18 Jackie 1930–1962
November 1941, the name of Jacques’s brother René appeared on
the list of excluded pupils: he would lose out on two years of study,
and thought he might stop going to school for good, as did several
of his friends. His sister Janine, aged just seven, was also expelled
from her school.
As for Jackie, he entered the fi rst form of the lycée at Ben
Aknoun, a former monastery very close to El Biar. Here he met
Fernand Acharrok and Jean Taousson, who would be the main
friends of his teenage years. But if this fi rst year at high school was
important, this was above all because it coincided for Jackie with
a real discovery: that of literature. He had grown up in a house
where there were few books, and had already exhausted the modest
resources of the family library. That year, his French teacher was a
certain M. Lefèvre.* He was a young, red-headed man who had just
arrived from France. He talked to his pupils with an enthusiasm
that sometimes made them smile. But one day, he started singing
the praises of being in love, and mentioned The Fruits of the Earth
by André Gide. Jackie immediately got hold of a copy of this work
and was soon ecstatically immersed in it. He would read and re-read
it for years on end.
I would have learned this book by heart if I could have. No
doubt, like every adolescent, I admired its fervour, the lyricism
of its declarations of war on religion and families [.. .]. For
me it was a manifesto or a Bible [.. .] sensualist, immoralist,
and especially very Algerian. [.. .] I remember the hymn to the
Sahel, to Blida, and to the fruits of the Jardin d’Essai.^25A few months later, it was another – and altogether less desirable
- face of France that he would be forced to confront.
- According to Fernand Acharrok, this teacher’s name was actually M. Verdier.