This was a misjudgement—the school lost its two best pupils, because the prize-winner’s father also took his son away.

Like decoys, pupils like us attracted others.

My mother thought I was too young to go to the Lycée Henri IV. In other words—to go by train. So for two years I stayed at home and worked on my own.

I resolved to have endless enjoyment, since, managing to do in four hours work that my former schoolmates wouldn’t have produced in two days, I was free for more than half the day. I went for walks by myself beside the Marne, which was so much ‘our’ river that when my sisters talked about the Seine they called it ‘a Marne’. I even went in my father’s boat, despite him forbidding it, but I didn’t row, although I wouldn’t admit to myself that I wasn’t scared of disobeying him, simply scared. I would lie in the boat and read. During 1913 and 1914 I got through two hundred books there. None of them were what could be described as bad books; in fact they were the best, if not for the mind then at least for their own merits. Much later on, at the age when adolescence looks down on erotic literature, I acquired a taste for its infantile delights, although at the time I wouldn’t have dreamt of reading it.

The drawback to this alternating leisure and school work was that it transformed my entire year into an imitation holiday. The amount of work I did each day amounted to very little, but although I worked for shorter periods than the others, I carried on during their holidays, and so this very little was like a piece of cork that a cat has tied to the end of its tail for its whole lifetime, when it would have probably preferred trailing a saucepan around behind it for a month.

The real holidays were approaching, but since my daily routine went on as usual, this was of little concern to me. The cat was still staring at the cheese under its glass cover. But then War came. It smashed the glass. The masters had other things to worry about and the cat was delighted.

To be honest, everyone in France was delighted. Prize books tucked under their arms, children crowded round public notices. Bad pupils took advantage of the distress and confusion at home.

Every day after dinner we went to the railway station at J …, two kilometres from where we lived, to watch the troop trains go past. We took bell-flowers and threw them to the soldiers. Women in overalls poured red wine into cans and sprinkled litres of it over the flower-strewn platform. The memory of the scene still makes me think of a firework display. Never was there so much wasted wine, so many dead flowers. We had to hang flags from all our windows.

We soon stopped going to J …—my brothers and sisters began to resent the War, they thought it was going on too long. It deprived them of their trips to the seaside. Accustomed to getting up late, they now had to go and buy newspapers at six in the morning. What a miserable sort of amusement! But around the twentieth of August the little monsters regain their hopefulness. Instead of leaving the dinner table where the grown-ups linger, they stay to listen to my father talking about the day of departure. There probably wouldn’t be any transport. So we would have to go a long way by bicycle. My brothers tease my younger sister. The wheels of her bike are barely forty centimetres across: “We’ll leave you behind on the road”. My sister sobs.