336 Derrida 1963–1983
her in Ris-Orangis for a few days; Jean, then fourteen years old, was
with her too.
Panic-stricken, Marguerite fi rst phoned Catherine Audard, who
gave her the number of her contact, Denis Delbourg, an old student
of Derrida’s, in charge, inter alia, of East–West relations in the offi ce
of Claude Cheysson, Minister of Foreign Aff airs. ‘I phoned him
straightaway,’ Marguerite remembers.
He told me he’d sort it out as soon as he could, the following
morning, but this wasn’t enough to calm me down. I wanted
him to act straightaway, and he eventually promised. Around
6 a.m., I decided to phone Régis Debray, who was then a close
adviser of the President. A few hours later, he assured me that
François Mitterrand was taking the aff air very seriously, saying
that he was prepared to recall the French Ambassador and
threaten the Czechs with economic sanctions.News of the arrest was very quickly made public. Jacques Thibau,
general director of Cultural Aff airs at the Quai d’Orsay, phoned
Catherine Clément, who edited the culture pages of Le Matin, and
asked her to give as much publicity as possible to Derrida’s arrest:
with the agreement of Claude Perdriel, she decided to put the news
on the front page of next day’s issue. As soon as the fi rst newsfl ashes
came out, the telephone never stopped ringing in the house in
Ris-Orangis and Marguerite went into action:
I stayed in my dressing gown all day, as I didn’t have time to
get dressed or even really grasp what was happening. Roland
Dumas, whom we had met several times at Paule Thévenin’s,
called me to off er his help. He was prepared to set off for
Prague with me straightaway, but he was the only one who
asked me whether it was possible that Jacques had really been
smuggling drugs.^8Meanwhile, the Ambassador of Czechoslovakia in Paris, Jan
Pudlak, was summoned to the Quai d’Orsay. At 4 p.m., he was
received by Harris Puisais, the offi cial in charge of countries in the
East and an intermediary well known to the Russians, as well as
Denis Delbourg, who conducted the interview because of his close-
ness to Derrida and intellectual circles. The Ambassador could not
understand why this aff air was causing such a fuss, right up to the
highest levels of state. Denis Delbourg was a young diplomat at the
time but he has a very precise memory of this conversation:
After I had told him of our surprise and our condemnation
of this arbitrary arrest on the pretext of possessing drugs,