Portrait of the Philosopher at Sixty 427
Later on, with me and in front of me, he said he was a vegetar-
ian. But one day, someone told me he had eaten a steak tartare,
as carnivorous a kind of food as you can get. For me, it was as
if he had betrayed me. When I spoke to him about it, he ini-
tially said I was behaving like a cop. Then he said, neatly: ‘I’m
a vegetarian who sometimes eats meat.’^32After dinners in Ris-Orangis, Derrida would gladly off er to drive
home any guests without transport. He enjoyed driving, and always
went into Paris by car. He’d learned when still very young, on the
job, with his father’s car. But since he had never studied the highway
code, he had his own ideas about it, which could sometimes lead to
spectacular results. He considered, for example, that most ‘no entry’
signs did not actually apply to him, and that big roads should auto-
matically have priority over smaller ones. At the wheel, he rapidly
lost his cool. In traffi c jams, he could almost get hysterical. And, to
crown it all, whenever he stopped for even a short time he would
start taking notes. In a letter to Éric Clémens, he indicated in a PS:
‘Excuse the handwriting, I’m writing in the car (what a life!), but I’ve
stopped, not even at a red light. I’ve just thought of the title for a
book: Written at a Red Light.. .’^33 But while he was not a reassuring
fi gure at the wheel, he never had an accident.
Marguerite says that they always had Citroëns, less out of any
particular liking than because there was a garage not far from the
house. ‘At one time, he took over his father’s DS, but he wrecked it
when he forgot to put any oil in. One day, fi lling up the tank, he used
diesel instead of petrol.’ Subsequently, he went for modest vehicles,
even if he knew how to appreciate a nice car. René Major says: ‘I’d
just bought a Lotus “Esprit”. He started to examine it with great
interest, before going into ecstasies over its name: “How extraordi-
nary. I’m just writing a book called Of Spirit [De l’esprit]... Could
I give it a spin?” ’^34
While his daily life was for the most part imbued with sobriety,
he made an exception for his clothes. While a pupil at Louis-
le-Grand, Jackie had been forced to endure the grim grey coat;
as a young professor, he had dressed rather drably. But he had
changed a great deal since his fi rst trip to Berlin, when Sam Weber
had failed to recognize him, as Derrida bore so little resemblance
to the way he imagined him. Since the start of the 1970s, he had
mainly gone for bright colours, shimmering materials, and marked
contrasts. He took care over the way he dressed, even if his rather
showy tastes did not meet with uniform approval. As René Major
remembers: ‘We used to comment on each other’s clothes. Chantal
and I knew that he could be really quite clothes-conscious. We
often gave him ties, and shirts. He valued brand names, especially
Kenzo.’ And Élisabeth Roudinesco emphasises: ‘Perhaps there