In the Bois de Boulogne, I walked round the lake with Jean Pradelle; we watched the autumn, the swans, the people in rowing-boats; we took up our discussions where we had left off: with a diminished ardour. I thought a lot of Pradelle, but oh, how untormented he was! His tranquillity offended me. Riesmann made me read his novel, which I thought puerile, but when I read him a few pages of mine he found it insufferably boring. Jean Mallet still talked to me about Alain, Suzanne Boigue about the state of her affections, Mademoiselle Lambert about God. My sister had recently entered a school of applied arts where she was very unhappy. Zaza was cultivating the virtue of obedience and spent hours in the large shops picking over samples of material with her mother. Boredom once more descended upon me, and solitude. When I had told myself that day in the Luxembourg Gardens that it was to be my lot, there was so much gaiety in the air that I didn’t feel too bad about it; but now, seen through the fogs of autumn, the future frightened me. I should never love anyone, no one is ever big enough for one’s love; I should not know the joys of a family hearth; I should spend my days in a small provincial room which I would leave only in order to give my lessons: what a barren existence! I no longer even hoped to have a true understanding with another human being. Not one of my friends would take me as I was, without reserves; Zaza prayed for me, Jacques thought I was too abstract, Pradelle deplored my rank obstinacy and the way I kept working myself up. What alarmed them was the most firmly rooted of my convictions: my refusal to accept that mediocre existence which they, in one way or another, said yes to, and my frantic efforts to escape from it. I tried to content myself. ‘I’m not like other people; I’ll have to try to accept that,’ I would keep telling myself; but I couldn’t content myself. Cut off from everybody, I no longer had any link with the world: it was becoming a spectacle that did not concern me personally. One after the other I had renounced fame, happiness, and the wish to serve others; now I was not even interested in living. At moments I completely lost all sense of reality: the streets, the cars, the passers-by were only so many shadows among which my own anonymous presence floated aimlessly. I would sometimes tell myself, fearfully but proudly, that I was mad: it’s a very short step between utter loneliness and madness. There were plenty of reasons why I should have lost my wits. For two years I had been struggling to get out of a trap but without finding a way; I kept bumping into invisible obstacles: in the end it must affect my brain. My hands remained empty; I tried to offset my disillusionment by repeating to myself both that one day I would possess everything and that it would not be worth anything anyway: I got all muddled by these contradictions. Above all, I was bursting with health and youthful vigour, and I was confined to home and library: all that vitality which I was unable to make use of unleashed its futile whirlwinds in my head and heart.