“You’ve always got cigarettes. . . .”

At last he was telling me what obsessed him. He showed what was on his mind. . . .

“It gets me down not having cigarettes. I’m not fit for the ash can. No butts, not a thing, not a thing. . . .”

As his smile reached these last words, it gradually faded. He had to talk quickly and quietly, we were in a hurry, almost the whole division had gone down. A guard might have come up and found us there. Under that double pressure, Bulkaen’s voice and what it was saying seemed to be reeling off a drama, a crime story.

“I’ll croak if it goes on. . . .”

My attitude didn’t encourage him. I still kept my mouth shut. At times I couldn’t understand his whispers. I cocked my ear, I listened carefully. Behind the walls I could sense the presence of our past life, of our days in prison, our sorrowful childhood. He said:

“You don’t have a butt on you, do you, Jean?”

Without letting my face show any feeling, though I was annoyed, I simply put my hand into my jacket pocket and took out a fistful of butts, which I handed him. He seemed not to believe they were all for him, but his face was beaming. And I went down, still not saying a word, with a casual shrug. I was already downstairs, outside, when he finally arrived. We were locked up in the same little yard. He came straight to me and thanked me, then immediately, to justify his chiseling, informed me that he had been in prison from the age of twelve. And he specified: “From twelve to eighteen I was in a reformatory. . . .”

I asked: “Where?”

“At Mettray.”

I remained calm enough to ask:

“What family? Joan of Arc?”

He answered “that’s right” and we reminisced about Mettray. He accompanied each of his important but rare remarks with a broad, open, flat movement of his left hand, which seemed to come down suddenly on the five strings of a guitar. A male gesture whereby the guitarist mutes the vibrations of the strings, but it is a calm gesture of possession, and one that produces silence. I gave way to my passionate nature. The love I had been damming up for several days broke through its reserve and flowed out in the form of great pleasure in finding a Mettray colonist in my division. The word pleasure isn’t quite right. Neither is joy, nor the other synonyms, nor satisfaction, nor even felicity or delight. It was an extraordinary state since it was the fulfillment of what I had been desiring (though with a vague desire that remained obscure to me until the day of my encounter) for twenty years: to find in someone other than myself the memory of Mettray, as much perhaps in order to relive Mettray as to continue it in my adult life by loving in accordance with the ways of the past. But added to that state of happiness was the fear that a slight wind, a slight shock, might undo the result of that encounter. So often had I seen the fondest dreams turn to dust that I never dared dream of Bulkaen, of a young, hale, handsome boy with a faithful heart and stern gaze, and who would love me. A youngster who would love robbery enough to cherish thieves, contemptuous enough of women to love a hoodlum, and also honest enough to remember that Mettray was a paradise. And suddenly, at the same time as the Colony showed me that despite my talent and training as a dreamer I had never ventured the fairest of dreams (I did approach it at times!), prison life was confronting me with the living fulfilment of that dream.