Pradelle was a good listener; he had a meditative air and would reply in a grave voice: what a find! I hastened to lay bare my soul to him. I made an aggressive attack upon the Barbarians, and he surprised me by refusing to agree with me; he had lost his father, and got on perfectly well with his mother and sister and did not share my horror of family life. He was not averse to parties and sometimes went dancing: why not? he asked me with an innocent air which disarmed me. My manichaeism postulated a small band of the chosen in a great mass of people unworthy of consideration; according to him, there was some good, some evil in everyone: there wasn’t all that much difference between people. He disapproved of my uncompromising attitude, and his indulgence offended me. Apart from this, we had many views in common. Brought up, like myself, in a pious home, and now an unbeliever, he had been branded by Christian morality. At the École Normale he was classed among the talas* (Holy Willies). He disapproved of his fellow-students’ coarse manners, their indecent songs, rude jokes, brutality, debauchery, and cynical dissipations. His taste in books was almost the same as mine, with a predilection for Claudel and a certain disdain for Proust whom he didn’t consider to be ‘essential’. He lent me Jarry’s Ubu-Roi, which I couldn’t really appreciate because I couldn’t find in it a trace of my own obsessions. What I thought was most important was that he, too, was anxiously seeking for the truth: he believed that one day it would be revealed to him through the medium of philosophy. We discussed this hotly for a whole fortnight. He told me that I had been too eager to choose despair and I reproached him with grasping at straws: all the systems had something wrong with them. I demolished them one after the other; he finally gave in on every point, but retained his confidence in rational humanity.