and myself had on the whole slackened a little. I spent my days in peace and quiet. I was studying philosophy and thinking of writing something. I hesitated a long time before deciding what to do. Pradelle had convinced me that my first task was to search for the truth: would not the writing of books be an escape from that task? And wasn’t there a fundamental contradiction in my enterprise? I wanted to write about the vanity of things; but the writer is a traitor to his despair as soon as he writes a book: perhaps it would be better to imitate the silence of Monsieur Teste. I was afraid, also, if I started to write, that I would be driven to wish for success, fame, things I despised. These abstract scruples did not carry enough weight to make me stop writing. I consulted many of my friends by letter, and, as I had hoped, they encouraged me to begin. I started a vast novel; the heroine was to live through all my own experiences: she was to be awakened to the meaning of ‘the true life’, enter into conflict with her environment, then be disillusioned by everything: action, love, knowledge. I never knew what the ending was because I hadn’t the time and I gave up halfway through.

In the Bois de Boulogne, I walked round the lake with Jean Pradelle; we watched the autumn, the swans, the people in rowing-boats; we took up our discussions where we had left off: with a diminished ardour. I thought a lot of Pradelle, but oh, how untormented he was! His tranquillity offended me. Riesmann made me read his novel, which I thought puerile, but when I read him a few pages of mine he found it insufferably boring. Jean Mallet still talked to me about Alain, Suzanne Boigue about the state of her affections, Mademoiselle Lambert about God. My sister had recently entered a school of applied arts where she was very unhappy. Zaza was cultivating the virtue of obedience and spent hours in the large shops picking over samples of material with her mother. Boredom once more descended upon me, and solitude. When I had told myself that day in the Luxembourg Gardens that it was to be my lot, there was so much gaiety in the air that I didn’t feel too bad about it; but now, seen through the fogs of autumn, the future frightened me. I should never love anyone, no one is ever big enough for one’s love; I should not know the joys of a family hearth; I should spend my days in a small provincial room which I would leave only in order to give my lessons: what a barren existence! I no longer even hoped to have a true understanding with another human being. Not one of my friends would take me as I was, without reserves; Zaza prayed for me, Jacques thought I was too abstract, Pradelle deplored my rank obstinacy and the way I kept working myself up. What alarmed them was the most firmly rooted of my convictions: my refusal to accept that mediocre existence which they, in one way or another, said yes to, and my frantic efforts to escape from it. I tried to content myself. ‘I’m not like other people; I’ll have to try to accept that,’ I would keep telling myself; but I couldn’t content myself. Cut off from everybody, I no longer had any link with the world: it was becoming a spectacle that did not concern me personally. One after the other I had renounced fame, happiness, and the wish to serve others; now I was not even interested in living. At moments I completely lost all sense of reality: the streets, the cars, the passers-by were only so many shadows among which my own anonymous presence floated aimlessly. I would sometimes tell myself, fearfully but proudly, that I was mad: it’s a very short step between utter loneliness and madness. There were plenty of reasons why I should have lost my wits. For two years I had been struggling to get out of a trap but without finding a way; I kept bumping into invisible obstacles: in the end it must affect my brain. My hands remained empty; I tried to offset my disillusionment by repeating to myself both that one day I would possess everything and that it would not be worth anything anyway: I got all muddled by these contradictions. Above all, I was bursting with health and youthful vigour, and I was confined to home and library: all that vitality which I was unable to make use of unleashed its futile whirlwinds in my head and heart.

I, too, would have liked to try that ‘hazardous and useless’ existence whose attractions Jacques and the younger novelists were praising all the time. But how could I introduce the unexpected into my daily life? Very occasionally my sister and I managed to spend an evening away from our mother’s vigilant eye; Poupette often took drawing lessons in the evening at La Grande Chaumière, and this provided a convenient pretext when I, too, had a good excuse for going out in the evenings. With the money I was earning at Neuilly we would go to see an avant-garde play at the Studio des Champs-Élysées, or we would go and stand in the promenade at the Casino for Maurice Chevalier. We would walk the streets, talking about our lives and about Life; adventure, unseen but ever-present, rubbed shoulders with us everywhere. These pranks used to raise our spirits; but we couldn’t repeat them often. The monotony of daily life continued to weigh heavily upon me: ‘Oh! deadly awakenings, life without longing, without love; all over, finished already, and so quickly; frightful boredom. Things can’t go on like this! What do I want? What can I do? Nothing, nothing, nothing. My book? Vanity of vanities. Philosophy? I’m fed up to the teeth with it. Love? Too tired. Yet I’m only twenty. I want to live!’

