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longer justified. Caboche’s men had fought for these principles. As I did not know the details of their struggle, nor did I fully understand it, the feelings that had once been a source of guilt were now shared and reinforced.
    As we walked home I opened my heart to my father. He stopped and looked at me. I saw in his eyes that he was more upset by my words than by the insult he had just received. I know now that he was sincere. He did not think any other attitude was possible with regard to the powerful, in the world as it was. He had raised me with one goal in mind: to enable me, when the time came, to survive.
    He immediately made the connection between my rebelliousness and the inflamed talk Eustache was spreading through the house. At my father’s request, no later than the following week the butcher was found another hiding place, and shortly thereafter he left town.
    In truth, my father had nothing more to fear in that respect: the harm had been done. Eustache had given me permission to voice the ideas I already had. As for following his example and, more generally, that of Caboche’s rebels, that was out of the question. As the son of a furrier, I was used to classifying human beings as if they were animals, according to their pelts, and I had noticed that Eustache had the same curly, wiry head of hair as Éloi. Both of them were advocates of reckless brute force, the exact opposite of weakness, but in the end it was of the same kind—that is, primitive. I was not tempted in the slightest to yield to it. There were surely other methods we could use to force the nobility to respect us, to make them reward our work and give a place in society to those who were undistinguished by birth. My aim henceforth would be to discover those methods, or to invent them.
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    Girls of my age—my comrades’ sisters, neighbors, or churchgoers from the same parish—were of little interest to me. I left it to Éloi and his kind to tell tales of conquests where fantasies rivaled sordid encounters. With regard to this subject, as to others, I preferred to daydream. The little people whom as children we saw among us and who were called girls were devoid of any interest to me. Propriety maintained that they must stay silent. Their bodies did not have a boy’s strength, and in any case, they were not allowed to join in our games. Their resemblance to actual women—our mothers, for example—was vague, if not downright nonexistent. If these incomplete creatures were worthy of any feeling, it must be compassion.
    Then came a time when, suddenly, one of these girls would leave her chrysalis, and a new body would come to life. Her waist grew longer, her breasts and hips grew rounder. Her gaze, above all, lost the humble modesty to which she had been condemned by so much silent waiting for this apotheosis. All of a sudden there were women among us. They studied us in turn, scrutinizing our smooth cheeks and our narrow shoulders with the same pity we had shown them and which they now reserved for us in plentiful supply.
    However, once they had taken this minor revenge, they deployed their newfound power more judiciously than we did. The attention they hardly paid to boys in general was counterbalanced by the vivid interest they showed some of them in particular. With a great deal of sensitivity, but not so much so as to make these nuances unintelligible to us, they would designate one or the other as their favorite. These games of desire placed us, and them as well, in competition.
    The subtle hierarchy that had been established in our group of boys had been turned on its ear. It was now also subject to the ranking that the girls established from outside. Fortunately, there were times when our rankings coincided. And that is what happened to me.
    Since my adventure during the siege of the town, I had gained the respect, if not the friendship, of my comrades. Two of the survivors of the