The Walls of Louis-le-Grand 1949–1952 55
Castex smiled sadly, raising his eyes to the ceiling; Schérer
pointed at his paper, saying:
‘There was nothing to stop you saying so right at the start.’In the fi nal analysis, whether one came fi rst or lower down was
of no importance. The main thing was to have passed. Derrida
claimed that he was mainly glad of the material security which the
École could now off er him – he would be paid the salary of a teacher
starting his fi rst job – and the relief this would mean for his family.
Sending him to Paris had been a considerable material sacrifi ce for
his parents, and this had caused him a great deal of worry over the
last three years.
With elegance and kindness, Derrida wrote a long letter to thank
Roger Pons for all that he had gained from his teaching, despite a
certain lack of polish – or indeed because of it:
I have the immense and inexcusable pretention to believe that,
apart from yourself and Monsieur Borne, no teacher in khâgne
taught me anything I did not know already or that I would
not have been able to learn for myself. What I mean is that
the others merely taught me, when they taught me anything,
a métier, a technique, a corpus of objective and useful know-
ledge. I feel that I have learned, in your class, from you, that
which of course is part of a métier, but also that which is, within
the métier, more than the métier: intellectual honesty and
modesty, the taste for rigour and a sense of rigour, the desire to
reach – simply, and without allowing oneself to be led astray by
pseudo-profundity or specious qualities – assured judgements
in which the greatest empathy is combined with the greatest
lucidity. From the fi rst work I submitted to you, I learned some
very hard lessons in style and intellectual rigour. The chaotic
and overblown pseudo-lyricism in which I then blindly placed
my trust and which I still have a tendency to indulge in suf-
fered a great deal from these lessons – fortunately. However
scathing some of your remarks may have been, why did I never
feel humiliated, off ended by them? That was the eff ect of your
presence.^35Winning a place at Normale Sup did not protect one from every-
thing. It was just after the oral exams that a revealing incident
happened. Another pupil at Louis-le-Grand, and a great lover of
poetry, Claude Bonnefoy, invited Jackie to the family château in
Plessis, near Tours. Derrida probably did not know how right-wing
was the milieu in which he found himself. René Bonnefoy, Claude’s
father, had been general secretary in the Ministry of Information, in
Pierre Laval’s government; he was sentenced to death after the war,