There, life would be easy, simple. All the servitudes, all the problems brought by material existence would find a natural solution. A cleaning lady would come every morning. Every fortnight, wine, oil and sugar would be delivered. There would be a huge, bright kitchen with blue tiles decorated with heraldic emblems, three china plates decorated with yellow arabesques in metallic paint, cupboards everywhere, a handsome whitewood table in the middle with stools and bench-seats. It would be pleasant to come and sit there, every morning, after a shower, scarcely dressed. On the table there would be a sizeable stoneware butter dish, jars of marmalade, honey, toast, grapefruit cut in two. It would be early. It would be May, the start of a long summer's day.

But such things are far from easy. For this young couple, who were not rich but wanted to be, simply because they were not poor, there could be no situation more awkward. They had only what they deserved to have. They were thrown, when already they were dreaming of space, light, silence, back to the reality, which was not even miserable, but simply cramped (and that was perhaps even worse), of their tiny flat, of their everyday meals, of their puny holidays. That was what corresponded to their economic status, to their social situation. That was their reality and they had no other. But beside them, all around them, all along the streets where they could not but walk, existed the fallacious but nonetheless glowing offerings of antique-dealers, delicatessens and stationers. From Palais-Royal to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, from Champ-de-Mars to the Champs-Elysées, from the Luxembourg Gardens to Montparnasse, from Ile Saint-Louis to the Marais, from Place des Ternes to Place de l'Opéra, from Madeleine to the Monceau Gardens, the whole of Paris was a perpetual temptation. They burned with desire to give in to it, passionately, straight away and for ever. But the horizon of their desires was mercilessly blocked; their great impossible dreams belonged only to Utopia.

But between these too grand daydreams in which they wallowed with strange self-indulgence, and their total lack of any actual doing, no rational plan, matching the objective necessities to their financial means, arose to fill the gap. The vastness of their desires paralysed them.

Like almost all their colleagues, Jérôme and Sylvie had become market researchers by necessity and not by choice. No-one knows, in any case, where the untrammelled development of their natural inclinations towards idleness would have led them. There again, history had chosen for them. Of course, like everyone else, they would have liked to give themselves to something, to feel in themselves some powerful need that they would have called a vocation, an ambition that would have raised them up, a passion that would have fulfilled them. But they possessed, alas, but a single passion, the passion for a higher standard of living, and it exhausted them. When they were students the prospect of a mediocre degree and then a teaching post with a tiny salary at Nogent-sur-Seine, Château-Thierry or Etampes terrified them so much that virtually on meeting each other - Jérôme was then twenty-one, Sylvie nineteen - and without needing to talk it over, they dropped out of courses they had never really begun. The thirst for knowledge did not torture them. Far more prosaically, and without hiding from the fact that they were probably making a mistake and that sooner or later they would come to regret it, they thirsted for a slightly bigger room, for running hot and cold water, for a shower, for meals more varied, or just more copious, than those they ate in student canteens, maybe for a car, for records, holidays, clothes.

There was washing, drying, ironing. Gas, electricity and the telephone. Children. Clothes and underclothes. Mustard. Packet soups, tinned soups. Hair: how to wash it, how to dry it, how to make it hold a wave, how to make it shine. Students, fingernails, cough syrup, typewriters, fertilisers, tractors, leisure pursuits, presents, stationery, linen, politics, motorways, alcoholic drinks, mineral water, cheeses, jams, lamps and curtains, insurance and gardening. Nil humani alienum . . . Nothing that was human was outside their scope.

They would go on for hours, sometimes, in high dudgeon at its outrageousness.

[...] the incommensurability, perceptible in every domain, between the quality of their taste in clothing (nothing was too fine for them) and the amount of money they normally had available was an obvious, if ultimately secondary, sign of their material situation. They were not the only ones; rather than shop at the sales, which happened everywhere, three times a year, they preferred to buy second-hand. In the world that was theirs it was almost a regulation always to wish for more than you could have. It was not they who had decreed it; it was a social law, a fact of life, which advertising in general, magazines, window displays, the street scene and even, in a certain sense, all those productions which in common parlance constitute cultural life, expressed most authentically. That was why they were wrong to feel, on some occasions, that they were losing their dignity. For minor mortifications - having to ask the price of something, hesitantly; having to think twice; trying to haggle; window-shopping, not daring to go in; wanting; appearing mean and petty - are also what keep business going. They were proud of having got something cheap, of having spent nothing on it, hardly a penny. They were even prouder (but the pleasure of paying too much for something has its own price, which is always a bit too high) to have paid a great deal, the highest possible price, on an impulse, without questioning, almost in blind excitement, for something that could not fail to be the finest, uniquely fine, perfect. These moments of shame and pride both had the same function, brought identical disappointments, identical inner rages. And they grasped - since all around them, everywhere, everything made them grasp, since slogans, posters, neon-lit signs and floodlit shop windows drummed it into their heads from morning to night — that they were for ever one rung down on the ladder, always one rung too low; even though they were fortunate enough not to be, not by a long chalk, at the bottom of the pile.

