You returned from the London première of the Concerto to your apartment in the rue de l'Abbé Patureau—the apartment where all six of your major works had been written—for one last night. During that night of 23 November 1968, as you wrote to Hopkins when you resumed your correspondence, the place ‘exploded because of a gas escape.’

‘There followed a fire’, you went on. ‘Happily I was awakened by the burning and had time to put on a shirt and trousers before extirpating myself from the flames. I'll spare you the details. In the evening I was able to rescue my files and my manuscripts. After that I lived here and there for months: rooms, hotels, friends (????????). … Not until May did I move into my splendid new apartment, where I mope.’

This new apartment, approached by its grand flight of stairs, was the one you had mentioned to Hodeir in August: at 113 rue des Moines, it was down to the west of Montmartre and close to your cousin Roland. While you were waiting to get into it, between November 1968 and May 1969, your principal abode was a flat found for you by the Bernsteins—‘unfortunately’, as you wrote on 18 December to Galley, ‘opposite the old abattoirs of Vaugirard, now become a transit place for animals to be slaughtered’. You thought you had escaped the butcher's shop two decades ago.