[...] I departed, alone, amazingly light-footed upon the ground, taking nothing with me, without any real joy, obsessed by the idea that, behind me, the treadmill was continuing endlessly to turn, crushing human beings. In the gray morning, I bought a cup of coffee in the station cafe. The proprietor came up to me with a kind of sympathy.

“Out of jail?”

“Yes.”

He wagged his head. Might he be interested in “my crime,” or my future? He leant over: “You in a hurry? There’s one hell of a brothel near here. . . ”

The first man I had met, in the mist of a gloomy bridge, had been a soldier with a mutilated face; this fat procurer was the second. Was it always to be the world-without-escape? What good was the war doing? Had the dance of death taught nothing to anyone?

Paris was leading a double life. Walking along, spellbound, I stopped in front of the lowly windows of the Belleville shops. [...]