[...] They would turn up, every one of them, on the opening night. The screen would light up, they would feel a thrill of satisfaction. But the colours had faded with age, the picture wobbled on the screen, the women were of another age; they would come out; they would be sad. It was not the film they had dreamt of. It was not the total film each of them had inside himself, the perfect film they could have enjoyed for ever and ever. The film they would have liked to make. Or, more secretly, no doubt, the film they would have liked to live.

Such a prospect is not comforting. No-one embarks upon it without protest. For Christ's sake, our young lad thinks, am I going to have to spend my days behind these glass walls instead of going for walks in flowery meadows? am I going to catch myself hoping the night before each promotion exercise? am I going to calculate, connive, champ my bit, me, who used to dream of poetry, of night trains, of warm sandy beaches? And, taking it mistakenly to be a consolation, he falls into the trap of hire-purchase. Then he is caught, well and truly caught. All he can do is to gird up his patience. Alas, when he gets to the end of his troubles, our young man is no longer quite so young, and, to cap his misfortune, it can even seem to him that his life is behind him, that it consisted only of his striving and not of what he strove for, and even if he is too cautious, too sensible - his slow climb has given him plenty of experience - to dare to say such things to himself, it will none the less be true that he will be forty, and straightening out his home and his weekend place and his children's education will have filled more than adequately the few hours he will have been able to spare from his work . . .

If some day something were to give way, such as an agency going out of business or their being seen as too old, or too unreliable in their work, or one of them falling ill, that was all it would take for everything to come tumbling down. They had no prospects, no reserves. Their minds often turned to this subject, anxiously. They would come back to it incessantly, in spite of themselves. They could see themselves out of work for months on end, taking on penny jobs just to survive, borrowing, begging. Then, sometimes, they would experience moments of intense despair. They would dream of offices, of established posts, of regular hours, of proper contracts of employment. But these reversed images threw them into perhaps even greater despair. They just could not, so they thought, recognise themselves in the face of a desk-bound executive, however splendid his apparel. They decided that they detested hierarchies, and that solutions, miraculous or other, would come from elsewhere, from the world, from History. They went on in their bumpy way; it fitted their natural inclination. In an imperfect world, of this they convinced themselves easily, it was not by any means the most imperfect way. They lived for the day; in six hours they would spend what it had taken three days to earn; they often borrowed; they ate ghastly French fries, smoked their last cigarette between them, sometimes spent two hours looking for a spare metro ticket, wore recycled shirts, listened to scratched records, hitch-hiked to get places, and, quite frequently still, put off changing the sheets for five or six weeks. They were quite near to believing that, all in all, this kind of life was not without its charm.

It didn't add up to much. They were the first to be aware of this, and they often wondered, standing in the middle of the pack, what they were doing there, out in the cold, in the rain, in these sinister parts of the town — Bastille, Nation, Hôtel de Ville. They wished something would happen to prove that what they were doing was important, necessary, irreplaceable, that their fear-struck efforts would have a meaning for them, would be something they needed, something that might help them to know themselves, to change themselves, to live. No: their real lives were elsewhere, in a near or distant future also full of menace, but of a more subtle, less straightforward kind: traps you could not touch, spellbound webs.

On occasions they wished everything would stay the same, not ever move. Then they would be able just to drift. Their life would keep them warm: it would stretch ahead through the months and years without - or almost without - altering, without ever hampering them. It would be but the harmonious sequence of their days and nights, the one almost imperceptibly modulating the other, a never-ending reprise of the same themes, a continuous happiness, a perpetuated enjoyment which no upset, no tragic event, no twist or turn of fate would ever bring into question.

At other times they could not stand it a moment longer. They wanted to fight, and to win. But how could they fight? Whom would they fight? What should they fight? They lived in a strange and shimmering world, the bedazzling universe of a market culture, in prisons of plenty, in the bewitching traps of comfort and happiness.

Where were the dangers? Where were the threats? In the past men fought in their millions, and millions still do fight, for their crust of bread. Jérôme and Sylvie did not quite believe you could go into battle for a chesterfield settee. But that was all the same the banner under which they would have enlisted most readily. There was nothing, they thought, that concerned them in party manifestos or in government plans: they would sneer at early retirement pension schemes, increased holiday entitlements, free lunches, the thirty-hour week. They wanted superabundance - Garrard turntables, empty beaches for their eyes only, round-the-world trips, grand hotels.

