Portrait of the Philosopher at Sixty 423
the diffi culties and rejections that he had also suff ered, held little
importance for her. She would sometimes describe her husband as
an ‘extraterrestrial’, which he rather liked.
To help him with his work, Marguerite had since the beginning of
the sixties taken over all the daily tasks and looked after the material
side of life: the home, the paperwork, the schooling of the children,
the tax returns, and countless other things. ‘Jacques didn’t even
know where the bank was,’ she said. ‘The employees in the local
branch had never set eyes on him. When I took in some documents
that I’d got him to sign, some of them asked me laughingly: “So he
really does exist, your Monsieur Derrida?” ’^18
Their friend Alexander García Düttman relates: ‘Jacques always
trusted Marguerite completely. She was beyond criticism. In one
sense, you could almost say that he didn’t deserve her.’ If Derrida
enjoyed inviting people round for dinner – friends, colleagues, trans-
lators, students –, it was Marguerite who looked after everything,
managing, in spite of her own activities, to ensure that the meals
were not only ready on time, but delicious as well. She received
guests in a way as simple as it was warm, as if all of this was self-evi-
dent. And if she was sometimes ironical about her husband, it was
in a benevolent, collusive way, without the least nastiness. Derrida
was aware of Marguerite’s delicacy, her extraordinary way of doing
things just right, and nothing that came from her could hurt his
feelings.^19
Ultimately, the only thing that sometimes annoyed Marguerite
was Jacques’s jealous temperament. ‘He wasn’t happy when he
couldn’t reach me straightaway. At every instant, he wanted to
know where I was, what I was doing, and with whom. But if I made
the mistake of asking him a question of the kind, he said: “Ah,
always this reciprocity!” ’^20
In spite of his ‘unconditional devotion’ to Paris, of which he some-
times said he loved each little alley, knowing that it would survive
him,^21 Derrida never wanted to live there. He had grown up on the
heights of El Biar, and so a big city always had something suff ocat-
ing about it for him. The Derrida couple remained loyal to their
house in Ris-Orangis, which they acquired in 1968, improving and
extending it over the years. Here, in this place to which Derrida
was glad to return after every trip away, there were bookcases and
desks everywhere. In every room, he left traces. Here, letters that
had accumulated since his arrival in mainland France, press arti-
cles and the countless editions of his own books in the most varied
languages. There, works of philosophy, many of them in tatters as
he had read them and annotated them so often. In another room,
books he had been sent, signed copies. In the stairwell, collections
of reviews. And, separately, ‘the literature he loved’. After the