[...] And yet the morning after I defended my dissertation (or maybe that same night), my first reaction was that I had lost something priceless, something I’d never get back: my freedom. For several years, the last vestiges of a dying welfare state (scholarships, student discounts, health care, mediocre but cheap meals in the student cafeteria) had allowed me to spend my waking hours the way I chose: in the easy intellectual company of a friend. As André Breton pointed out, Huysmans’ sense of humour is uniquely generous. He lets the reader stay one step ahead of him, inviting us to laugh at him, and his overly plaintive, awful or ludicrous descriptions, even before he laughs at himself. No one appreciated that generosity more than I did, as I received my rations of celeriac remoulade and salt cod, each in its little compartment of the metal hospital tray issued by the Bullier student cafeteria (whose unfortunate patrons clearly had nowhere else to go, and had obviously been kicked out of all the acceptable student cafeterias, but who still had their student IDs – you couldn’t take away their student IDs), and I thought of Huysmans’ epithets – the woebegone cheese, the grievous sole – and imagined what he might make of those metal cells, which he’d never known, and I felt a little less unhappy, a little less alone, in the Bullier student cafeteria.

But that was all over now. My entire youth was over. Soon (very soon), I would have to see about entering the workforce. The prospect left me cold.