Today it strikes me that the most important aspect of these conversations was not so much what we said as what we took for granted, and what in fact was not so at all. We were wrong about almost everything. An accurate character sketch must take these errors into account, since they expressed one kind of reality - our actual situation.

They use the pretext of avoiding war, to make you swallow any kind of peace, said Paul. They use the pretext of a revolution to involve us in any kind of war, said Jardinet.

A woman alone always seems a little unusual; it is not true that men respect women: they respect each other through their women — wives, mistresses, “kept” women; when masculine protection no longer extends over her, woman is disarmed before a superior caste that is aggressive, sneering, or hostile. As an “erotic perversion,