The chapter opens with another of Bruno Lacombe's emails to the Moulinards, responding to a question about why natural selection preserves instincts that harm us. Bruno argues that addiction is a distortion of a useful Neanderthal trait: the instinct to move toward joy. Pleasure, he explains, drives survival, sex, love, rest, and reproduction, but the same instinct can lead to ruinous attachments to drugs and alcohol. He warns Pascal and the others to keep a list of charismatic visionaries who were 'martyred to joy,' urging them not to join it.

The narrator reflects on her own relationship to drinking, noting she drinks for pleasure, while Pascal Balmy, per her dossier, is notable for his indifference to alcohol. This pragmatic temperance, she suggests, is part of why aging leftists like Bruno have invested in him as a leader.

The narrator then situates Pascal within a French radical lineage, comparing him to Guy Debord, the Situationist writer and provocateur of May 1968. Bruno had known Debord personally. She summarizes Debord's critique of the 'spectacle' and consumer culture, conceding parts while rejecting his blanket refusal of work. She notes Debord never worked because of inherited family money, and that his critique was tinged with bitterness over his family's lost fortune.

Pascal, similarly funded by family wealth, is said to embody Debordian charisma, modeling himself on the young, magnetic Debord rather than the late, bitter, alcoholic Debord, whose dossier photos the narrator describes with clinical disgust. Lucien has confirmed Pascal authors most of Le Moulin's anonymous essays in Debord's voice. Unlike Debord, Pascal shuns fame, drinks little, and evades authorities, qualities that make him precisely the kind of figure the narrator's contacts have hired her to watch.