Solitude had long ago plunged me into pride. My head was completely turned. Baruzi handed me back my dissertation with copious praise; he gave me an interview after the lecture and, in his voice with the dying fall, sighed out the hope that it might be the basis for an important work. I got swelled-headed: ‘I am sure that I shall reach loftier heights than any of them. Is this pride? If I didn’t have genius, it would be; but if I have got genius – as I sometimes believe; as I am sometimes quite sure – then it simply means that I recognize clearly my superior gifts,’ I wrote complacently in my diary. The next day I went to see Charlie Chaplin in The Circus; when I came out of the cinema I went for a walk in the Tuileries; an orange sun was foundering in a pale blue sky and making the windows of the Louvre flash with fire. I remembered other dusks and suddenly I felt stunned by that necessity which I had been calling out for so desperately all this time: I was to write my book. This was no new project. Yet because I wanted things to happen to me, and they never did, I turned my emotion into an event. Once again, I uttered vows to heaven and earth. Nothing was ever, under any circumstances, to stand in the way of my writing a book. The fact is that I was no longer calling my decision into question. I also promised myself that from now on I would wish for happiness, and obtain it.