Your creative achievements of 1950–55—the Sonata, Séquence and the electronic Etude—inevitably came with personal and professional change.

Some things did not alter. You went on living with your parents in the Montmartre apartment, and you stayed close to Fano and his wife Claudette (they were married in 1952). In other respects, you were moving from the life of a student to that of an artist. You found new friends at the Club d'Essai—Hodeir, Philippot—and you found something else you needed: a job. Hodeir introduced you to Raymond Lyon, which was how you became a regular contributor to the weekly Le guide du concert, providing notes on works due to be performed in Paris and also a treatise in many instalments on the rudiments of music. From the magazine you earned, as you mentioned to Boulez in your letter of 1 December 1952, 6,000 francs a month, ‘which allows me, you can well imagine, to lead the high life’.

Through Lyon, too, you gained occasional work as a lecturer for Jeunesses Musicales, the music-education movement, which took you to different parts of the country, even to Corsica in February 1955. ‘I am returning to Paris—’, you added in a letter to Boulez at the time, adopting a lighter tone after objecting to the Sonata's absence from his 1955–6 concert schedule, ‘but very briefly—to depart again for the snow [in the Alps, presumably].