Apart from a few minor differences, I found a great resemblance between his attitude and my own. There was nothing worldly in his ambitions. He reproved me for making use of religious vocabulary, but he, too, was really seeking ‘salvation’ in literature; books brought into this deplorably non-essential world a necessity which redounded to the credit of the author; certain things had to be said by him, and were therefore an entire justification for the means he used to express them. He was still young enough to feel emotional about his future whenever he heard a saxophone playing after his third martini; but if it had been necessary, he would have been willing to remain anonymous: the important thing was that his ideas should prevail, and not that he should enjoy any personal success. He never told himself – as I had sometimes done – that he was ‘somebody’, that he had a certain ‘value’ or place in the world; but he believed that important truths – perhaps the Truth itself – had been revealed to him, and that he had a mission to teach those truths to society. In the notebooks he showed me, in his conversations and even in his University writings he persistently put forward a system of ideas whose originality and coherence astounded his friends. He had given a detailed outline of them on the occasion of an ‘Investigation’ carried out among University students by Les Nouvelles Littéraires. ‘We have received some remarkable observations from J.-P. Sartre,’ wrote Roland Alix in an introduction to Sartre’s reply, of which long extracts were printed; indeed, a whole philosophy was brought to light in it, a philosophy which had hardly any connexion with what we were being taught by the ‘official’ philosophers at the Sorbonne: