There was nothing startling about the luxury of the Laiguillon home: what I was really rejecting, and what I reproached Jacques with accepting, was the bourgeois status. Our understanding was based on an ambiguity which explains the incoherence of my emotions. In my view, Jacques was freeing himself from his class because he, too, was suffering from a deep disquiet; what I did not realize was that this deep disquiet was the means which that bourgeois generation was employing in order to effect its own cure; yet I felt that at the very moment when marriage ought to have delivered him from the bonds of class, Jacques would at last coincide exactly with the persona of a young business man and head of a family. In fact, all he wanted was to play with conviction the role assigned to him by birth, and he was counting on marriage as Pascal had counted on holy water, to give him the faith he lacked. I was still not clearly conscious of all this at that time, but I understood that he looked upon marriage as a solution and not as a point of departure. There would be no question of us storming the heights together: if I became Madame Laiguillon I would be dedicated to ‘home life’. Perhaps that would not be absolutely incomparable with my personal aspirations? I distrusted all compromises, and that one in particular seemed to me to be dangerously suspect. If I were to share Jacques’ existence I would find it hard to hold my own against him, for already I found his nihilism contagious. I tried to challenge his authority by having recourse to the evidence of my own passions and wishes: I often succeeded. But in moments of discouragement I was inclined to think he was right. Once under his influence and in order to gratify his desires wouldn’t I let myself be driven to sacrifice everything I thought worthwhile? I rebelled at the thought of such a personal mutilation. That is why all that winter my love for Jacques was such a painful one; either he was throwing away his talents, and I was hurt to see him drifting away from me; or he was trying to seek a certain stability in a bourgeois self-sufficiency which might have brought him closer to me if I hadn’t looked upon it as a fall from grace. I couldn’t follow him in his disordered ways, yet I didn’t want to live with him in an order I despised. We neither of us had any faith in conventional values; but I was determined to find some I could believe in, or else invent new ones; he could see as far as that; he wavered between dissipation and the depths of despair, and it was only by an acceptance of bourgeois values that he was able to pull himself together: he never thought of changing his way of life, but only of adapting himself to it. But I wanted to find a way out of it.