42 Jackie 1930–1962
make more eff ort’ was the comment for German.^13 As for Latin,
he was poor at unseen translation and very weak in prose, where he
scored just 2.5. If he was to have any chance of passing the exam, he
would absolutely need to take ‘remedial Latin’ – in other words, take
additional lessons from some friends who were better at this subject.
Despite these uneven results, Jackie was, at least during that year,
convinced that he would sooner or later pass the exam, and pretty
confi dent in his own lucky star. One day when he was out strolling
with Bellemin-Noël, they passed in front of the buildings of the
École Normale Supérieure in the rue d’Ulm, and he assured his
friend that they would both get in – a prediction which turned out to
be quite correct. On another occasion, on the place du Panthéon, he
halted for a moment in front of the façade of the Hôtel des Grands
Hommes, celebrated by André Breton in Nadja, and uttered the
words: ‘ I really should spend a night there sometime.’
As he waited for these happy events to come to pass, he was pre-
paring for the exams by swallowing great quantities of Maxiton, an
amphetamine that could then be purchased over the counter (Sartre
himself was a great consumer), though it disturbed his already fragile
sleep. Jackie turned up for the exam in a feverish state: it was held in
the halls of the rue de l’Abbé-de-l’Épee and he fell half-asleep over
several of his papers. His marks in the written exam were too low for
him to go on to take the orals. In any case, his hopes had not been
high: it was considered normal to fail the exam when you took it at
the end of your fi rst khâgne. Only a few passed fi rst time. For most
people, this fi rst attempt was a kind of dress rehearsal – one more
reason for going to listen to the oral exams being taken by those of
his fellow pupils who had reached this stage. In philosophy, the oral
examiners were Vladimir Jankélévitch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
this would be the one time in his life that Derrida would set eyes on
the latter, the author of Phenomenology of Perception.
Throughout the summer, which he spent in El Biar, Derrida
exchanged a constant stream of letters with Michel Monory. Their
year as boarders had weighed heavily on both of them, but the
return to the family hearth was a far from joyous occasion. Jackie
found it very hard to rediscover his previous close bonds with his
teenage friends and now felt himself to be a ‘corrupted Algerian’:
For me too, the holidays are a real drag, terribly monotonous.
I really can’t wait to get back, if not to work and active life, at
least to winter in Paris, away from the family, near you and
the others. Here, the weather leaves me exhausted and the
only relationships I have with people are either distant and
awkward, or natural and animalistic. In fact, this doesn’t even
bother me very often, and this shows how dull things are.^14