[...] I went on, “Do you think that making money is an adequate goal in life?”

“I really scarcely know what our goals were, nor whether they were adequate.”

Did he really believe what he was saying, or was he amusing himself by teasing me? He does that sometimes, when he thinks me too set in my convictions and my principles. Usually I put up with it very well—I join in the game. But this time I was in no mood for trifling. My voice rose. “Why have we led the kind of life we have led if you think other ways of life just as good?”

“Because we could not have done otherwise.”

“We could not have done otherwise because it was our way of life that seemed to us valid.”

“No. As far as I was concerned knowing, discovering, was a mania, a passion, or even a kind of neurosis, without the slightest moral justification. I never thought everybody else should do the same.”

Deep down I do think that everybody else should do the same, but I did not choose to argue the point. I said, “It is not a question of everybody, but of Philippe. He is going to turn into a fellow concerned with dubious money-making deals. That was not what I brought him up for.”