Sarrazin, Albertine

French author born out of wedlock in Algiers to a French colonel and military surgeon and his fifteen-year-old Jewish Algerian servant. The child was immediately taken into care and registered as Albertine Damien, by which time her real mother disappeared from her life. About a year later, her father and his wife, old enough to be her grandparents adopted Albertine. They gave her the strictly bourgeois, Catholic upbringing of the colonial ruling class, which meant that she was completely removed from any contact with the local culture and from the multi-cultural city that a couple of decades earlier had made such a great impression on the working class boy Albert Camus.