Like almost all their colleagues, Jérôme and Sylvie had become market researchers by necessity and not by choice. No-one knows, in any case, where the untrammelled development of their natural inclinations towards idleness would have led them. There again, history had chosen for them. Of course, like everyone else, they would have liked to give themselves to something, to feel in themselves some powerful need that they would have called a vocation, an ambition that would have raised them up, a passion that would have fulfilled them. But they possessed, alas, but a single passion, the passion for a higher standard of living, and it exhausted them. When they were students the prospect of a mediocre degree and then a teaching post with a tiny salary at Nogent-sur-Seine, Château-Thierry or Etampes terrified them so much that virtually on meeting each other - Jérôme was then twenty-one, Sylvie nineteen - and without needing to talk it over, they dropped out of courses they had never really begun. The thirst for knowledge did not torture them. Far more prosaically, and without hiding from the fact that they were probably making a mistake and that sooner or later they would come to regret it, they thirsted for a slightly bigger room, for running hot and cold water, for a shower, for meals more varied, or just more copious, than those they ate in student canteens, maybe for a car, for records, holidays, clothes.