The École Normale Supérieure 1952–1956 75
the École, Maurice de Gandillac invited him on several occasions
to the receptions that he and his wife held every Sunday. It was in
this salon that Jackie got to know several major fi gures from the
intellectual and philosophical world, such as Jean Wahl and Lucien
Goldmann, as well as promising young men like Kostas Axelos,
Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Tournier. This was the fi rst time he had
gained admittance to a Parisian milieu that had hitherto seemed
inaccessible. The previous summer, there had been a décade* at the
chateau of Cerisy-la-Salle devoted to Heidegger, who also attended.
This crucial encounter was still being talked about. At a reception
at the home of Mme Heurgon, the proprietor of Cerisy, a record-
ing of some of the high points of the décade was played. This was a
moment that Derrida would never forget:
I was a student at the École Normale and I heard Heidegger’s
voice for the fi rst time in a salon of the 16th arrondisse-
ment. I can remember one sequence in particular: we were
all in the salon, we were all listening to that voice. [.. .] I
especially remember the bit just after Heidegger’s talk: the
questions raised by [Gabriel] Marcel and [Lucien] Goldmann.
One of them put the following objection, in so many words, to
Heidegger: ‘But don’t you think that this method of reading or
this way of reading or questioning is dangerous?’ A methodo-
logical, epistemological question. And I can still hear – after
the ensuing silence – Heidegger’s reply: ‘Ja! It is dangerous.’^38But for Jackie, the main event of the year was the somewhat
chaotic development of his relationship with Marguerite, the sister
of his fellow student Michel Aucouturier. After a long stay in a
sanatorium, the young woman eventually returned to Paris in 1954:
results of tests on her health were still quite poor, and a serious oper-
ation was envisaged, but she refused. ‘Once I felt that I was really in
danger, I decided to get better,’ she remembers. Since returning to
Paris, Marguerite had been subjected to a more or less homeopathic
treatment, based on a protein-rich diet: every day, she had to eat a
whole camembert, two hundred grams of meat, and four eggs, and
drink a signifi cant quantity of red wine. This idiosyncratic treat-
ment produced a noticeable improvement in her state, enabling her
to resume her studies in Russian. Jackie was invited several times to
have lunch or play bridge at the home of the Aucouturier family,
and grew ever closer to Marguerite. At one of their fi rst meetings,
he gave her Camus’s Nuptials. He revered this oeuvre de jeunesse,
with its prophetic title. But the book mainly enabled him to give
- The conferences at Cerisy traditionally last for ten days – a décade. – Tr.