In October 1933, Romain Gary left Nice for law school at the University of Aix-en-Provence. The departure was a painful parting from his mother and the start of a student life made possible by her sacrifices. In Aix, food sent from home filled his attic larder, while her daily routines and exhortatory letters remained present across the distance; his own writing, meanwhile, began to bring him a first, unsettling recognition as a writer.

Departure from Nice

Toward the end of 1933, Romain Gary enrolled in law school and left Nice in October. His mother and he would not see each other again until Christmas. At the bus, he tried to hold a manly, faintly ironic expression before his fellow passengers. His mother, by contrast, seemed suddenly bent and diminished, staring at him in agonized incomprehension. As the bus pulled away, she followed it for a few steps, stopped, and began to cry. In her hand was the small bunch of violets he had given her.

A pretty passenger watched the farewell. During the journey, Romain Gary struck up an acquaintance with her; she ran a delicatessen in Aix and told him that she had barely managed not to cry at the sight of his mother. Her response made the separation legible to a stranger: the attachment between mother and son was visible even to someone who had just met him.

A student life sustained from home

Romain Gary’s room on the rue Roux-Alphéran cost sixty francs a month. His mother earned five hundred francs, of which a hundred went to insulin and doctors’ fees and another hundred to cigarettes and miscellaneous expenses; the remainder was for him. Beyond that regular support came what she called the little extras. Almost daily, the bus from Nice brought provisions taken from the storeroom of the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts, until the sloping roof around his attic window resembled a stall at the Buffa Market.

The improvised larder was conspicuous and abundant: strings of onions stirred in the wind, eggs lay in the gutter, cheese swelled in the rain, and hams and joints of meat stood out against the roof tiles. There were dill pickles, tarragon-vinegar mustard, Greek halva, dates, figs, oranges, and nuts. Friends at the Buffa Market added their own specialties, among them M. Pantaleoni’s pizza with cheese and anchovies, M. Peppi’s garlic pasties, and quarters of beef sent by M. Jean. The food was more than a colorful feature of student life: it made his mother’s continuing provision for him tangible, and the reputation of the larder helped him make friends along the Cours Mirabeau.

Companions, work, and literary ambition

The people drawn into Romain Gary’s Aix circle included the poet-guitarist Sainthomme, a young German student and writer with an ambition to fecundate the North by the South, or the South by the North, and two students attending Professor Segond’s philosophy lectures. He also encountered the delicatessen owner again in 1952, by then a mother of nine children; he later treated that outcome as evidence that Providence had kept her from causing him anxiety.

In his free time, he went to the Café des Deux Garçons and wrote a novel under the plane trees of the Cours Mirabeau. His mother’s support thus accompanied not only his studies but also his literary labor. A new novel was soon finished and sent around to publishers, carrying the hopes she had placed in his future into the uncertain business of seeking publication.

His mother’s letters and his first recognition

His mother wrote frequently, urging courage and tenacity in language the memoir compares to a general’s proclamation on the eve of defeat. In 1940, reading the Reynaud Government’s declaration on a wall, Romain Gary remembered his mother as his own commander in chief. He pictured her rising at six, lighting her first cigarette, preparing the water for her insulin injection, putting the syringe into her thigh, and then writing an order of the day before going to the market. Her letters promised his return crowned with laurels; he understood that their conventional confidence may have been as much a way of strengthening her own courage as his.

She also begged him not to fight duels, haunted by the deaths of Pushkin and Lermontov and convinced that her son’s literary genius matched theirs. The mixture of grand literary expectation and practical maternal worry made distance no less intimate: even while he pursued his own work in Aix, her attention followed him into the dangers she imagined.

The first significant reply from a publisher came from Robert Denoel, who had shown pages of Romain Gary’s manuscript Fin des Morts to the psychoanalyst Princesse Marie Bonaparte. Her twenty-page report attributed several complexes and aberrations to the author. Romain Gary was annoyed that even the Oedipus complex had not made the list, but the episode also marked a change: for the first time, he felt that he was becoming somebody and beginning to fulfill the hopes his mother had placed in him. The move to Aix therefore joined separation and dependence to an early, complicated experience of literary recognition.