‘From now on, I’m going to take you under my wing,’ Sartre told me when he had brought me the news that I had passed. He had a liking for feminine friendships. The first time I had ever seen him, at the Sorbonne, he was wearing a hat and talking animatedly to a great gawk of a woman student who I thought was excessively ugly; he had soon tired of her, and he had taken up with another, rather prettier, but who turned out to be rather a menace, and with whom he had very soon quarrelled. When Herbaud had told him about me, he had wanted to make my acquaintance at once, and now he was very pleased to have me all to himself; for my part, I was beginning to feel that time which was not spent in his company was time wasted. During the fortnight of the oral examinations we hardly ever left one another except to sleep. We went to the Sorbonne together to sit the examinations and to listen to our fellow-students. We went out with the Nizans. We would have drinks at the Balzac with Aron who was doing his military service in the Meteorological Corps and with Politzer who by now had joined the Communist Party. But usually we went about alone together. At the second-hand bookstalls by the Seine Sartre bought me copies of Pardaillan and Fantomas which he far and away preferred to the Correspondence of Rivière and Fournier; in the evenings he would take me to see cowboy films, to which I brought all the enthusiasm of a neophyte, for until then I had been mainly interested in abstract cinema and art films. We would talk for hours sitting in pavement cafés or drinking cocktails at the Falstaff.