'I know, but...' Once more Lambert paused, seemed embarrassed. 'For example, your series on Portugal is very good, but I remember those pages you once wrote on Sicily, It makes you feel a little sad not to find anything like them in what you're writing now.'

'If you ever go to Portugal, you won't feel very much like describing pomegranates in bloom,' Henri said.

'I wish you'd feel that way again,' Lambert said urgently. 'Why not? You certainly have the right to stroll along the seaside without worrying about the price of sardines.'

'But the fact is that I couldn't,' Henri replied.

'After all,' Lambert continued vehemently, 'we fought in the Resistance to defend the individual, to defend his right to be himself and to be happy. It's time now to reap what we sowed.'

'The trouble is that there are several hundred million individuals for whom that right still doesn't exist,' Henri said, shrugging his shoulders. 'I think it's precisely because we began to take notice of them that we can no longer stop.'

'Then everybody has to wait for the whole world to be happy before trying to be happy?' Lambert said. 'And art and literature must be put off until that golden age? It's now, right now, that we need them!'

'Yes, it is a mistake,' he said to himself decisively. He had wanted to write about himself. Well, he had nothing in common with the person he had been in 1935. His political indifference, his curiosity, his ambition, all that stubborn insistence on individualism — how quickly it passed, how foolish it was! It presupposed a future without obstacles, with guaranteed progress, the immediate brotherhood of man, and peace everlasting. Above all it presupposed selfishness and thoughtlessness. Oh, he would no doubt have been able to find excuses enough. But he was writing this book in order to try to tell the truth about his life, not to explain away its faults. 'It has to be written in the present,' he decided. He reread the last few pages. It was a pity to think that the past was going to be finally buried — his arrival in Paris, his first meetings with Dubreuilh, the trip to Djerba. 'I've lived them; that should be enough,' he said to himself. But if you take that position then the present is also enough, life itself is enough. And it obviously wasn't, for he had to write to feel himself completely alive. Too bad then. In any case you can't salvage everything. The question was to know what to say about himself, about himself today. 'How far have I come? What do I want?' If was funny — if you're so set on expressing yourself, it's because you feel you're unique. And he was not even able to say in what way he thought he was! 'Who am I?' He did not ask himself that question in the past; then it had always been the others who were defined, had limits. But not he. His books and life were still ahead of him. It enabled him to dismiss all adverse criticism, and from the heights of his future works to look on everyone, even Dubreuilh, with a little condescension. But now, he had to admit to himself that he was a mature man: young people treated him as an elder, adults as one of them, and some even treated him with respect. Mature, bounded, finite, himself and no one else, nothing but himself. But who was he? In a way, his books would ultimately decide; but on the other hand, he had to know the truth about himself in order to write them. At first sight, the meaning of those months he had just lived through was quite clear, but if you looked more closely everything became hazy. Helping people to think straight, to live better lives — was his heart really set on it, or was it only a humanitarian daydream? Was he really interested in what happened to others, or only in soothing his own conscience? And literature? What meaning did it now hold for him? There's nothing more abstract than wanting to write when you have nothing urgent to say. His pen hung motionless above the paper and he thought irritably that Paula was there behind him, watching him not write.

'If that fellow does finance L'Espoir, he'll want to stick his nose into it,' Henri said.

'Completely out of the question!' Dubreuilh replied. 'He will positively not intervene in the management of the paper. As a matter of fact, you'd be much more independent with a silent partner like him. After all, you are tied down to a certain extent by the fear of losing your readers.'

'Your shoemaker seems to be a funny kind of philanthropist.'

'If you met the man, you'd understand right off,' Dubreuilh said.

'Nevertheless, I can't bring myself to believe he won't impose any conditions,' Henri persisted.

'Absolutely none. I guarantee it. That's one thing you can be certain of.'

Henri's bitterness slowly dissipated as he listened to Paula's protests; their very vehemence made clear the frivolous motives which lay behind them. And they were the very same objections Henri himself had been turning over in his mind. 'I'm rebelling because I'm afraid of being eaten up by politics, because I dread the thought of taking on new responsibilities, because I'd like some leisure, and especially because I want to stay master in my own house.' All quite trifling reasons. On his way to the paper the next day, he hoped from the bottom of his heart that Luc would furnish better ones.

[...] The world was wavering between war and peace, the future depended perhaps on an imponderable; it would be a crime not to try anything and everything to sway the balance in favour of peace. Henri looked at his desk, his chair, the walls; he listened to the purrings of the presses; and suddenly it seemed to him as if he had just awakened from a long, futile dream. Up to now he had considered L'Espoir a sort of toy, a complete set of equipment for the little junior editor — life-size. A magnificent plaything! But it was in fact an instrument, a weapon; people had the right to hold him to account for the way he used it. He walked over to the window. Oh, he was exaggerating a little, of course; it hadn't been as futile as all that. The September euphoria had long since been dissipated. He had been quite emotional about this paper, but nevertheless he had always believed there was no one to account to but himself. He couldn't have been more wrong. 'It's funny,' he said to himself, 'but whenever you do the decent thing, instead of it giving you certain rights it only creates more obligations.' He had founded L'Espoir, and now that act was forcing him to throw himself body and soul into the political arena. Even now he could imagine Samazelle's intrusions, his harangues, Dubreuilh's telephone calls, the conversations, the conferences, the arguments, the deals. I won't let myself be eaten up, he had promised himself. Well, the die was cast; he was going to be eaten up. He left his office and went down the stairs. Wrapped in fog and darkness, the city seemed to him like a huge station. There was a time when he had liked fogs, stations, but now he liked nothing; already he had let himself be eaten up. Yes, that was why he found so little to say when he tried to write about himself. There are things you value; tell us which. Which? He loved neither Paula nor Nadine, and travelling hardly tempted him; he never listened to music any more, took walks, never read for pleasure. He no longer did anything at all for pleasure alone, no longer stopped on street corners to look about idly, no longer took time to savour an old memory. People to see, things to do; he was living like an engineer in a mechanical world. No wonder he had become as dry as a stone. He quickened his pace. It terrified him, that dryness. At Christmas Eve he had promised himself so firmly that he would find himself again. And he had found nothing. In the bargain he felt constantly uneasy, constantly on the defensive, tense, irritable, irritated. He knew only too well he was acquitting himself poorly of all those drudgeries he inflicted upon himself; they brought him nothing but remorse. 'I don't know enough, don't see things clearly, take sides too lightly; I haven't enough time, I'll never have enough time.' It was unbearable, that refrain. And now it would grow even louder, he would never stop hearing it; everything was going to be worse than before, infinitely worse. Eaten up, devoured, picked clean to his very bones. Writing would be out of the question, for writing is way of life and he was about to choose another; he would longer have anything to communicate to anyone. 'That's not what I want; I don't want it,' he said to himself with revulsion. No, his repugnance wasn't frivolous; on the contrary, with only a little pathos, he could have told himself that the thing was matter of life or death, his life or death as a writer. He had assert himself. 'After all, the SRL doesn't hold the fate humanity in its hands,' he thought. 'Nor do I hold the fate of the SRL in mine.' [...]

[...] 'Reap what you've sown,' Lambert had said. Try to be happy without waiting for everyone else in the world to achieve happiness. Why not? Henri imagined a solid country home, pine trees, the smell of the scrub. 'But what will I write?' He continued walking, his head empty. 'The trap is well laid,' he said to himself. 'Just when you think you're escaping, it slams down on you.' To recapture the past and preserve the present with words is all very fine. But it can be done only if there is someone to read them; there's no sense to it except if the past, if the present, if life counts for something. If this world has no importance, if other men mean nothing, what point would there be to writing? There would be nothing left to do but yawn in boredom. Life can't be bought piecemeal; it has to be purchased in bulk — all or nothing. Only there isn't time enough for everything, that's the tragedy of it. Once more the refrain began repeating itself insistently in Henri's head. He was strongly attached to that paper, and his concerns about war, peace, and justice weren't just idle nonsense; throwing all that overboard was out of the question. And yet he was a writer, he wanted to write. Up to now he had managed more or less to reconcile everything, rather less than more. But if he gave in to Dubreuilh, he'd never be able to extricate himself. What then was he to do? Give in? Not give in? Get involved in politics? Write?

He would have willingly taken more interest in the magazine, for he enjoyed helping Dubreuilh gather articles and make selections. But it was always the same refrain: he needed time to go through the manuscripts, to write to the authors, to talk things over with them. And that was out of the question; he had to limit himself to skimming hastily through anonymous writings. 'I skimp everything,' he thought, sitting down behind the wheel of the little black car. 'I can't even take time out to do justice to a beautiful day like this. In the end I'll just hurry through my whole life.'

He would meet her at ten o'clock. At about eleven they would go to the little hotel across the street from the paper. It was she who had insisted upon sleeping with him again after their return to Paris. There was some consolation at least in thinking that that arid day would, in a few hours, fade into a warm, pink night. Henri climbed into the car and started off in the direction of the paper. The night was still far off, and the afternoon would drag cheerlessly to its end. Listening to new jazz recordings, drinking with friends, smiling at women — yes, certainly, he would have enjoyed all that. But time was short; even now at the paper some people were ticking off the minutes. He would have liked to pull the car up along a quay, lean against the railing, watch the dappled water; or ride off into the gentle countryside surrounding Paris. He would have liked a great many things. But no. This year again the old stones of Paris would become covered with green without him. 'Never a breathing spell. Nothing exists but the future, a future which is always retreating. And that's what they call doing something!' Discussions, conferences — not a single one of those hours had been lived for itself. [...]

'And what you're doing is no less a dismal farce,' Henri said. 'You want me to tell you something?' he added sharply. 'It's breaking your heart to think that all the adventure is over; you're just trying to prolong it. But good God! It wasn't the adventure that counted; it was the things we were defending.'

'Granted, we don't carry much weight,' Henri said. 'But at least we can speak out, defend our views, exert pressures ...'

'How well I remember!' Tournelle said bitterly. 'We wanted to save the honour of France so that she could speak to her allies with her head high. And there were people who got themselves slaughtered for that! A lot of blood spilled for nothing!'

'You're not going to tell me we shouldn't have resisted,' Henri said.

'I don't know. All I can say is that it didn't do us a hell of a lot of good!' Tournelle put his hand on Henri's shoulder. 'Don't repeat what I've said.'