Once or twice a week during the next month I Went to the Stryx with Stépha, Fernando, and a Ukrainian journalist who was a friend of theirs and who preferred to spend his free time learning Japanese; I also took my sister, Lisa, and Mallet. I don’t quite know where I found the money that year, because I was no longer giving any lessons. Probably I saved something out of the five francs a day which my mother gave me for my lunches, and I managed to scrape up a bit here and there. In any case, my budget was based on the assumption that I would indulge in these orgies. I wrote in my diary: ‘Glanced through Alain’s Eleven Chapters on Plato at Picard’s. It costs eight cocktails: too dear.’ Stépha would dress up as a barmaid and help Michel to serve the clients, with whom she could joke in four languages, and sing Ukrainian folksongs. With Riquet and his middle-aged friend we talked about Giraudoux, Gide, the cinema, life, women, men, friendship, love. We would then saunter down towards Saint-Sulpice in a noisy gang. The next morning I would make a note: ‘Wonderful evening! ‘But I would intersperse my account with parentheses which struck quite a different note. Riquet had said about Jacques: ‘He’ll marry one day, out of sheer impetuosity, and perhaps he’ll make a good father: but he’ll always regret it.’ These prophecies did not unduly worry me; what disturbed me was that Jacques should have led practically the same sort of life as Riquet during the past three years. The latter spoke about women with a freedom which offended me: could I still go on believing that Jacques was a brother of Le Grand Meaulnes? I very much doubted it. After all, I had created this image of him in my mind quite without his authorization, and now I was beginning to think that perhaps he did not in the least resemble it. But I would not give in. ‘All that is very hurtful to me. I have visions of Jacques that hurt me.’ All in all, if work was a narcotic, alcohol and gambling were no better. My place was neither in bars nor libraries: then where was it? I could see no other salvation than in books; I planned a new novel; its protagonists would be a heroine who would be myself and a hero who would resemble Jacques, with ‘his overweening pride and his mad urge to self-destruction.’ But I couldn’t get rid of my uneasiness. One evening, I saw Riquet, Riaucourt, and his friend Olga in a comer of the Stryx; I thought Olga looked very elegant. They were talking about a letter they had just received from Jacques; they were sending him a post-card. I couldn’t help asking myself: ‘Why does he write to them, never to me?’ I walked all one afternoon along the boulevards with my heart sunk in despair, then wound up weeping in a cinema.