The enemy was unseen. Or, rather, the enemy was within them, it had rotted them, infected them, eaten them away. They were the hollow men, the turkey round the stuffing. Tame pets, faithfully reflecting a world which taunted them. They were up to their necks in a cream cake from which they would only ever be able to nibble crumbs.

But friendships, too, began to fray. Some evenings, within the finite fields of their unspacious rooms, the couples that had come together crossed swords by word and eye. Some evenings, they finally grasped that their fine friendships, their almost hermetic language, their private jokes, this shared world, shared language, the common gestures they had made up, were based on nothing: theirs was a shrunken universe, a world running out of steam, opening onto nothing. Their lives were not conquests, but slow collapses, dispersions. That was when they realised how deeply they were condemned to habit, to sluggishness. They were bored in each other's company as if all there had ever been between them was a void. Puns, boozing, walks in the woods, dinner parties, endless discussions about films, plans, gossip had long stood in for adventure, history and truth. But the words were hollow, the gestures empty, without substance, without consequence, without a future, words repeated a thousand times, hands shaken a thousand times, ritual actions which no longer afforded them any protection.

They would drift from marvel to marvel, from surprise to surprise. All they had to do was to live, to be there, for the world to offer itself to them whole. Their ships, their trains, their rockets crisscrossed the planet. The world was in their arms, with its wheat-covered counties, its fish-full seas, its peaks and its deserts, its flowery landscapes, beaches, islands, trees and treasures, with its huge and long-abandoned factories buried underground making the finest woollen cloths and the brightest silks for them alone.

[...] A few books were swapped, and a few records; there was the odd discussion at La Régence; and that was that. No warm hospitality, no keen friendship. That wasn't a plant that grew in Sfax. People turned in on themselves, in their houses that were too big for them.

It soon occurred to them that they were going to stop living altogether. Time passed and stood still. There was no longer anything to keep them in touch with the world, apart from eternally out-of-date newspapers which they began to suspect were well-meaning fabrications, or the memories of anterior life, shadows of another world. They had always lived in Sfax, they would always live there. They had lost all their plans, all their impatience. They looked forward to nothing, not even to holidays too far over the horizon, not even to returning to France.

Their life was like an unrelinquished habit, an almost unruffled tedium: a life sans everything.

They tried to get away from Sfax, from its dreary streets and emptiness, so as to find vistas, sights and ruins which perhaps would dazzle or bowl them over, some glowing marvel which would even the score. The remains of a palace, or a temple, or an amphitheatre, a verdant oasis seen from a peak near Kairouan, a long strip of fine sand forming a curved beach as far as the eye could see, sometimes rewarded their search. But more often they escaped from Sfax only to find, a few dozen or a few hundred miles further on, identically dreary streets, identically incomprehensible and bustling bazaars, identical inlets and ugly palms, an identical desert.

They bought nothing. Obviously, to some degree, because they did not know how to buy and were worried about having to haggle, but above all because they did not feel drawn to these things. None of them, however lavish they could occasionally be, gave them a feeling of wealth. They moved on, amused or indifferent, but all they saw remained foreign, belonged to another world, did not concern them. And from these trips they brought back only images of emptiness and drought: desolate heaths, tundra, sea inlets, a mineral world where nothing grows: their own world of loneliness, their own dry desert.

It now seemed to them that before - and each day, that before receded further into the past, as if their anterior life was falling slowly into the domain of legend, of the unreal, or of the shapeless - before, they had had at least a passion for possessing. Often it was wanting that had been all their existence. They had felt drawn towards the future, impatient, consumed with desire.

And then what? What had they done? What had happened?

Something resembling a quiet and very gentle tragedy was entering the heart of their decelerating lives. They were adrift in the rubble of a very ancient dream, lost amidst unrecognisable ruins.

There was nothing left. They were at the finishing line, at the terminus of the doubtful trajectory which had been their life for six years, at the end of that uncertain quest which had taken them nowhere, which had taught them nothing.

The journey will be pleasant for a long while. Towards noon they will wander nonchalantly down to the dining car. They will sit by a window, facing each other. They will order two whiskies. They will look at each other one last time with a smile of complicity. The starched table linen, the solid cutlery engraved with the arms of the Compagnie des Wagons-Lits, the weighty, emblazoned crockery will seem like a prelude to a sumptuous feast. But the meal they will be served will be quite simply tasteless . . .