During the first phases of my rise to fortune and glory, I had occasionally tasted the joys of consumption, by which our epoch shows itself so superior to those that preceded it. You could quibble forever over whether men were more or less happy in past centuries. You could comment on the disappearance of religions, the difficulty of feeling love, discuss the disadvantages and advantages of both; you could mention the appearance of democracy, the loss of our sense of the sacred, the crumbling of social ties. I myself had done such things, in a lot of sketches, though in a humorous way. You could even question scientific and technological progress, and be under the impression, for example, that the improvement of medical techniques had been at the cost of increasing social control and an overall decrease in joie de vivre. But it remains the case that, on the level of consumption, the preeminence of the twentieth century was indisputable: nothing, in any other civilization, in any other epoch, could compare itself to the mobile perfection of a contemporary shopping center functioning at full tilt. I had thus consumed, with joy, shoes most notably; then, gradually, I had grown weary, and I had understood that my life, without this daily input of basic, renewable pleasures, was going to stop being simple.