40 Jackie 1930–1962
as possible and almost immediately forgotten – quite the opposite of
what your usual cinephile would watch.
When they could obtain permission, Bellemin-Noël and Derrida
would go out together on a Saturday evening, though they had to
make sure they were back by 11 p.m. They walked along the quais,
trying to dig up a few cheap books: it was here that they found, in
particular, their fi rst volumes of Freud. As for cafés, there were
two that they liked to drop into: the Mahieu and the Capoulade, at
the corner of the boulevard Saint-Michel and the rue Souffl ot, just
opposite the Luxembourg Gardens. ‘We’d talk about literature and
philosophy, but also about sport and girls,’ Bellemin-Noël recalls.
What brought us together was mainly the fact we’d both lost
our innocence sexually, which was rare in student milieus in
those days, and even rarer in the classes préparatoires. In a
school where most young men were virgins when they arrived,
neither he nor I was: I had grown up in a spa town, which pro-
vided opportunities, and he had the brothels of Algiers. Jackie
felt superior because of this experience. On the Boul’Mich,
you’d see a lot of young women: secretaries, sales girls, some
of them a bit more sociable than the girl students. Jackie could
already turn on the charm... All this coexisted in him with
bursts of mysticism and religiosity, a thirst for the absolute that
was evident in the personal writings that he sometimes gave me
to read. I remember one poem that began like something by
Valéry and ended almost in the hymn-like forms of Claudel.
Only the fi rst two or three stanzas were regular, then the con-
straints became looser and looser. It was already impossible for
him to comply with any norm whatsoever.At this time, Derrida was already a close enough friend of
Bellemin-Noël for the latter to invite him to stay with his family for
the Easter holidays: so Aix-les-Bains was the fi rst French town he
discovered after Paris. Another experience brought the two young
men together during this fi rst year of khâgne. The theatre group at
Louis-le-Grand, which had quite a good reputation, decided to put
on Schiller’s Don Carlos. Since the rehearsals were held in the ‘thurne
de musique’,* a pleasant music room that was heated better than the
rest of the building, Bellemin-Noël and Derrida off ered their services
as halberdiers. To their minds, the preparations for the performance
were mainly a good excuse for prolonging their evenings.
It was during the rehearsals that Derrida fi rst noticed Gérard
Granel, whose path he would often cross subsequently. Granel, a
- Thurne: student slang for a room. – Tr.