It was cold. I went back to Weber's and at once the lights and the throng restored my natural timidity. I sat down humbly in a corner with that lack of ease characteristic of a man who is afraid that people will notice he is not used to being there.
Opposite me a group of young people were making a good deal of noise. Enviously I studied their clothes and that air of easy assurance, the sure sign of a happiness which, perhaps, I should never attain. Truly I was not exactly made for the University, I whom learned expositions, bibliographies and works of reference left sceptical, I whose heart almost beat quicker at the sight of a well-cut waistcoat, a well-tied tie and elegant socks visualized under well-creased trousers!
They were a party of four, one a woman, pink and pretty, in her furs. Painted a little, perhaps, though I've never minded that. She was seated next to one of the handsome young men, and facing me. The other two had their backs to me, but in the mirror I could see their faces, slightly flushed by a good dinner, which was then approaching its end.
That evening I realized the humiliation of those who go for their coffee to a fashionable restaurant. Said I to myself: "You'd far better have stayed at home, dined anywhere, gone to bed and slept, yes, slept. Sleep is the poor man's haven. You oughtn't to have come here."
And yet.... It was gradually beginning to dawn upon me that one of the men with his back to me was studying me closely in the mirror, when he got up and came over to me.
"Vignerte!"
"Ribeyre!"
I had come across this Ribeyre during my advanced rhetoric course. He had already obtained his licence, and was, like me, a candidate for Normale, though he displayed that indifference to results which comes from a private income and ambitions in other directions.
"What are you up to?"
"You can see for yourself," I said, somewhat stung. Then I added quickly: