From 1973–4 onwards, I accompanied Lacan to Guitrancourt more and more often, and soon every weekend. It was a beautiful house, an old eighteenth-century courthouse with pleasant proportions characteristic of that period with its taste for intimacy. It had been elegantly furnished by Sylvia. An annex had been transformed into a studio by a previous owner, a famous painter. It was here that Lacan worked in his office, facing the great bay window overlooking the garden. To the right of it, and echoing it, there hung a Monet, a Giverny landscape where the water lilies seemed to have been drowned under a cascade of foliage. When I settled down on a sofa opposite, I had it in front of my eyes when I was working there with Lacan. In the studio, a mezzanine had been created where you could contemplate The Origin of the World, concealed by a painting on wood by André Masson allusively portraying the very same subject it was supposed to hide. You could reveal the Courbet by removing one side of the frame and sliding away the Masson. Lacan took pleasure in this ritual unveiling. Pre-Columbian pottery adorned the edge of the mezzanine. I liked one of them in particular. It represented a woman’s body with barely marked breasts, on the flared flank of which there clung a small being whose tiny proportions gave the mother a gigantic stature.

At a distance from the house and the studio, the garden had been enlarged on the right and a swimming pool installed, as well as a small house built on the edge. This included a room adorned with a Pompeian fresco which opened onto the pool through a bay window. Here Alicia, the caretaker, served the lunch she had prepared. There was also a small kitchen and a shower room, as well as a room arranged in Japanese style, in accordance with all the rules of the art, by an architect whom Lacan had employed on this task on his return from a journey to Japan. Every day, before lunch, in every season and whatever the weather, Lacan jumped naked into the swimming pool. He did two lengths, it was a ritual rather than an exercise, but it was still a discipline from which he never deviated. On the wall which ran alongside the pool there climbed various plants that bloomed in different seasons and were covered with all sorts of berries. Seeing their ever-changing foliage was a pleasure of which one never tired.

The pool and its house made our stays in Guitrancourt seem like real holidays. Indeed, we did spend some of the summer there. But it was also an intense place of work. Lacan set the tone, working all through the mornings and afternoons, in a quiet concentration. In the morning, he tended to stay in his bed. A small wooden drawing board served as his writing desk; the sheets of paper were held in place by a large clip. In addition to the night tables, two rectangular tables were arranged on each side of the bed, on which were piled books and papers. In the afternoon, he would settle down in the studio, sitting at the large trestle table facing the bay window. He remained there for hours, completely immobile apart from the movements of his hand on the page. This immobility impressed me very much, for it was totally unfamiliar to me: in comparison, everyone else seemed to be animated by a kind of Brownian motion. Together with his silence, this immobility formed as it were a central vacuum in the house, around which we would gravitate.

I am using the plural pronoun here, for his son-in-law, Jacques-Alain, and his daughter, Judith, and their children, came more and more often to spend the weekends in Guitrancourt, soon joined by Laurence and her three children. It was, for years, a family life with which I found myself associated. I watched the children grow up, we went riding together in the surroundings. They were good years. Lacan seemed happy to be surrounded by his family, even though he was often silent, absorbed in his thoughts. At table, for example, he did not join in the conversation much.

One thing I shared with Jacques-Alain was that we were both completely blown away by Lacan. This formed the basis of a mutual friendship. We also shared a love of badminton. Our game consisted of prolonging the exchange for as long as possible, and thus, contrary to the rules, making it easier for our partner to return the shuttlecock. This unusual way of playing favoured endurance and eliminated competitiveness. In the evening, in the lounge, where one wall was decorated with a Renoir, we sometimes played cards: neither poker nor bridge, but some children’s game such as barbu. Lacan didn’t join in. Apart from these games, and the time spent by the pool, especially on sunny days, we were all very studious. The many different places in the house meant that everyone could find the spot that suited him or her best, in complete independence: it was also a space of freedom. Conviviality and solitude were thus preserved and combined.

From autumn 1974 onwards, alongside Lacan in the studio, I did my work for Vincennes. I was investigating Freud’s view of education, which became the subject of my thesis, and led me to re-read his complete works. From time to time, I would ask Lacan a question. Should I interrupt the course of his thoughts or wait for the right moment? He did not always reply. One day, I questioned him about the death drive and beyond the pleasure principle. Was a desire for death, I asked him, to be situated on the side of the desire to sleep or the desire to wake up? This was a question that interested him sufficiently for him to reply, after a long silence. This was a very circumstantial reply, and I took notes on it, which I kept as precious relics.

When I re-read them today, these notes, which were published in the journal L’Âne, seem to me to reflect faithfully the movement of his thought, his tumultuous character. He pushed on with his ideas until he came to a dead end and then went off along another path that also led to an obstacle; the whole thing circumscribed a zone in which thought is confronted with an impossible that forms a hole, or a siphon. In several of Freud’s texts we find a comparable movement, repeatedly approaching the impasses by which the real is identified. It is something similar which we find in the progress of an analytical treatment.

That day, Lacan spoke of the ‘dream of awakening’. Life, he said, is something quite impossible that can dream of an absolute awakening. I can now gauge how intensely this dream has long haunted me. He had added: ‘This desire for awakening is none other than the dream of drowning in absolute knowledge, of which there is no trace.’

