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Our fathers were clearly very unalike.

And our relations with them were also, clearly, very different. I adored mine and had nothing but respect for him. Unlike yours, mine impressed me to the end.

But I like the way you wrote about that.

And in doing so, you used two words that really resonated with me and that you made me feel like expanding on: the words withdrawal and contempt. I’m not sure that they mean the same to me, but still …

To begin, I’d like to point out that my father was born poor, in Mascara, a modest village in western Algeria, all steep slopes and loose stones, stifling in summer, freezing in winter, whose only bit of life and bustle came from the Foreign Legion barracks.

His father, my grandfather, was a photographer, but he was a village photographer restricted by the prevailing anti-Semitism to photographing only the “natives,” leaving to a “real Frenchman” the sole rights to the only worthwhile market, i.e., marriages and births among the “whites.”

His house, which I came across much later, almost by chance when I was doing a report following the footsteps of Camus in his youth, was a one-story dwelling made of poorly assembled stones, without electricity or running water and with one of those floors of beaten earth that nowadays can be found only in Africa’s shantytowns or the Brazilian favelas.

The little I know of my father’s life there until the beginning of 1938, when, at the age of seventeen, he escaped to Spain, I learned through cross-checking, as he never confided in me. It confirms this picture of black poverty, unilluminated, unmitigated: a childhood in which before dawn the little boy, still half-asleep, had to walk to the end of the town to fill the water bottles for the day; an adolescence spent dreaming of a wooden shelf, just one shelf, on which to place the books by Romain Rolland or Anatole France he had pilfered from the school library; football to pass the time and later on revolution in order to abolish it; and finally the opium of a communist youth, with the double virtue of being both soporific and exciting that this type of opium has always had.

So, he was born into poverty, an absolute poverty, as monotonous as hell, where the milk had to be diluted, the soup was made with thistles and roots, where you got a thrashing if you were tempted to start the fresh bread before finishing the stale bread from the night before, a poverty I’m not sure that any French person today, even in the most deprived housing estate, can even begin to imagine.

And yet, after the war, at the age of not much over twenty, helped by his talent, his anger, and an unusual authority, and also perhaps the solidarity that came out of the early Gaullism and his affinities with the Communist Resistance, he changed his life radically and built up a thriving business, indeed one that very quickly became quite powerful.

The interesting thing (and the point I’m trying to get to) is that as far back as I can remember, I always understood that he loathed his native Algeria, which was for him synonymous with misery, but at the same time I could see that he mistrusted this “mainland” France where he had succeeded so brilliantly.

I always knew that he hated, for others no less than for himself, that atrocious, humiliating, killing poverty and yet at the same time that he equally—perhaps even more so—abhorred money, men with money, the customs, the insulting, arrogant behavior that went hand in hand with this money, which nevertheless had become his world.

He was bourgeois but despised the bourgeoisie.

He was a captain of industry who disdained captains of industry.

He had broken with the politics of the left he had supported in his youth but at table he would still describe someone as “right-wing” as if it were an insult or a flaw.

His profession was wood, international commerce and the wood industry, like the left-wing Feltrinelli billionaire or Wallace, the hero of Gommes by Robbe-Grillet (a detail that did not escape the notice of my well-read mother: the same