The Walls of Louis-le-Grand 1949–1952 43
Whenever he could, Jackie went with his father on his rounds,
especially to Kabylia, an area he was particularly fond of. ‘These
are the most tiring but also the most interesting days in the week.’
Apart from that, he felt ‘more liverish and neurasthenic than ever.
[.. .] I indulge in the least demanding pleasures; I also play bridge,
poker, I go for a drive, I go for a train ride, and I enjoy the company
of people whom I know – in the abstract – to be of no interest.’ The
over-rich food he was given at home quickly put back the pounds he
had lost in Paris. But he really did not like his new paunch and wrote
on the back of the photo he sent to Michel: ‘Look at the huge thing
I’ve turned into. I don’t have anything in common with “myself”
and that also fi lls me with gloom.’
Many of the letters the two boys sent each other over the summer
were devoted to comments on their respective readings. Derrida
could not get into Julien Green’s Journal, recommended to him by
Monory:
You’ll have to forgive me if I sound pretentious when I tell you
that the genre of the ‘Diary’ is a genre that’s always tempted me
too strongly, and from which I personally abstain too much to
be indulgent towards the weaknesses and facile writing that it
brings out in other people.
For instance, I’ve been re-reading Gide’s Journal in the
Pléiade edition and I have to explain Gide through an infi nite
network of determinations, i.e. I have to cancel him, if I am not
to view him as a monument of stupidity, of bland innocence, if
not of intellectual rottenness; and Gide was the writer I really
admired a few years ago.^15Derrida did all the same re-read Strait is the Gate, and was again
thrilled by it. And he discovered Maurice Sachs, whom he thought
was remarkable.
As was traditional, Jackie changed class when he repeated his year
at school, from K2 to K1. But most of his friends stayed with him;
it was the teachers who were new. In philosophy, this made a con-
siderable diff erence: the Christian Democrat Étienne Borne was
succeeded by Maurice Savin, a disciple of Alain. He had come from
the Lycée Fénelon: allegedly, he had been transferred because he
was a little too fond of the girls, though some of them continued to
fi nd an excuse, any excuse, to meet him as he was leaving Louis-le-
Grand. Savin was a literary man, mad about theatre: he regularly
published in Les Temps modernes, Le Mercure de France, and La
Table ronde. In his classes, he would sometimes mention Proust and
Ravel, Bachelard and Freud, while advising his students not to refer
to them in their exams.