The next morning the radio confirmed the German collapse. 'It's really the beginning of peace,' Henri repeated to himself, sitting down at his desk. 'At last I can start writing again!' He would, he assured himself, write every day from now on. But what exactly would he write? He didn't know and he was perfectly content not to know; always before he had known only too well. Now he would attempt to talk to the reader without premeditation, as one writes to a friend: And perhaps he would at last succeed in saying all those things for which he had never found room enough in his too carefully constructed books. There are so many things one would like to preserve with words but which are forever lost. He raised his head and looked through the window at the cold sky. What a pity to think that this winter morning would be lost; everything seemed so precious: the white, virginal paper, the smell of alcohol and stale cigarette ends, the Arab music drifting up from the cafe next door. Notre Dame was as cold as the sky, a tramp with a. huge collar of bluish chicken feathers was dancing in the middle of the street, and two girls in their Sunday clothes were watching him and laughing. It was Christmas, it was the German collapse, and life was beginning again. Yes, all those mornings, all those evenings, that he had let slip through his fingers in the last four years, he was determined to make up for them during the next thirty. You can't say everything, that's true enough. But nevertheless you can try to get across the real flavour of your life. Every life has a flavour, a flavour all its own, and if you can't describe it, there's no point in writing. 'I've got to tell about what I liked, what I like, what I am,' he said to himself as he finished sketching a cluster of flowers on a scrap of paper. Who was he? What manner of man would he discover after that long absence? It's difficult, working from within, for a person to define himself, to set limits on himself. He wasn't a political fanatic, nor a literary aesthete, nor a dedicated man in any sense. Rather, he felt quite ordinary, and the feeling didn't upset him in the least. A man like everyone else, who spoke sincerely of himself, would speak in the name of everyone, for everyone. Complete sincerity: that was the only distinctive thing he felt he had to aim for, the only restriction he would have to impose upon himself. He added another flower to the cluster. But it isn't easy to be sincere. First of all, he had no intention of making an open confession. And secondly, whosoever says novel, says lie. Well, he would think about that later. For the moment, he had above all else to keep himself from becoming burdened with too many problems. Say anything, begin anywhere — beneath the moon in the gardens of El Oued. The paper was bare; he had to take advantage of it.