A Year in America 1956–1957 83
detail go unanswered, in the way that he would later make his own
in philosophical polemics. Georges Safar was stunned:
Having written to you in familiar everyday words, you now
reply, after dissecting and carefully analysing them (I suppose
you’re just doing your job) a long, bitter letter, very ‘uptight’
and sometimes quite impertinent in tone. [.. .]
As for what I had been putting off telling you, it was simply
this: what will you do later, the day children come along? I
wanted, not to warn you of the possibility, knowing that you’d
already thought about it, but to recommend you to weigh it up
properly, as [.. .] the problems that you’ll have to cope with
in the children’s upbringing on this point will in my view be
insoluble, unless you have already faced up to this future.
Let me add fi nally, my dear Jackie, that I don’t want to see
you dissecting, as you did for my previous letter, each of the
terms used in it, or even to receive a subtle analysis of them, as
in your reply – even if it is not tinged with insolence.However, the uncle realized that his letter, ‘coming after many
others’, would have found his nephew ‘in the position of the gladia-
tor assailed on all sides and, turning his sword this way and that to
ward off blows, continues to slice through the air... even when he
no longer has any enemies around him’.^7
Only Jackie’s female cousins seemed to be pleased about his
engagement. Josette advised him ‘not to hesitate for a moment, even
if there’s a bit of friction in the family’. Micheline also said that she
was very happy to learn of ‘the existence of a future cousin, a pretty
Marguerite from Paris, blonde with lovely blue eyes’. She hoped
that the quarrel with René would not last, but whatever happened,
Jackie must do as he thought best.^8
Meanwhile, on 15 September, Jackie and Marguerite had embarked
in Le Havre on the aptly named Liberté. After a wonderful trans-
atlantic journey, they were ‘fascinated and thrilled by New York’.
They were both seduced and overwhelmed by ‘by the mystery of
this city without mystery, without history, all on the outside’.^9
Unfortunately, they did not have enough money to see the sights
or visit other cities. So they left straightaway for Cambridge, in the
suburbs of Boston.
‘I was working as an au pair,’ remembers Marguerite.
Mr Rodwin was a professor at MIT, his wife was French and
wanted their three daughters to be brought up in French. I had
a room in their home, in Arlington Street, near Massachusetts
Avenue. It was a pleasant area, right next to the university,