As it had been those days when, returning after a brief stay in the foreign country where she was born—those funereal visits, those aunts about whom she was told: “It’s the last time you’ll see them,” and actually see their faces, their bodies, their ruins, and she wanted to go out screaming; or else those family dinners on a tablecloth embroidered by a great-grandmother who was long since dead and whom no one thought about, except she who was thinking about her great-grandmother when she was young, about her pleasures, about her appetite for living, like herself, marvelously beautiful in the bloom of her youth, and everyone at the table was paying her compliments, and on the wall around the table were hanging portraits of beautiful young women who were the ones who were complimenting her now and who were all decrepit and worn out.
Then, her blood on fire, she wanted to flee, flee to a country where no one would grow old or die, where beauty was imperishable, where life would always be wild and radiant, and that did not exist; she wept in his arms when she returned, and he loved her desperately.
And he too, perhaps more than she, since he had been born in a land without forefathers and without memory, where the annihilation of those who preceded him was still more final and where old age finds none of the solace in melancholy that it does in civilized lands [],1 he, like a solitary and ever-shining blade of a sword, was destined to be shattered with a single blow and forever, an unalloyed passion for life confronting utter death; today he felt life, youth, people slipping away from him, without being able to hold on to any of them, left with the blind hope that this obscure force that for so many years had raised him above the daily routine, nourished him unstintingly, and been equal to the most difficult circumstances—that, as it had with endless generosity given him reason to live, it would also give him reason to grow old and die without rebellion.
- An illegible word.
a. add to the list - An illegible word.
Interleaves
SHEET I
(4) On the ship. Siesta with child + war of 14.
(5) At his mother’s—the bombing.
(6) Journey to Mondovi—siesta—the settlement.
(7) At his mother’s. Childhood continued—he recaptures childhood and not his father. He learns he is the first man. Madame Leca.
“When, having kissed him two or three times with all her strength, holding him tight against her, and after letting him go, she looked at him and took him in her arms again to kiss him once more, as if, having measured her affection to its fullness (which she had just done), she had decided that one measure was still missing and.1 And then, right afterwards, turned away, she seemed no longer to be thinking of him nor for that matter of anything, and even sometimes looked at him with a strange expression as if now he were in the way, disturbing the empty, closed, confined universe where she circled.”
SHEET II
A settler wrote to a lawyer in 1869:
“For Algeria to survive her doctors’ treatments she has to be hard to kill.”
Villages surrounded by moats or walls (and turrets at the 4 corners).
Of 600 settlers sent in 1831, 150 died in the tents. Hence the great number of orphanages in Algeria.
In Boufarik, they plow with a gun on their shoulder and quinine in their pocket. “He looks like Boufarik.” 19% died in 1839. Quinine is sold as a drink in the cafés.
Bugeaud marries off his soldier settlers in Toulon after having written the mayor of Toulon to select 20 energetic fiancées. These were “shotgun weddings.” But, once confronted with it, they exchange mates as best they can. It’s the birth of Fouka.
Communal work at the beginning. These are military collective farms.
Settling “by region.” Chéragas was settled by 66 families of horticulturists from Grasse.
In most cases the town halls of Algeria have no archives.
The people from Mahon landed in small bands with a trunk and their children. Their word is their bond. Never hire a Spaniard. They created the wealth of the Algeria seaboard.
Birmandreis and the house of Bernarda.
The story of [Dr. Tonnac], the first settler in Mitidja.
Cf. de Bandicorn, Histoire de la colonisation de l’Algérie, p. 21.
Pirette’s history, idem, pp. 50 and 51.
SHEET III
10—Saint-Brieuc1
14—Malan
20—Childhood games
30—Algiers. The father and his death (+ the bombing)
42—The family
69—M. Germain and the School
91—Mondovi—the settlement and the father
II
101—Lycée
140—Unknown to himself
145—The adolescent2
SHEET IV
Also important is the theme of performing for others. What rescues us from our worst sorrows is the feeling of being abandoned and alone, yet not so alone that “others” do not “take notice” of us in our unhappiness. It is in this sense that our moments of happiness are sometimes those when the feeling that we are abandoned inflates us and lifts us into an endless sadness. In the sense also that happiness often is no more than self-pity for our unhappiness.
Striking among the poor—God put resignation alongside despair like the cure alongside the disease.a
When I was young, I asked more of people than they could give: everlasting friendship, endless feeling.
Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: a straightforward companionship. And their feelings, their friendship, their generous actions seem in my eyes to be wholly miraculous: a consequence of grace alone.
Marie Viton: airplane
SHEET V
He was the prince of the world, with a crown of shining talent, of passions, of strength, of joy, and it was from all that that he was coming to beg her forgiveness, she who had been a submissive slave to life and the passing days, who knew nothing, desired nothing, and did not dare to desire, and who nonetheless had preserved intact a truth he had lost and that was all that justified our existence.
Thursdays in Kouba
Practice, sports
Uncle
Baccalaureate
Illness
O mother, O love, dear child, greater than my times, greater than the history that subjected you to itself, more true than all I have loved in this world, O mother, forgive your son for having fled the night of your truth.
The grandmother, a tyrant, but she serves standing up at the table.
The son who makes his mother respected and strikes at his uncle.
- The sentence ends there.
- The numbers correspond to the pages of the manuscript.
- The manuscript stops at page 144.
a. death of the grandmother.
The First Man (Notes and Sketches)
“Nothing compares to a life that is humble, ignorant, stubborn …”
CLAUDEL, The Exchange
Or else
Conversation about terrorism:
Objectively she is responsible (answerable)
Change the adverb or I’ll hit you
What?
Don’t take what’s most asinine from the West. Don’t say objectively or I’ll hit you.
Why?
Did your mother lie down in front of the Algiers-Oran train? (the trolleybus)
I don’t understand.
The train blew up, four children died. Your mother didn’t move. If objectively she is nonetheless responsible,* then you approve of shooting hostages.
She didn’t know.
Neither did she. Never say objectively again.
Concede that there are innocent people or I’ll kill you too.
You know I could do it.
Yes, I’ve seen you.
aJean is the first man.
Then use Pierre as a reference point and give him a past, a country, a family, a morality (?)—Pierre—Didier?
Adolescent loves on the beach—and night falling on the sea—and nights of stars.
Meeting the Arab in Saint-Étienne. And this befriending by the two exiles in France.
Mobilization. When my father was called to the colors, he had never seen France. He saw it and was killed.
(What a modest family like mine has given to France.)
Last conversation with Saddok when J. is already against terrorism. But he receives Saddok, the right of asylum being sacred. At his mother’s. Their conversation takes place in his mother’s presence. At the end, “Look,” said J., indicating his mother. Saddok got up, went to his mother, hand on his heart, to kiss his mother while bowing in the Arab manner. “She is my mother,” he said. “Mine is dead. I love and respect her as if she were my mother.”
(She fell because of a terrorist attack. She isn’t well.)
Or else:
Yes I hate you. For me honor in the world is found among the oppressed, not those who hold power. And it is from that alone that dishonor arises. When just once in history an oppressed person understands … then …
Goodbye, said Saddok.
Stay, they’ll catch you.
That’s better. Them I can hate, and I join them in hatred. You’re my brother and we’re separated …
J. is
