This passage is lodged at the heart of an autobiographical book entitled L'Africain, by the 2008 Nobel Prize-winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. By undertaking a rather common literary project among writers at the zenith of their career, the author, whose family history stretches back to the plantation society of the Mauritius island, extends as far as Guyana and spans the English Channel to encompass French and English languages, cultures and histories, casts a retrospective look at his father's life as a way of reflecting on his own. The story is thus doubly significant. On the one hand, it allows Le Clézio, the son, to understand and forgive his father's cold demeanor and aggressive behavior by retracing his life path, from his arrival in Europe as a young man after his own father, J. M. G. Le Clézio's grandfather, ruined and disgraced, is forced to leave his colonial property in Mauritius and settle for a life of relative poverty in England to his years in medical school, where his study of tropical diseases foreshadows his entire career as a doctor, at first in British Guyana and then, for decades, in Africa, from Ghana and the Congo to Cameroon and Nigeria. On the other hand, this oblique autobiography, a literary form in which the author recounts his own existence through the prism of someone else's, provides the writer with an opportunity to ponder the foundational values of his work, to reflect on his own choices, while rationalizing his father's actions insofar as they hold a mirror to his own.