The Walls of Louis-le-Grand 1949–1952 39
lunch on Sundays, so as to get a good meal, even if we had to
put up with some rather dull conversation. On the way back,
we always had lots of funny stories to tell each other.^8At the home of aunt and uncle ‘Ziem’, as he nicknamed them, Jackie
sometimes met his brother René, who had been in Paris since 1947:
he was doing a basic training course in medicine so as to fi nish his
studies to become a chemist. The fi rst time he saw Jackie coming
out of Louis-le-Grand, with his long grey smock, René could not
conceal his surprise: the rebellious adolescent and the eager reader
of literary reviews now had the face and bearing of a prisoner.
Another close friend that year was Jean Bellemin-Noël, who had
come from Aix-les-Bains. As he relates,
I probably reassured Jackie, since unlike him I had an easy-
going temperament. I slept well and I could digest pretty
much anything. We’d often have ourselves woken up at 5 in
the morning by the night guard, so we could get a good two
hours’ work in before classes started. We’d place our towels
on the bedrail and the guard would give us a tap on the feet.
Sometimes, I’d put Jackie’s towel in position myself, to make
him work. He’d never done any Greek, but he knew he’d need
it later on; I gave him beginner’s lessons two or three times a
week. In return, he acted as my dictionary of philosophy. The
secondary school I’d attended had been a religious school,
so I’d never heard of Hegel or Schopenhauer, nor, a fortiori,
of Nietzsche or Husserl. Most of the time, Jackie was able to
answer my questions very precisely. But he sometimes stalled
on a subject, just dried up completely. He had a very unsociable
side to him and could suddenly withdraw into himself.^9Their friendship did not depend on work alone. Between the end
of classes and the start of private study, they sometimes organized
poker games. They both played an excellent game. ‘We found a
method for winning a bit of money from a few better-off boys who
lived at home, such as André Tubeuf, Dominique Fernandez, and
Michel Deguy. We’d agreed to bid higher than each other. This gave
us a bit of pocket money for when we went out.’
But they went out quite rarely. On Thursdays, the boarders had
three hours’ free time. They generally used this to see a fi lm at the
Champo cinema, at the corner of the rue des Écoles and the rue
Champollion; the seats were very cheap. As Derrida would relate,
much later: ‘Cinema followed me throughout my student life, which
was diffi cult, depressing. In this sense, it often acted on me as a drug,
a pick-me-up, a world to escape to.’^10 As when he lived in Algiers,
the fi lms he saw were almost always American fi lms, as entertaining