Watching the others go to prison, or to Algeria to fight for colonial France, Bruno had a revelation that he could change course, that his own commitment to mayhem was not inevitable, not total. He stopped thieving. He gave up drinking. He got a job punching tickets in the metro, rented a maid’s room out in the nineteenth. He made plans to enroll in school. He was still a teenager. Guy Debord shunned him, and the others followed suit. Working, enrolling in school, these things were just not done. You were meant to reject society completely, to fling yourself headlong into a world without the old structures.

Bruno punched tickets in the metro by day, and by night, he took up reading. At the age of twenty, he left Paris to study earth science in Lyon.