It was a viva at the Sorbonne, serious business in those days of doctorates weighty as destinies. The thesis director was Professor Jean-Jacques Mayoux, a man I venerated, noble and implacable, stern as Saint Just, who called himself J-J in secret in order to share in the rages and indignations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, something I only heard about later, an upright man, probative as a surgeon's scalpel, a master who made his disciples feel the cutting edge of his knife, fond of laughter, a chaste lover of literary genius, thus it was that in the final days of his life in a hospital room, on the brink of agony, he bore up with a volume of Blake, a member of the Resistance naturally, though this I was unaware of almost to the day of his death – he wasn't one to boast.

Curmudgeonly, feared, sublime, and therefore, of course, loyal, a man of absolutes, knight of the realm of literature, knight of the faith, nothing could shake him. As for the shaking that Parkinson's disease had plagued him with his whole life long, he never conceded it so much as an inch of his mental life.

For him literature, in the folds of reality literature was the supreme reality.

In those days he was in the middle of old age, it seemed to me, that's how I saw him, me thirty-five, him having gone past eighty without slowing down.

The candidate was a nincompoop one of those dogged but utter duds capable, in time, of gangrening a professor's existence.