he first intimation1， apparently， was when three-year-old Yves told his mother that her shoes did not go with her dress. They were at home in Oran，a dull commercial town in French-ruled Algeria， where Yves's father sold insurance and ran a chain of cinemas，and Mrs. Mathieu-Saint-Laurent cut an elegant figure in colonial society. Oran had once enjoyed some small renown as the westernmost outpost of the Ottoman Empire， and was to gain more later as the setting for Albert Camus's The Plague.3 But after 1936 it had a genius in the making4.