To the sources of Sufism in The Roots of Heaven and The Life Before Us, Emile Dermenghem

This article reports on a previously unsuspected common factor between Romain Gary’s two Goncourt-prized novels Les Racines du ciel (1956) and Momo (1978; also published as Madame Rosa, 1979, by Émile Ajar; a.p.a. La Vie devant soi, 1975, by Romain Gary): The Sufi passages in both masterpieces are all (uncredited) quotations from the vivid ethnographic survey Le Culte des saints dans l’Islam maghrébin by French Orientalist Émile Dermenghem (1954, unpublished in English).