At half-past nine, before people had time to finish their dinner, the lights were suddenly put out on account — of police regulations and at nine-thirty-five there was a renewed hustling of embusqués seizing their overcoats from the hands of the chasseurs of the restaurant where I had dined with Saint-Loup one evening of his leave, in a mysterious interior twilight like that in which magic lantern slides are shown or films at one of those cinemas towards which men and women diners were now hurrying. But after that hour, for those who, like myself, on the evening of which I am speaking, had
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It is not known in which of the cinemas in Algiers Haïm Aaron Prosper (Aimé) Derrida, a wine merchant like his own father, Abraham, and Georgette Sultana Esther Safar, daughter of Moïse Safar and Fortunée Temime, saw Charlie’s Chaplin’s first full-length feature film, The Kid, or even if they saw it together, although the release date of 1921, the six to eighteen months it took films to transfer from Paris to Algiers, and their marriage in 1923 make it tempting to believe that they did. There were between fifteen and twenty cinemas in Algiers at the time, most of them named – in a way that was to haunt Aimé and Georgette’s third son – after their equivalents in Paris, including Le Vox, Le Majestic, Le Splendid, Le Cameo, Le Regent, Le Cinéma Musset, L’Empire, Le Bijou, L’Alhambra and Le Colisée.