Solitude had long ago plunged me into pride. My head was completely turned. Baruzi handed me back my dissertation with copious praise; he gave me an interview after the lecture and, in his voice with the dying fall, sighed out the hope that it might be the basis for an important work. I got swelled-headed: ‘I am sure that I shall reach loftier heights than any of them. Is this pride? If I didn’t have genius, it would be; but if I have got genius – as I sometimes believe; as I am sometimes quite sure – then it simply means that I recognize clearly my superior gifts,’ I wrote complacently in my diary. The next day I went to see Charlie Chaplin in The Circus; when I came out of the cinema I went for a walk in the Tuileries; an orange sun was foundering in a pale blue sky and making the windows of the Louvre flash with fire. I remembered other dusks and suddenly I felt stunned by that necessity which I had been calling out for so desperately all this time: I was to write my book. This was no new project. Yet because I wanted things to happen to me, and they never did, I turned my emotion into an event. Once again, I uttered vows to heaven and earth. Nothing was ever, under any circumstances, to stand in the way of my writing a book. The fact is that I was no longer calling my decision into question. I also promised myself that from now on I would wish for happiness, and obtain it.

In October, while the Sorbonne was closed, I spent my days in the Bibliothèque Nationale. I had obtained permission to have my lunch out: I would buy bread and rillette and eat them in the gardens of the Palais Royal while watching the petals of the late roses fall; sitting on the benches, navvies would be munching thick sandwiches and drinking cheap red wine. If it was raining, I would take shelter in the Café Biard with bricklayers eating out of messtins; I was delighted to escape from the ritual of family meals; by reducing food to its essential elements I felt I was taking another step in the direction of freedom. I would go back to the library; I was studying the theory of relativity, and was passionately interested in it. From time to time I would look up at the other readers and lean back proudly in my armchair: among these specialists, scholars, researchers, and thinkers I felt at home. I no longer felt myself to be rejected by my environment; it was I who had rejected it in order to enter that society – of which I saw here a cross-section – in which all those minds that are interested in finding out the truth communicate with each other across the distances of space and time. I, too, was taking part in the effort which humanity makes to know, to understand, to express itself: I was engaged in a great collective enterprise which would release me for ever from the bonds of loneliness. What a victory! I would settle down to work again. At a quarter to six, the superintendent’s voice would solemnly announce: ‘Gentlemen – we shall – very soon – be – closing.’ It was always a surprise, after leaving my stuthes, to come back to the shops outside, the lights, the passers-by, and the dwarf who sold bunches of violets near the Théâtre Français. I would walk slowly, giving myself up to the melancholy of evening and of my return home.

