The best part of the week was Garric’s lecture. I was beginning to admire him more and more. It was rumoured at Sainte-Marie that he could have had a brilliant career at the University; but he had not a scrap of personal ambition; he never finished his thesis and devoted himself body and soul to his Social Welfare Groups; he lived the life of an ascetic in a working-class house in Belleville. He used to give fairly frequent propaganda lectures, and through Jacques’ good offices my mother and I were admitted to one of them. Jacques took us into a suite of drawing-rooms, richly furnished, in which rows and rows of red plush chairs with gilded woodwork were set out; he found us seats and went off to greet his acquaintances; he seemed to know everybody: how I envied him! It was hot, I was stifling in my mourning garments and I knew no one. Then Garric walked on to the platform; I forgot myself, and everything else; I was spellbound by the authority in his voice. He explained to us that at the age of twenty he had discovered in the trenches the joys of a comradeship which overcame all social barriers; when, after the armistice, he became a student again, he was determined not to be deprived of that comradeship; the segregation which in civilian life separates young middle-class men from working chaps was something he felt like a personal mutilation; besides, he believed that everybody has a right to culture. He believed firmly in the truth of what General Lyautey had said in one of his Moroccan speeches: that beyond all differences, there is a common denominator which links all men. On the basis of this concept, he decided to set up a system of exchanges between students and working-class youths which would release the former from the egotistical solitude and the latter from their ignorance. By learning to understand and love one another they would work side by side to bring the classes together. To loud applause, Garric stated that it is impossible for any kind of social progress to emerge from a conflict whose motive force was class hatred: progress would only come through friendship. He had roped in a few friends who helped him to organize the first cultural centre at Neuilly. They obtained support and subsidies and the movement began to grow: there were now ten thousand members in groups all over France, all young men and women, and two hundred teachers. Garric himself was a firm Roman Catholic, but he did not intend to turn the movement into a religious mission; there were unbelievers among his collaborators; he believed that men should help one another on the human level. At the end, in a voice charged with emotion, he claimed that if people are well-treated they will be good; by refusing to offer the hand of friendship to the lower classes the bourgeoisie were making a grave mistake whose consequences would fall upon their own heads.