The Stranger Or the Boy from Belcourt

ANDREW GIAMBRONEintellectual and spiritual like a patient describing an out-of-body experience. The metaphorhe has been using to portray his love of books — food and drink — serves to reverse thetraditional binaries between real and imagined, fact and fiction, and life and dream; indeed,the latter terms of these pairings seem to have held more sway over the teenage Camus thanhis immediate material surroundings.But for all Camus says in Le Premier homme about not caring whether the books heread in high school implied “more refined tastes,” authors like Proust, Balzac, and Gideoccupied a special place in his heart. 152 153 According to Olivier Todd, some of Camus’sclassmates considered him “cold, sarcastic, and distant,” and thought his sartorial choices —often “a gray flannel suit, a small, round felt hat, a wide, deep-blue scarf with white polkadots,white socks, and polished shoes” — made him seem pretentious. 154 “This formal attirewas different from the that of his other classmates, who were disheveled, usually wearingdepressing gray shirts and rope belts,” Todd writes. 155 “Camus walked around with abriefcase of art magazines and unheard-of books, quoted the Russian philosopher LeonChestov as well as Proust, and made fun of other famous writes, like Stendhal, who he feltworked a sort of ‘terrorism’ on French writers.” 156 Albert, it seems, may have been more of apedantic aspirant during his high school years than a humble bookworm.A 1991 interview with André Belamich (1914-2006), one of Camus’s best friendsfrom Le Lycée Bugeaud, complicates our attempts to characterize how the author struck hispeers. In “J’ai connu Camus en khâgne,” Belamich reports that Camus had the reputation ofbeing cultured yet distant, seeming “a little isolated” from many of his classmates. 157 “It wasdifficult, at least in the early stages, to be friendly with him,” Belamich states. “[…]Of152 “For Camus, Proust represented the typical artist, where ‘everything is said, and there’s no need to go back tothe same subjects again.” supra Todd, Olivier. Camus: A Life. p. 22153 “[Camus] took many notes and reread his favorite authors like André Gide. ‘I was enraged by the mediocrityof my thoughts, while considering the deep feeling I have for Gide,’ [Camus said.] ‘My liking for Gide doubleswhen I read his Journal. Isn’t he human though? I continue to prefer him to every other writer.’” ibid.154ibid. p. 19155 Todd does not mention the possibility that Camus’s formal attire could have been the impoverished author’sonly ‘nice’ clothes he had to wear to school. Perhaps the gray flannel suit was the sole suit in his closet; andperhaps Camus was compensating for his family’s material dearth by trying to appear consistently well dressed.156supra Todd, Olivier. Camus: A Life. p. 19157Khâgne informally refers to the classe préparatoire aux grandes écoles (CPGE) that one must take at the endof lycée in order to become ready for study at a French university. Its purpose is to prepare undergraduatestudents for the competitive entrance exam to the three Ecoles normales supérieures (ENS) as well as certainschools that specialize in business or political science. Specifically, khâgne designates the literary and humanityCPGE, otherwise known as première supérieure. The coursework is intensive, as students take classes inliterature, history, philosophy, and languages. The word khâgne itself derives from the French adjectivecagneux, which means “knock-kneed.” During the 19 th and early 20 th centuries, the adjective was used topejoratively describe academics, since they were thought of as often crouching over their books in an awkwardposition. But soon, humanities students themselves adopted the term as a form of self-parody, changingkhâgne’s spelling to make it look like a Greek loan word. “khâgne” on Larousse.fr, Editions Larousse 2009.155