3 The Walls of Louis-le-Grand 1949–1952
At the end of September 1949 came the feared and longed-for
moment of departure for Paris. This was Jackie’s fi rst real trip: the
fi rst time he had left his parents, the fi rst time he had taken the boat,
the fi rst time he had travelled by train.
The crossing, on the Ville d’Alger, was hellish, with a terrible
seasickness and twenty hours of almost uninterrupted vomiting.
Jackie saw nothing of Marseilles and left almost immediately for
Paris. After a long day in the train, his arrival in the capital, which
so many books and fi lms had led him to dream about, was a cruel
disappointment, an ‘instant degradation’.^1 Everything struck him as
grey and gloomy, in a Paris that was rainy and dirty. ‘From Algiers,
the white city, I arrived in Paris, the black city, since Malraux had
not yet come along to re-surface the façades.’^2 But the most dismal
thing of all was 123, rue Saint-Jacques: the Lycée Louis-le-Grand,
whose doors he entered for the fi rst time on 1 October.
Derrida – boarder no. 424 – was, like all boarders, obliged to
wear a grey smock from sunrise to sunset. Discipline was strict and
the timetable draconian. In the huge dormitory there was not the
least privacy, not even a curtain to separate the beds. Hygiene was
reduced to a strict minimum: students had to wash in cold water,
even in midwinter. As for the meals served in the canteen, they were
unappetizing and the portions were small – the privations of the
postwar period were still in evidence. Jackie felt like a prisoner. His
old childhood horror of school came back to him in those few days
of solitude before the start of term: ‘a week of distress and a child’s
tears in the sinister boarding house of the “Baz’Grand” ’,^3 as the
lycée was nicknamed.
The letter that Fernand Acharrok sent his friend Jackie shortly
after term began must have made a weird impression on him.
‘Dolly’ hoped that his old friend had already seen the sights of Paris;
he thought he was ‘bloody lucky’ to be living there. Had he seen
‘the famous Saint-German-des-Prés district’ and the ‘Royal Saint-
German, where Jean-Paul Sartre [was] supposed to have his HQ’?