I had not drifted for long when my legal studies were over. An old family friend, the manager of the Abyssinian Railway Company, had asked me to become his private secretary. I accepted the post. Another had soon fallen vacant, that of General Secretary. Suggested as a stop-gap, I had acquitted myself to everyone's satisfaction. I was good at interviewing visitors, and wrote with a certain amount of style. My appointment was confirmed. The business was a sound one, when the time for exploitation came, it would be excellent. I had put some capital into it. I had not much work, only four hours a day to put in. I earned ample to live on. What more could I have wished for? Cipollina slyly urged me to enumerate what he called my positive joys. I demurred, none too good-naturedly. "We have so few tastes in common." But, privately, I invoked my customary amusements: dinner in a restaurant on the boulevards, where I used to meet Laquarrière: it was there that we exchanged our stock of ill-natured sallies: then there would be bridge, poker, or billiards: and often a theatre, though it did not appeal to us much; from time to time a boxing match, or on Sunday, in the Parc des Princés, a sensational football tie. These last shows held the most interest for me. They reminded me of the still recent time when I myself excelled in these games, and I still continued, though somewhat irregularly, to frequent a school of physical culture. I had scratched sentiment out of my life once and for all. Paris offers an inexhaustible fund of sensual attractions to those possessed of time and money. I had both, but I dreaded nothing so much as being tied to one person, and as I also detested the flat period of preliminary gallantries, I came to content myself with a wise and banal voluptuousness. More restricted still was the balance-sheet of family obligations and satisfactions. I would not have missed dining with my father on Sunday evening. At long intervals I wrote a few lines on a card to my married brother, an officer at St. Mihiel. I have spoken of my dilettantism: the word gratified my vanity and was just, in the main, as certain artistic tendencies distinguished me from the herd of vulgar pleasure-seekers. I read a great deal. I bought novels and philosophies, and had a weakness for pretty editions. I made a point of being well up in matters concerning painting and music. I owned some admirable eighteenth-century prints, a small series by Daumier, an oil-painting by Pissarro. I vaguely cherished the hope of making a sort of collection of which my friends would one day be jealous. That was all. I might ransack my mind indefinitely but I should not find a possibility of joy beyond these few instances.