How was it that I managed to fit in with them so quickly? Herbaud had taken care not to shock me, but when they were all together the three ‘comrades’ didn’t pull their punches. Their language was aggressive, their thought categorical, their judgements merciless. They made fun of bourgeois law and order; they had refused to sit the examination in religious knowledge: I had no difficulty in agreeing with them on that score. But I was still, in many respects, the dupe of bourgeois humbug; they jabbed a pin in every inflated idealism, laughed high-minded souls to scorn–in fact, every kind of soulfulness, the ‘inner life’, the marvellous, the mysterious, and the precious all fell under their lashing contempt; on every possible occasion – in their speech, their attitudes, their gestures, their jokes – they set out to prove that men were not rarefied spirits but bothes of flesh and bone, racked by physical needs and crudely engaged in a brutal adventure that was life. A year before, they would have scared me; but I had made much progress since the beginning of the academic year and I very often felt the need of stronger meat than that to which I was accustomed. I soon understood that if the world these new friends opened up to me seemed crude, it was because they didn’t try to disguise its realities; in the end, all they asked of me was that I should dare to do what I had always longed to do: look reality in the face. It did not take me long to make up my mind to do so.