You returned from the 1947 summer break to the rue Jacquard, and to your parents, who gamely supported you in the life of an artist. One wonders what thanks they got. A kind of silence seems more likely: the couple below, with their own rancours; the boy above, working at his music. Composition studies had started—the date is uncertain—with Jean Langlais, an organist-composer in the French tradition who had been blind since early childhood. As he remembered it, you were eighteen at the time, but it seems more likely you were nineteen, and that the lessons started in 1947, when your growing creative efforts swamped your school work.

Langlais—around forty at the time of your lessons, and recently installed as organist of Sainte-Clotilde, César Franck's old position—continued the kind of French academic training on which you had already embarked by buying and studying textbooks. (Remember the testimony of your German composition.) Your basic skills improved, and, now with no schoolwork to do, you became more productive. You also expanded your musical world.

You began aiming, here and there, at intense expressive effects, as evidenced by markings found in an untitled piano piece of July 1947: ‘increasingly overwhelmed and sad … breathless and distraught [de plus en plus accablé et douloureux … haletant et déchiré]’. As you started to composemore energetically and achieve your first pieces on an ambitious scale (the Fantaisie, Retour)—all within the half year after your nineteenth birthday—so your music started to reflect the disabling despair you were coming to experience at the same time.