Université d’Aix-en-Provence

Université d’Aix-en-Provence is identified in the memoir through its law school, where Romain Gary enrolled in 1933. It marks a transitional stage between his life in Nice and the future his mother imagined for him: a move away from home, legal studies, and an increasingly independent student identity, though one still sustained by her sacrifices.

Enrollment and Departure from Nice

Toward the end of 1933, Gary enrolled in the law school of Université d’Aix-en-Provence and left Nice in October. The departure was not simply a change of address. His mother, who had built her hopes around his education and eventual career, watched him go in grief; Gary recalled her following the departing bus before stopping to cry, still holding a small bunch of violets he had given her. Their separation was to last until Christmas.

The scene also establishes the emotional conditions under which his studies began. Gary tried to maintain a manly, faintly ironic expression in front of the other passengers, while his mother appeared to him suddenly bent and diminished by sorrow. A young woman on the journey later remarked that his mother adored him, a response Gary recognized as familiar. The university thus enters the account through both an educational decision and the painful cost of leaving the household that had shaped him.

Student Life and His Mother’s Support

Gary rented a room on rue Roux-Alphéran for sixty francs a month. His mother was then earning five hundred francs, of which a hundred went to insulin and medical fees and another hundred to cigarettes and other expenses; much of what remained went toward supporting him. Her assistance extended beyond money. Provisions taken from the storeroom of the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts arrived on the Nice bus, accumulating around the sloping roof of his attic window until it resembled a stall at the Buffa Market.

That improvised supply line makes the distance between Nice and Aix tangible. Gary’s student life depended on a mother who continued to provision him even while he was away, and whose own limited income and illness made that care costly. The university was therefore not an escape from family dependence so much as a new setting in which that dependence took practical form.

Literary Performance and Recognition

During his first year as a law student, Gary became associated with a report about a supposed psychological case. He cultivated an air of dark, studied eccentricity, carried small scissors, and distributed twenty typed copies of the report among young women at the university. He also sent two copies to his mother, who read it aloud to the patrons of the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts. The performance gave him a brief reputation: when he returned to Nice at the end of the academic year, he was welcomed with unusual interest.

The episode shows Gary turning student life into a stage for self-invention. His mother shared in the performance, treating the document as proof that he had become famous, while her one practical anxiety was that his imagined psychological affliction might lead him to hurt himself. The law school is not described as a place of academic achievement in this episode; it is the social setting in which Gary experimented with a persona and discovered the rewards of an audience.

Place in His Education

The memoir presents the Aix enrollment as one step in a longer educational plan devised by his mother. She had imagined a sequence leading through schooling, naturalization, a law degree, military service, further study, and ultimately diplomatic service. Her ambition invested his education with a purpose much larger than the immediate work of studying law.

By the time the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts was thriving and Gary had completed his first year, the next decision was to continue his studies in Paris, where his mother expected him to make useful contacts. Université d’Aix-en-Provence consequently occupies a defined but temporary place in his trajectory: it is where he began legal studies away from Nice, supported by his mother, before the family’s educational ambitions carried him on to another city.