76 Jackie 1930–1962
the young woman a glimpse of the Algerian world in which he had
grown up.
Marguerite was born in 1932, in a very diff erent environment,
and her childhood was particularly eventful. Her father, Gustave
Aucouturier, was a former student of Normale Sup: he studied
Russian before taking the agrégation in history. He met his wife
in Prague, where he was working for the Havas Agency, and
Marguerite and her two brothers were born there. The Aucouturier
family then lived in Belgrade until the German troops invaded
in 1941. Not knowing what had become of their father, the three
children and their mother fl ed to Cairo, living in diffi cult condi-
tions until the end of the war. Then the family settled in Moscow,
where Gustave Aucouturier became the Agence France-Presse cor-
respondent: it was here that Marguerite and Michel started to learn
Russian. Finally, in 1948, the Aucouturiers returned to Paris so
that the children could take the baccalaureate and go on to higher
education. As one can see, the young woman was no more classi-
cally French than was Jackie: even though she came from a Catholic
family, Marguerite would sometimes say that after this childhood
spent in diaspora, and having a Czech mother, she sometimes felt
more Jewish than Derrida.
In a letter written in the summer of 1956 to Michel Monory,
Jackie referred in veiled terms and under the seal of secrecy to the
‘terrible period’ he had just gone through. The reason was that
Marguerite was already involved with another normalien, Laurent
Versini, a serious young man who was well liked by her parents
and had accepted an invitation to the family property in Charente.
Initially, this ambiguous situation did not seem to bother Jackie
unduly: like many young men of his generation, he often said he did
not like marriage or being faithful – until, eaten up with jealousy, he
asked Marguerite to choose between him and Versini. Marguerite
was probably waiting for just this opportunity to take her decision
and go and see her fi ancé’s mother. When Marguerite explained the
situation, Mme Versini asked her in particular to tell her son nothing
until the agrégation exams were over, so as not to distress him.^39
For Jackie too, the main thing now was to concentrate on working
towards his exam, if he was to stand any chance of fi nally getting
through it. During the weeks preceding the written exams, it was
traditional for those preparing to take the agrégation in philo-
sophy to go and get ‘Althussered’ – in other words, let their caïman
Althusser give them some words of encouragement. Unfortunately
for Derrida, Althusser had to leave the École following one of
the attacks of depression to which he was already prone. So it
was Jackie who endeavoured to reassure him, without wishing to
‘disturb his peace of mind’: