And it grieved me to discover this new aspect of the world and of prison at a time when I was beginning to realize that prison was indeed the closed area, the confined, measured universe in which I ought to live permanently. It is the universe for which I am meant. It is meant for me. It is the one in which I must live ( for I have the organs one needs to live in it), to which I am always being brought back by the fatality that showed me the curve of my destiny in the letters carved on the wall: “M.A.V.”1 And I have this feeling ( so disheartening that after my mentioning it to Rasseneur he exclaimed: “Oh! Jean!” in a tone of such poignant sadness that I felt an instant expression of his friendship), I have this feeling during the medical check-up or during recreation when I meet friends, new and old, those to whom I am “Jeannot with the Pretty Ties”, those I knew at the Mouse-trap, in the corridors of Santé and Fresnes Prisons, even outside. It is so natural for them to make up the population of prison and I discover I have such close ties with them (professional relations, relations of friendship or hatred) that, since I feel so much a part of this world, it horrifies me to know that I am excluded from the other, yours, just when I was attaining the qualities by means of which one can live in it. I am therefore dead. I am a dead man who sees his skeleton in a mirror, or a dream character who knows that he lives only in the darkest region of a being whose face he will not know when the dreamer is awake. I now act and think only in terms of prison. My activity is limited by its framework. I am only a punished man. To the usual hardships of prison has been added hunger, and not a child’s hunger—for our hunger at Mettray was the gluttony natural to children who are never sated, even by abundance. Hunger here is a man’s hunger. It bites the bodies (and gnaws the minds) of the least sensitive brutes. Behind the walls, the war, which is mysterious to us, has shrunk our loaf of bread, our food allowance, and the big shots have been hit in the rightful object of their pride, their muscles. Hunger has transformed the prison into a Great North where wolves howl at night. We live at the confines of the Arctic polar circle. Our skinny bodies fight among themselves, and each, within itself, against hunger. This hunger, which at first helped to disenchant the jail, has now become so great that it is a tragic element which finally crowns the prison with a savage, baroque motif, with a ringing song that is wilder than the others and may dizzy me and make me fall into the hands of the powers summoned by Bulkaen. Despite this affliction—for though I take a man’s stand, I realize that I am leaving a larval world of prodigious richness and violence—I want to try to relive my moments at Mettray. The atmosphere of the prison quickly impelled me to go back—in going back to Mettray—to my habits of the past, and I do not live a single moment on earth without at the same time living it in my secret domain, which is probably similar to the one inhabited by the men who are being punished, who walk round and round with their heads bent and their eyes looking straight ahead. And the fury with which I once turned on Chariot has not yet emptied me of the hatred I vowed him, despite my air of indifference, when, in the shop, because I reacted vaguely, or perhaps not at all, to one of his jokes, he shook me by the shoulder and said, “You in a fog or something?” I instantly felt the hatred we can bear a person who violates our dearest secrets, those of our vices.