In July I had put my name down for the Social Service Groups. The woman in charge of the women’s sections, a huge purple-faced individual, made me the head of the Belleville group. At the beginning of October she called a meeting of officers to give us our instructions. The young women I met at this gathering were depressingly like my ex-schoolmates at the Cours Désir. I had two assistants, one of whom was to teach English, the other gymnastics; they were close on thirty and never went out in the evenings without their parents. Our group had its headquarters in a sort of community centre administered by a tall, dark, rather handsome girl of about twenty-five; she was called Suzanne Boigue and I got on well with her. But my new activities gave me very little satisfaction. On one evening a week for two hours I would talk about Balzac or Victor Hugo to young working girls; I would lend them books and we would have discussions; they were fairly numerous, and regular attenders; but they mainly came in order to meet one another and to keep in with the centre, which provided them with more material benefits. There was also a men’s section, and the young men and women were brought together fairly frequently at social gatherings and dances; dancing and flirtation attracted them much more than study circles. I thought this was quite natural. My students were working all day long in fashion workshops or tailoring establishments; the knowledge, of a rather spasmodic nature, which was doled out to them had no bearing on their own experience and was of no use to them at all in their work. I saw nothing wrong in making them read Les Misérables or Le Père Goriot; but Garric was much mistaken if he imagined that I was providing them with Culture; and it was distasteful to me to follow instructions which called upon me to talk to them about human dignity or the value of suffering: I would have felt I was having them on. As for friendship, here too Garric had misled me. The atmosphere at the centre was a fairly happy one; but between the young people of Belleville and those who, like myself, had come to teach them there was neither intimacy nor anything in common. We came together to pass the time, that was all. My disillusionment extended itself to Garric. He came to give a lecture and I spent a good part of the evening with him and Suzanne Boigue. I had passionately wanted to have a chance to speak to him one day, as one grown-up to another: our conversation seemed utterly pointless now. He chewed over the same old ideas: friendship was to take the place of hatred; instead of thinking from the point of view of parties, trade unions, and revolutions we had to orientate our thinking from the point of view of trade, family, and region; the great problem was to preserve the dignity of man. I listened to him with only half my attention. My admiration for him had died at the same time as my faith in his work. A little later, Suzanne Boigue asked me to take over a correspondence course for sick children in the sanatorium at Berck: I accepted. I found this work, because of its modest aim, to be more effective. Nevertheless I concluded that action is a deceptive solution: by pretending to devote oneself to the welfare of others one was providing oneself with too easy a way out. I had no idea that action could take forms far different from the kind I was condemning. Because if I felt that the Groups were something of a humbug, I was all the same a victim of that humbug. I thought I was in real contact with ‘the people’; they seemed to be friendly, deferential, and willing to collaborate with their privileged superiors. This fake experience only served to aggravate my ignorance.