A longing for defeat and gentleness had overcome me and no other feeling, not anger, not desire, had ever swept me up as this one did.

It made me want to weep when I remembered how we used to be in league with each other, how we would laugh together as we drove back home at dawn through the deserted streets of Paris. All that was over. I in my turn was going to be influenced, reshaped and given direction by Anne.

‘His type of intelligence isn’t perhaps very common but …’ She interrupted me patronizingly: ‘What you call types of intelligence quite simply amounts to normal intelligence at different ages.’

He asked me what I was doing with myself. I replied that I was working, I was reading. In fact, whenever I read or went to the cinema, it was only with the thought that I would be able to talk to him about the particular book, or about the film whose director he had told me he knew. I was desperately seeking for bonds between us, bonds other than

And yet it’s probably this moment that I will have loved the most, the one when I accepted the fact that life is just as it appears to me now, quietly heart-breaking.’

Yes, that was what I held against Anne: she prevented me from liking myself. I was, by my very nature, made for happiness and affability and light-heartedness, but because of her I was entering a world of reproaches and guilt, a world in which I was getting lost because I was not used to introspection.

would have preferred it if she had shown anger at my emotional deficiency, or had abandoned that air of resigned indifference. It struck me that she was right, that I lived on an animal level,

All at once I despised raucous dinner parties, South Americans, the Elsas of this world. I was overcome by a sense of pride and superiority.

My father was already growing away from me. I was obsessed, tortured, by the embarrassed expression he had had at table and by how he had turned his face away.