Another time he wanted to take me to see the Russian Ballet. My mother put her foot down: ‘Simone may not go out with you in the evenings.’ Not that she had any doubts about my losing my virtue; before dinner, I could spend hours alone in the flat with Jacques: but after dinner, any place, unless it was exorcized by the presence of my parents, was automatically a den of vice. So our friendship was restricted to exchanges of unfinished sentences broken by lengthy silences and readings from our favourite authors.
