Under the Sun of Algiers 1942–1949 27
For a young Algérois like me, cinema still represented an
extraordinary form of travel. You could travel a lot with
the cinema. Not to mention the American fi lms, absolutely
exotic and at the same time close to us, there were the French
fi lms that spoke in a very individual voice, moved along with
re cognizable bodies, showed landscapes and interiors that
really impressed a young teenager like me who’d never crossed
the Mediterranean. Books didn’t give me the same thing: this
direct, immediate transport into a France that was unknown
to me. Going to the cinema was going on a journey where
everything was laid on from the start [un voyage organisé]).^23Reading was still Jackie’s favourite activity. His love of literature
had continued to grow ever since he had started the lycée, with
M. Lefèvre’s fervent praise of Gide. This was a passion that he
nourished by himself, ever more freely and independently of his
academic obligations. At home, his parents had divided the veranda
in two so that Jackie could have a room of his own. He would shut
himself away there to read for hours at a time. Above his bed he set
up a little set of bookshelves with the books he worshipped. The
small amount of pocket money that he received went straightaway
on books.
I grew up in a world where there were few books, a few bad
novels, that I read, Paul Bourget.. ., and that was it. I bought
my fi rst books in Algiers with my weekly pocket-money. So I
totally fetishized them.^24After Gide’s The Fruits of the Earth, he enthusiastically read The
Immoralist, Strait is the Gate, Paludes, and the Journal. ‘For me,
he wasn’t a novelist, but a moralist who told us how to live,’ he
explained later.^25 Jackie probably knew that Gide was living in
Algiers at the very same time as he was discovering his works with
such enthusiasm. The writer arrived in the city on 27 May 1943 and
a month later dined in El Biar, in the villa occupied by General de
Gaulle. Over the following months, now settled in the home of his
friend Jacques Heurgon in rue Michelet, Gide would sometimes
play a game of chess with Saint-Exupéry. Jackie could quite easily
have crossed the path of the very man he was reading with such
passion.
But he was soon fascinated by other authors. Rousseau, whom he
had discovered at school, very soon became one of his favourites;
he read and re-read The Confessions and The Reveries of a Solitary
Walker. At the age of thirteen or fourteen, as if following advice
from Gide, he also immersed himself in Thus Spake Zarathustra,
then other works of Nietzsche’s, and this contributed to his moving