This obstinate refusal prevented me from deriving any benefit from my meeting with Simone Weil. While preparing to enter the Normale – the training-college in Paris for professoriates – she was taking the same examinations as myself at the Sorbonne. She intrigued me because of her great reputation for intelligence and her bizarre get-up; she would stroll round the courtyard of the Sorbonne attended by a group of Alain’s old pupils; she always carried in the one pocket of her dark-grey overall a copy of Libres Propos and in the other a copy of Humanité.
