Your determination to go on was fuelled in part by your sense of artistic mission, and you were making it your mission to express that determination. Music, as you had recognized in your teens, was your vocation. Music—or, more precisely, your obligation to music—would provide one certainty amid the doubt. Not self expression but music would be your cause: making music as much as it could be, in full awareness of the difficulties, historical and social.

On this lonely path you had your guides. Nietzsche, surely, was on your mind as you wrote those letters to Boulez and Lacharité. Nietzsche's would have been the court in which to debate the loss of God. Nietzsche, to anyone young and thoughtful in these immediate postwar years, was unavoidable. Humanity had proved its lack of belief in itself. God's death and undone morality had come off the page.

In 1955 you were to write words of Nietzsche's into your music, in Séquence, but much of the music had come first, and under different circumstances, in the Trois mélodies of 1950. Though you were not pleased when Hodeir revealed the connection, in his 1961 book, this was why you always spoke of Séquence as the earlier piece: it belonged in its origins to an earlier phase of your life—to rue Jacquard (where the first two songs were written and the third begun, to be completed during the summer at Montmorency), to Messiaen's classes and your frequent meetings with Fano, Goeyvaerts and Lacharité, to a time when you were still travelling towards the desperate nihilism you expressed in your letters of 1 December 1952.