d. the la mouna laundry [words circled by the author—Ed.]
e. the beach pieces of bleached wood, corks, sea-worn fragments of glass … reeds from cork trees.
f. the hunt? could be cut.
g. the book should be heavy with things and flesh.
h. careful, change the names.
i. Tolstoy or Gorki (I) The Father From that background came Dostoevsky (II) The Son which returning to its origins gives the writer of the period (III) The Mother
j. M. Germain—the lycée—religion—death of the grandmother—End with Ernest’s hand?
k. microtragedies
l. The household of Ernest, Catherine after the death of the grandmother.
- tears of helpless love
m. bring on much earlier—fight not Lucien.
n. for old age would come—at the time Jacques thought his mother was old and she was barely the age he was now, but youth is above all a collection of possibilities, and for him to whom life had been generous … [passage crossed out—Ed.]
o. put cooperage before rages and maybe even at beginning profile Ernest.
† look up the name of the tool
p. finish the barrel
- An illegible name.
q. bring Michel back during the Orléansville earthquake.
r. Book six in the second part.
s. And Francis was dead too (see latest notes)
t. Denise leaves home at eighteen to be a prostitute—Comes back rich at twenty-one, sells her jewels, does over her father’s whole stable—killed by an epidemic
u. the daughters? - Illegible name.
v. but are they after all aliens? (no, he was the a.)
w. humble and proud sovereign of the beauty of the night.
6A : School1
aThis man had never known his father, but he often spoke to Jacques of him in a rather mythological way, and in any case at a critical time he knew how to take the father’s role. That is why Jacques had never forgotten him, as if, having never really felt the lack of a father he had never known, he had nonetheless subconsciously recognized, first as a child, then during the rest of his life, the one paternal act—both well thought out and crucial—that had affected his life as a child. For M. Bernard, his teacher for the year of the certificat d’études,2 had at a given moment used all his weight as a man to change the destiny of this child in his charge, and he had in fact changed it.
Right now M. Bernard was facing Jacques in his small apartment in the winding streets of the Rovigo, almost at the foot of the Casbah, a district that overlooked the city and the sea, occupied by small shopkeepers of all races and all religions, where the homes smelled at once of spices and of poverty. He was there, grown old, his hair more sparse, old-age splotches under the now glassy tissue of his cheeks and hands, moving more slowly than in the old days, and visibly glad when he could sit back down in his rattan armchair, by the window that faced the street of shops, where a canary was chirping; age had also softened him and he let his feelings show, which he had not done before, but he was still erect, his voice strong and firm, as it had been back when, standing before his class, he would say: “In line two by two.
By two! I didn’t say by five!” And the scrambling would stop; the pupils, who both feared and adored M. Bernard, would line up along the wall outside the classroom, in the second-floor corridor, until, when the rows were at last still and straight, and the children quiet, a “Come in now, you bunch of tramousses” would liberate them and give them the signal to move but at a more subdued pace, which M. Bernard, robust, elegantly dressed, his strong face with its regular features crowned by hair that was thinning but still smooth, smelling of cologne, would watch over with good-natured strictness.
The school was located in a relatively new part of that old neighborhood, among two- and three-story houses built not long after the war of 1870 and more recent warehouses that eventually connected the main street of the neighborhood, where Jacques’s home was, to the inner harbor and the coaling docks.
So Jacques went on foot twice a day to that building he had begun attending at the age of four, when he went to nursery school, about which he remembered nothing except a dark stone lavatory that took up one whole end of the covered playground where he landed one day headfirst, got up all bloody with a cut eyebrow, amidst the panic of teachers, and it was then he became acquainted with medical staples and, in fact, his had hardly been removed when they had to put one on his other eyebrow, his brother having conceived the idea of dressing him up at home in an old bowler that blinded him and an old coat that hobbled his feet, with the result that he wound up with his head hitting a loose tile and was covered with blood once again.
But now he was going to nursery school with Pierre, who was a year or almost so older, who lived in a nearby street with his mother, also a war widow and now working in the post office, and two of his uncles who worked on the railroad.
Their families were vaguely friends, or—the way people are in these neighborhoods—they valued one another but hardly ever exchanged visits, and they were firmly resolved to help each other out but almost never had the occasion to do so. Only the children had really become friends, from that first day when Jacques was still wearing a dress and was entrusted to Pierre, who was aware that he was wearing pants and had responsibilities as the older boy, the two children went together to nursery school.
They then went through every grade together up to the year of the certificat d’études, which Jacques entered at the age of nine. For five years they made the same journey four times a day, one blond, the other brown-haired, one placid, the other hot-blooded, destined from the beginning to be friends, good students both and also tireless at play. Jacques shone more in some subjects, but his conduct, his flightiness, and his desire to show off were forever leading him into all sorts of foolish behavior, and this gave the advantage back to the more sober and discreet Pierre. So they alternated at the head of the class, but, in contrast to their families, they did not think to take pride in this. Their pleasures were different.
Each morning, Jacques would wait for Pierre outside his house. They would leave before the passage of the scavengers—or more precisely a cart drawn by a broken-kneed horse driven by an old Arab. The sidewalk was still moist from the humidity of the night, the air coming from the sea tasted of salt. Pierre’s street, which led to the market, was dotted with garbage cans that famished Arabs or Moors, or sometimes an old Spanish tramp, had pried open at dawn to see if there was still something to be retrieved from what poor and thrifty families had so disdained they would throw it away.
The lids of these cans were usually off, and by this hour of the morning the neighborhood’s thin vigorous cats had taken the place of the ragged people. The idea was for the two children to creep up to the garbage can so noiselessly that they could suddenly slap the lid down on the cat inside. This exploit was not easy, for cats born and raised in a poor district were as vigilant and agile as animals used to fighting for their right to live. But sometimes, hypnotized by an appetizing find that was hard to extract from the pile of garbage, a cat would let itself be caught unawares. The lid would slam noisily down, the cat would give a terrified howl, convulsively arch its back and claws, and manage to raise the roof of its zinc prison, then scramble out, its hair standing on end with fear, and tear off as if there were a pack of hounds at its heels—to bursts of laughter from its tormentors, who were hardly aware of their cruelty.b
To tell the truth, these tormentors were also inconsistent, for they directed their hatred at the dogcatcher, nicknamed “Galoufa”3 (which in Spanish …) by the neighborhood children. This municipal employee operated at about this same time of day, but if necessary he would also come around in the afternoon. He was an Arab in European dress who was usually stationed at the rear of a strange cart drawn by two horses and driven by an impassive old Arab.
The body of this cart consisted of a kind of cube made of wood, with a double row of cages with strong bars installed along each side. It included a total of sixteen cages that could each hold a dog, that would then find itself squeezed between the bars and the back of the cage. Since the dogcatcher was perched on a little running board at the back of the cart, his nose was even with the roof of the cages and thus he would survey his hunting grounds. The cart rolled slowly through wet streets that were beginning to be peopled by children on their way to school, housewives in flannelette housecoats decorated with garish flowers going for their bread or milk, and Arab peddlers returning to the market, their little folded stands over one shoulder, holding in the
