You do not move; you will not move. Someone else, your twin, a ghostly, conscientious double is perhaps performing in your stead, one by one, the actions you have eschewed: he gets up, washes, shaves, dresses, goes out. You let him bound down the stairs, run down the street, leap onto the moving bus, arrive on time, out of breath but triumphant, at the doors of the hall. Certificate of Advanced Study in General Sociology. First written paper.

You get up too late. Back there in the hall, studious or bored heads are bowed pensively over their desks. The perhaps anxious glances of your friends all converge on your still-vacant seat. You will not set down on four, eight or twelve sheets of paper what you know, what you think, what you know you are supposed to think, about alienation, the workers, modernity and leisure, about white-collar workers or about automation, about our knowledge of others, about Marx as a rival of De Tocqueville, about Weber as an opponent of Lukacs. In any case, you wouldn't have said anything, because you don't know a great deal and you think nothing at all. Your seat remains vacant. You won't finish your degree, you won't begin a postgraduate thesis. You will study no more.

This is your life. This is yours. You can establish an exact inventory of your meagre fortune, the precise balance sheet of your first quarter-century. You are twenty-five years old, you have twenty-nine teeth, three shirts and eight socks, a few books you no longer read, a few records you no longer play. You do not want to remember anything else, be it your family or your studies, your friends and lovers, or your holidays and plans. You travelled and you brought nothing back from your travels. Here you sit, and you want only to wait, just to wait until there is nothing left to wait for: for night to fall and the passing hours to chime, for the days to slip away and the memories to fade.

[...] But you no longer need excuses, regrets, nostalgia. You reject nothing, you refuse nothing. You have ceased going forward, but that is because you weren't going forward anyway, you're not setting off again, you have arrived, you can see no reason to go any further: all it took, practically, on a day in May when it was too hot, was the untimely conjunction of a text of which you'd lost the thread, a bowl of Nescafé that suddenly tasted too bitter, and a pink plastic bowl filled with blackish water in which six socks were floating, this was all it took for something to snap, to turn bad, to come undone, and for the truth to appear in the bright light of day - but the light of day is never bright in the garret on Rue Saint-Honoré - this disappointing truth, as sad and ridiculous as a dunce's cap, as heavy as a Latin dictionary: you have no desire to carry on, no desire to defend yourself, no desire to attack.

No. You prefer to be the missing piece of the puzzle. You're getting out while the going's good. You're not stacking any odds in your favour or putting any eggs in any baskets. You're putting the cart before the horse, you're throwing the helve after the hatchet, you're counting your chickens before they're hatched and eating the calf in the belly of the cow, you're drinking your liquid assets, taking French leave, you are leaving and you are not looking back.

From now on, when you eat standing up at the counter of La Petite Source or La Bière or Roger La Frite, it is rather like what psychophysiologists call "nutritional intake": you ingest, once or twice a day, rarely more, a fairly precisely calculable compound of proteins and glucosides, in the form of a piece of grilled beef, strips of potato quick-fried in boiling oil, and a glass of red wine. In other words it's a steak, sometimes called a minute steak, or even a rump steak, but it is definitely not a tournedos, and chips that no-one would dignify with the name French fries, and a glass of red wine of uncertain, not to say dubious, origin, and entirely unguaranteed quality. But your stomach can no longer tell the difference, if it ever could, and neither can your palate. Language has proved more resistant: it took a while for your meat to stop being thin, tough, stringy, for your chips to stop being greasy and soft, and the wine sticky or vinegary. It took a while for these eminently pejorative adjectives, which at first evoke the sad fare of the poorhouse, food for tramps, soup-kitchens, suburban fun-fairs, gradually to lose their substance, and for the sadness, the misery, the poverty, the need, the shame that had become inexorably attached to them - this fat-become-chip, this hardness-become-meat, this bitterness-become-wine-to stop hitting you, to stop leaving their mark on you. Similarly, it took a while for you to stop being convinced by the signs which are their exact opposite, the noble signs of abundance, feasting and merry-making: the bloody, succulent thickness of the 'sides' of Charolais or the 'slabs' of beef, of the finest fillet or porterhouse steaks, the golden crispness of straw potatoes, or match-stick potatoes, or soufflé potatoes, or gratin dauphinois, the bouquet of the fine wine in its wicker basket. Never again will your plate play host to any hallowed energy, and no divine nectar will sparkle in your glass. No exclamation marks punctuate your meals. You eat meat and chips and you drink wine. The immeasurable distance between a lavish Côte de boeuf de La Villette and the full-course menu that you order every day, as soon as you enter, from the counter at La Petite Source, no longer has any power over you.

You walk or you do not walk. You sleep or you do not sleep. You walk down your six flights of stairs, you climb back up again. You buy Le Monde or you do not buy it. You eat or you do not eat. You sit down, you stretch out, you remain standing, you slip into the darkened auditorium of a cinema. You light a cigarette. You cross the street, you cross the Seine, you stop, you start again. You play pinball or you don't.

You will not break the magic circle of solitude. You are alone and you know no-one; you know no-one and you are alone. You see the others bunch together, huddle together, hug and protect one other. But you, lifeless gaze, transparent wraith, leper blending with the walls, you are a silhouette already returned to dust, an occupied space that no-one approaches. You force yourself to hope for unlikely encounters. But it is not for you that leather, brass and wood start suddenly to shine, that lights are lowered and noises gently muffled. You are alone despite the thickening cigarette smoke, despite Lester Young or Coltrane, alone in the snug heat of the bars, in the empty streets which echo to your tread, in the drowsy complicity of the last bars to remain open.

Noisy or deserted city, pallid or hysterical city, gutted, devastated, soiled city, city bristling with prohibitions, steel bars, iron fences, locks.

Charnel house city: the covered markets that are rotting away

Or else, in a sudden rush of sympathy, you almost feel like sending him salutary messages, tapping with your fist against the partition

You have learnt nothing, except that solitude teaches you nothing, except that indifference teaches you nothing: it was a lure, it was a mesmerising illusion which concealed a pitfall. You were alone and that is all there is to it and you wanted to protect yourself; you wanted to burn the bridges between you and the world once and for all. But you are such a neglible speck, and the world is such a big word: all you ever did was to drift around a city, to walk a few kilometres past façades, shopfronts, parks and embankments.