mystery of his mother’s silence or her small smile when he entered the dining room at evening and, alone in the apartment, she had not lit the kerosene lamp, letting the night invade the room step by step, herself a darker denser form gazing pensively out the window, watching the brisk—but, for her, silent—activity of the street; and the child would stop on the doorsill, his heart heavy, full of a despairing love for his mother, and for something in his mother that did not belong or no longer belonged to the world and to the triviality of the days.

Then it was the First Communion, of which Jacques remembered little except confession the day before, when he had admitted the only acts he had been told were sinful—very few, that is—and to “Have you had sinful thoughts?” he said, “Yes, Father,” at a guess, though he did not know how a thought could be sinful, and till the next day he lived in fear that he would unwittingly let out a sinful thought or, and this was clearer to him, one of those objectionable words that populated his schoolboy vocabulary, and as best he could he held back the words at least until the morning of the ceremony when, dressed in a sailor suit with an armband, equipped with a small prayerbook and a chaplet of little white beads, all supplied by the least poor among their relatives (Aunt Marguerite, etc.), holding a taper in the center aisle in a line of other children carrying tapers under the ecstatic eyes of their families standing in the pews, and the thunder of the music that exploded now chilled him, filled him with dread and with an extraordinary exaltation where for the first time he could feel his strength, his boundless ability to prevail and to live, an exaltation that stayed with him throughout the ceremony, taking him away from everything that was happening, including the instant of Communion, and lasting through their return home and the meal to which their relatives had been invited, around a [richer] than usual table, and which bit by bit excited the guests who were accustomed to eat and drink sparingly, so that an enormous gaiety gradually filled the room, destroying Jacques’s elation and so shaking him that when dessert came, at the peak of the general excitement, he burst out sobbing. “What’s the matter with you?” his grandmother said.

“I don’t know, I don’t.”
And his exasperated grandmother slapped him. “That way you’ll know why you’re crying,” she said.
But in truth he did know why when he looked across the table at his mother, who was giving him her small sad smile.
“That’s well over with,” said M. Bernard. “Well, now we get to work.” A few more days of hard work, with the last lessons at M. Bernard’s (describe the apartment?), and then, one morning at the trolley stop near Jacques’s home, the four pupils were grouped around M. Bernard, each equipped with writing pad, ruler, and pen case, and Jacques could see his mother and grandmother waving energetically to them from their balcony.

The lycée where the examination was given was all the way across town, at the other end of the arc the city makes around the bay, in a district that had once been rich and dull, but, thanks to Spanish immigrants, had become one of the most crowded and lively parts of Algiers. The lycée itself was a huge square building that dominated the street. You entered it by steps at either side and, in front, large monumental steps flanked on both sides by meager gardens planted with banana trees and12 protected from student vandalism by wire fencing. The central steps led to an arcade connecting the steps at the two sides; from the arcade opened the monumental door used on major occasions, to one side of which, for everyday use, was a much smaller door that led to the glassed-in cabin of the concierge.

It was in that arcade—among the first students to arrive, who on the whole were able to hide their nervousness under a casual manner, except a few whose anxiety was betrayed by their pale countenances and their silence—that M. Bernard and his pupils were waiting in front of the closed door, in the early morning when the air was still cool and the street still damp before the sun covered it with dust. They were a good half hour early, huddled silently around their teacher, who found nothing to say to them and then left, saying he would return. Indeed they saw him come back in a few minutes, elegant in the felt hat and spats he had put on for the occasion, holding in each hand a package of tissue paper wrapped and twisted at the top to make a handle, and as he approached, they saw that the paper was spotted with grease. “Here are some croissants,” said M. Bernard. “Eat one now and save the other for ten o’clock.” They thanked him and ate, but the heavy dough once chewed was difficult to swallow. “Don’t lose your head,” the teacher kept saying. “Carefully read the wording of the problem and the subject of the composition. Read them over several times. You’ll have time.” Yes, they would read it over several times, they would obey him, with him there were no obstacles in life, it was enough to let themselves be guided by him. Now there was a hubbub by the smaller door. The students, numbering about sixty, headed in that direction. An attendant had opened the door and was reading a list. Jacques’s name was one of the first to be read. He clutched his teacher’s hand, he hesitated. “Go, my son,” said M. Bernard. Jacques, trembling, went to the door, and, as he was going through it, he turned back to his teacher. He was there, big, solid; he was smiling calmly at Jacques and nodding reassuringly.k

At noon M. Bernard was waiting for them at the exit. They showed him their work papers. Santiago was the only one who had made a mistake in a problem. “Your composition is very good,” he said tersely to Jacques. At one o’clock he accompanied them back. At four o’clock he was still there, and he looked over their work. “Come on,” he said, “we have to wait.” Two days later the five of them were again in front of the small door at ten o’clock in the morning. The door opened and the attendant again read a list of names, this one much shorter, of the successful candidates. In the clamor Jacques did not hear his name. But he received a joyful slap on the back and heard M. Bernard say to him, “Bravo, moustique. You passed.”
Only the nice Santiago had failed, and they gazed at him with a sort of absentminded sadness. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, “it doesn’t matter.”

And Jacques no longer knew where he was, or what was happening, they were coming back all four on the trolley; “I’ll go see your parents,” M. Bernard said, “I’ll go to Cormery’s first because he’s the closest,” and in the poor dining room full now of women—there were his grandmother, his mother, who had taken the day off for the occasion (?), and their neighbors the Masson women—he stayed close to his teacher’s side, breathing one last time the odor of cologne, pressing against the hearty warmth of that solid body, while the grandmother beamed in front of her neighbors. “Thank you, M. Bernard, thank you,” she said, and he patted the child’s head.

“You don’t need me anymore,” he said, “you’ll have teachers who know more. But you know where I am, come see me if you need me to help you.” He went out, and Jacques was left alone, lost among the women; then he dashed to the window and looked out at his teacher, who waved at him one last time and who was leaving him alone henceforth, and, instead of the joy of success, a child’s immense anguish wrung his heart, as if he knew in advance that this success had just uprooted him from the warm and innocent world of the poor—a world closed in on itself like an island in the society, where poverty took the place of family and community—to be hurtled into a strange world, one no longer his, where he could not believe the teachers were more learned than the one whose heart was all-knowing, and from now on he would have to learn, to understand without help, and become a man without the aid of the one man who had rescued him; would have to grow up and bring himself up alone, and it would be at the highest cost.

1. See appendix, sheet II, pp. 286–87, that the author inserted between pages 68 and 69 of the manuscript.
   a. Transition from 6?
2. The last year of elementary school, and at the time the last year of compulsory public education—Trans.
   b. Exoticism pea soup.
3. The name originated with the first person to take this position and who was in fact named Galoufa.
4. sic
   c. stretch out and exalt secular school.
5. Here the author uses the teacher’s real name.
   d. see the book. [A novel of the First World War—Trans.]

• novel
  † The punishments.
  e. or, what punishes one makes the others rejoice.
  f. and your ancestors are whores.

1. The sentence ends there.
2. In Rome, traitors were thrown to their death from the Tarpeian Rock. The meaning is: Pride goeth before a fall—Trans.
3. Fantomâs was the masked hero of a series of pulp novels—Trans.
4. The sentence ends there.
   g. M’sieur he tripped me
   h. The scholarship
5. Three illegible