It was at Guitrancourt, during the holidays, that I wrote my thesis. It took me several years. The usual inhibition which accompanies this kind of exercise was exacerbated in me by a great anguish. I suffered a thousand deaths in the little green office of the main house, where I took myself off, alone and as if doing penance. I worked sitting at a table, which increased my torment due to a scoliosis that made this position very uncomfortable – and which I subsequently always avoided. In this small office there was a library that contained several treasures that Lacan had shown me, such as the limited edition of the childhood memories of Marie Bonaparte, as her analysis with Freud had enabled her to reconstitute them. On the wall were two early paintings by Giacometti: a self-portrait and a skull, acting as counterparts. Three French windows looked out onto the garden, but the room was somewhat darkened by the proximity of the trees. Such was the scene of my torture…

Guitrancourt was a convivial place. Lacan invited people to stay for the weekend, or longer, for the holidays – people whose work he was interested in or whom he liked. They included François Cheng, whom he had often asked, from 1969 onwards, to help him read this or that Chinese text. I remember that he had studied Chinese at the École des langues orientales, opposite his apartment block, during the war years. Over the course of these working sessions, Cheng was able to take stock of the concentration of thought that characterized Lacan, as well as his openness to the world, his incessant curiosity. ‘I believe’, he said in an interview, ‘that from a certain period of his life onwards, Dr Lacan was pure thought. At the time I was working with him, I often wondered whether there was a single second in his daily life when he was not thinking of some serious theoretical problem.’ Cheng recalled that he had brought their regular conversations to an end so that he could dedicate himself to his study Chinese Poetic Writing. Lacan understood this and accepted it with good grace, but not without heaving a sigh: ‘Whatever is going to become of me?’ This exclamation, this cri du coeur, was so typical of him!

After their last discussion, in Guitrancourt, in 1978 or 1979, when Cheng was leaving, Lacan said to him: ‘Dear Cheng, from what I know about you, you have experienced, because of your exile, several breaks in your life: a break with your past, a break with your culture. You will be able, won’t you, to transform these breaks into an active Median Void linking your present to your past, the West to the East?’

At the same time, Lacan often invited a mathematical logician, Georg Kreisel, who had been a pupil of Wittgenstein. A Jew of Austrian origin, he had been sent to study in England by his parents before the Anschluss. He had studied mathematics at Trinity College and had, after the war, specialized in the theory of demonstration. He stayed for quite long periods in Guitrancourt, in the summer. He had the beautiful head of an intellectual from Mitteleuropa and the air of an eccentric and somewhat hypochondriacal bachelor. Even on sunny days, he never went into the swimming pool. But he was far from being as eccentric as Lacan, who seemed to intrigue him greatly.

Was it in 1974 or 1975? I remember one weekend when there was a gathering of Jacques-Alain and Judith, François Regnault, Jacques-Alain’s former fellow student and friend, Brigitte Jaques, Jean-Claude Milner, whose friendship with Jacques-Alain also dated back to their days at the Rue d’Ulm, Gérard Miller and Jocelyne Livi, as well as Benoît Jacquot, who had just produced Télévision with Lacan.

Until then, the latter had refused to appear on any televised interview, put off by the insistence and even arrogance of the presenters who had requested him to do so. Benoît Jacquot had come to see him, he was very young and completely unknown, ‘a very little fellow’, in the by no means pejorative judgement of Lacan who had been charmed and won over by him. The weekend was very cheerful. We played the society games that Jacques-Alain liked. His brother, Gerard, gave us lessons in hypnosis. Needless to say, Lacan did not participate.

When you see it now, Télévision creates a strange effect. To tell the truth, this was already so at the time. Anyone who speaks on television addresses the viewers as if they were familiar figures, in the intimacy of the same room. But Lacan seemed to be haranguing the crowds. He was addressing the thousands of people who make up the television audience. So he exaggerated the theatrical delivery of his remarks, all the more so since it was not a question of an improvisation, but of a text written in advance, in response to the questions addressed by Jacques-Alain.

Marc’O, a man of the theatre, who admired Lacan’s style of delivery and often attended his seminars, was staying in a small mountain hotel when Télévision was broadcast. He asked the hoteliers to watch the broadcast on the hotel TV set. Everyone assembled at the appointed hour and carefully followed the film. At the end, the hotelier spoke: ‘It’s very interesting, very interesting. But where’s the psychiatrist?’

Lacan continued to treat Benoît Jacquot with great affection. When the latter, shortly afterwards, brought out his first film, L’Assassin musicien, Lacan wrote a complimentary text in the Nouvel Observateur: ‘His test piece is as distinguished as a master stroke. As a composition of music and images, I consider it, this film he has made, to be a masterpiece.’

He liked being surrounded by young people and was unstintingly supportive. This was the case with the first play directed by Brigitte Jaques, Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, ‘a tragedy of childhood’ in its author’s words, and one which had some similarities with Jacquot’s film. I still remember the evening when we attended the 1974 Autumn Festival for the premiere of this play that seemed designed to attract Lacan’s interest – he had written a short presentation for the programme. As in Jacquot’s first film, it was moving to attend the debut of Brigitte Jaques, a stunningly attractive and very likeable woman, who went on to have a fine career as a director.

Lacan also liked to buy works by young artists who were still unknown, or almost. One example was François Rouan. Lacan had made his acquaintance at the Villa Medici and his canvases, made of woven thongs, reminded him of Borromean tresses and particularly interested him. He also accompanied me to the exhibitions of my friend Jean-Max Toubeau, from whom he purchased several drawings and commissioned a portrait of me.