Saloth Sar must also have absorbed a good deal of French literature, for when he became a teacher in Phnom Penh in the late 1950s, he knew enough nineteenth-century French poetry (Hugo, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Vigny) by heart to impress his Cambodian students. One of his favorite authors was the eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It would be interesting to know what other writers influenced Sar’s thinking, but he never mentioned any, aside from a brief reference to Mao Zedong’s writings after Mao was dead. It is likely that, by 1952, Sar received most of his news, and formed many of his opinions, from journals produced by the French Communist party—Humanité, Les cahiers de communisme, and so on. He would also have been familiar with Stalin’s writings, especially his widely circulated History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which took a conspiratorial view of Soviet history and stressed the important role played by Stalin, who controlled the party and the nation but seldom mingled with ordinary people. It is tempting to picture Saloth Sar working through these turgid materials by dim light, absorbing a view of the world that emphasized conspiracies, empowerment, vigilance, and clandestinity. It would probably be misleading, however, to endow his activities at this stage with too much coherence or ambition.

In 1951 Saloth Sar met his first wife, Khieu Ponnary, who had come to France with her younger sister Khieu Thirith. Ponnary came to study Khmer linguistics, and Thirith to study English literature. During World War II, their father, a judge, had run off to Battambang with a Cambodian princess, leaving their mother to raise the family. This action may have hardened the sisters’ attitudes toward the raffish Cambodian elite. In any case, they both earned baccalaureates from the Lycée Sisowath, a rare achievement for women at the time. When Ponnary arrived in France, she had already begun a distinguished career as a teacher. Thirith had become engaged to Ieng Sary while they were students in Cambodia; they were married in the summer of 1951 in the mairie (“town hall”) of the fifteenth arrondissement. The reception drew hundreds of well-wishers, including Khmers of all political persuasions and students of many nationalities. It is tempting to date the start of Sar and Ponnary’s romance to their time together in Paris, but this cannot be corroborated.13