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PARTISAN REVIEW
to be raised by a grandfather and must have figured then , as in his
later and far more dramatic quests . The Franco-Prussian war that
drove what was left of the family from their native Strasbourg, in
1870, must surely have helped, too, to set up a lifelong pattern of
dislocation. Poverty, obvious hardship might perhaps have been bet–
ter , in at least driving a person to some steady occupation , than the
range of temptations lying around this unmoored young aristocrat
with no particular calling and too much pocket money .
A remark attributed to him around the time of his only higher
education at a normal age, at the military academy of St. Cyr, was
that he didn't need to choose a life work or work at all, since he was
rich. He was quite fat and in photographs of the time looks overin–
dulgent in general. His studies for the priesthood came much later,
when he was almost forty. His earlier reputation for laziness and
sloppiness must have had some basis in fact, since according to one
of his French biographers, he was rated number 333 in his class of
386 at St . Cyr, and in cavalry training at Saumur afterwards he was
eighty-seventh out of eighty-seven . He became known for his wild,
expensive parties , at which, as he would tell it in later years, a grim
moodiness was apt to seize him before the end of the evening. He
took a mistress named Mimi to Algiers and set her up in an apart–
ment there, in the guise of his wife, to lighten his military service,
from which he was shortly discharged because of objections to that
arrangement. He was still in the reserve, however, and before long,
having ditched Mimi after some boring months with her in a hotel in
Switzerland, he was back for another hitch in uniform. He resigned
that time, in order to prepare for a project both daring and in itself
worthy enough, but this too was only for a pampered darling of soci–
ety. A young man of small or no income could not have considered it.
He was about to undertake a geographical exploration of
Morocco, disguised as a Jew, since no Christian was then allowed
across the border. As guide he hired an elderly rabbi who knew the
country well . The journey would end up taking eleven months, after
at least as many of preparation . The budding explorer had first to
learn Hebrew, perfect his Arabic, take a crash course in surveying
and map-making, acquire the necessary costly instruments and de–
vise ways of hiding them about his person , bone up on all possible
aspects of that then quite forbidding segment of the Maghrib. At
least as much as the courting of danger in the enterprise, the fierce
intellectual labor entailed might seem at odds with the pudgy and
licentious spendthrift of the same period, who had already squan-
