This chapter consists primarily of Bruno's emails to the Moulinards recounting his early life. After WWII, orphaned Bruno was shuttled through institutions in Paris, then fled to live on the streets, joining a community of vagrant boys. At fifteen in 1953, he met Guy Debord, then twenty-one, cultured and bookish. Bruno taught Debord street survival; Debord relayed to Bruno what mattered from books. Bruno also helped orphan girls escape strict nunneries and felt protective of younger children, sweetening their stolen wines, partly out of guilt over his brother murdered by the Nazis at twelve.

Bruno describes the bohemian existentialist milieu around the Café Dupont-Latin and later the Mabillon, characterized by drinking, theft, and Debord's ethos that true art must be lived as gesture, not produced or sold. Bruno specialized in robbing occupied hotel rooms, learning to see by touch in the dark. After a stint in a brutal reformatory and watching peers escalate to armed robbery and then face the choice of prison or the Foreign Legion in Algeria, Bruno had a revelation and broke from the group: he stopped stealing and drinking, took a metro job, and at twenty left for Lyon to study earth science. Debord shunned him for rejoining society.

After graduation, Bruno was assigned to teach in Rodez, which turned out to be a reform school run on punishment and cruelty. Refusing the violent methods of his colleagues, he treated his students as equals, forging communal bonds. This experience became the foundation of his philosophy: life is precious when treated as such; children and adults alike will choose love over brutality if given the chance; all savagery originates in authority.

Bruno addresses Pascal directly, gently mocking Pascal's continued mystification of Debord and dismissing the cult of drinking and denunciation as signs of death rather than life. Crucially, he warns Pascal that signals he is picking up "on cave frequency" suggest a plan in the offing that they do not agree on. Bruno states that if the plan risks human lives, regardless of whose, it will be a wrong turn. He concludes by declaring he deplores violence in all its forms.