Once or twice a week during the next month I Went to the Stryx with Stépha, Fernando, and a Ukrainian journalist who was a friend of theirs and who preferred to spend his free time learning Japanese; I also took my sister, Lisa, and Mallet. I don’t quite know where I found the money that year, because I was no longer giving any lessons. Probably I saved something out of the five francs a day which my mother gave me for my lunches, and I managed to scrape up a bit here and there. In any case, my budget was based on the assumption that I would indulge in these orgies. I wrote in my diary: ‘Glanced through Alain’s Eleven Chapters on Plato at Picard’s. It costs eight cocktails: too dear.’ Stépha would dress up as a barmaid and help Michel to serve the clients, with whom she could joke in four languages, and sing Ukrainian folksongs. With Riquet and his middle-aged friend we talked about Giraudoux, Gide, the cinema, life, women, men, friendship, love. We would then saunter down towards Saint-Sulpice in a noisy gang. The next morning I would make a note: ‘Wonderful evening! ‘But I would intersperse my account with parentheses which struck quite a different note. Riquet had said about Jacques: ‘He’ll marry one day, out of sheer impetuosity, and perhaps he’ll make a good father: but he’ll always regret it.’ These prophecies did not unduly worry me; what disturbed me was that Jacques should have led practically the same sort of life as Riquet during the past three years. The latter spoke about women with a freedom which offended me: could I still go on believing that Jacques was a brother of Le Grand Meaulnes? I very much doubted it. After all, I had created this image of him in my mind quite without his authorization, and now I was beginning to think that perhaps he did not in the least resemble it. But I would not give in. ‘All that is very hurtful to me. I have visions of Jacques that hurt me.’ All in all, if work was a narcotic, alcohol and gambling were no better. My place was neither in bars nor libraries: then where was it? I could see no other salvation than in books; I planned a new novel; its protagonists would be a heroine who would be myself and a hero who would resemble Jacques, with ‘his overweening pride and his mad urge to self-destruction.’ But I couldn’t get rid of my uneasiness. One evening, I saw Riquet, Riaucourt, and his friend Olga in a comer of the Stryx; I thought Olga looked very elegant. They were talking about a letter they had just received from Jacques; they were sending him a post-card. I couldn’t help asking myself: ‘Why does he write to them, never to me?’ I walked all one afternoon along the boulevards with my heart sunk in despair, then wound up weeping in a cinema.

I did not think much of him as a philosopher. I noted, rather incoherently, in my diary: ‘I admire his ability to have his own theories about everything. Perhaps because he does not know much about philosophy. I like him enormously.’ He was, in fact, ignorant of any philosophic discipline, but what mattered much more to me was that he opened up paths that I longed to explore without as yet having the courage to do so. The majority of my friends were believers, and I kept evading the issue by trying to find a compromise between their point of view and my own; I didn’t dare disassociate myself from them too much. But Herbaud made me want to wipe out the past that separated me from him: he frowned upon my association with the ‘Holy Willies’. Christian asceticism was repugnant to him. He professed deliberate ignorance of metaphysical soul-searching. He was anti-religious, anti-clerical, anti-natiönalist, and anti-militarist; he had a horror of all mysticisms. I gave him my dissertation on ‘The Personality’ to read, for I was overweeningly proud of it; he pulled a face as he handed it back to me; he felt it smacked of Catholicism and romanticism: he exhorted me to get them out of my system as soon as possible. I accepted his advice with open arms. I had had enough of ‘Catholic complications’, spiritual dead-ends, miraculous make-believes; I felt it was time for me to get my feet back on the ground. That is why, when I got to know Herbaud, I had the feeling of finding myself: he was the shadow thrown by my future. He was neither a pillar of the Church, nor a book-worm, nor did he spend his time propping up bars; he proved by personal example that one can build for oneself, outside the accepted categories, a self-respecting, happy, and responsible existence: exactly the sort of life I wanted for myself.

[...] with what blind obstinacy I had deceived myself! It was I alone who had built up the image of our friendship over the last three years; I still clung to it today because of the past, and now the past was nothing but a lie. Everything was falling to pieces. I felt I wanted to burn all my boats behind me; to love someone else, or set off for the ends of the earth.

And then I chided myself. It was my own dream that was at fault, not Jacques. What had I to reproach him with? He had never set himself up as a hero or a saint and he had even told me himself that he was no good. The quotation in the Jouve had been a warning; he had tried to talk to me about Magda, but I had not made it easy for him to be frank. Besides, I had long suspected, and even known the truth. What was it within me that could be so shocked by it? My old Roman Catholic prejudices? I felt my equanimity had been restored. It was I who had been wrong in wanting life to conform to a preconceived ideal; it was for me to show myself equal to everything life might bring. I had always preferred reality to the mirage; I brought my meditation to a pious close by priding myself on having stumbled on a solid problem, and on having successfully solved it.