Too often the provençaux regarded them as an alien race, as threatening competition, calling them sales pieds noirs much as they in turn had once scorned the melons and ratons of Algeria, and barring their homes to them. Sometimes the local village grocer would make a point of short-changing his ingenuous pied noir customers. When the farmers went shooting, memories of nightmares from years past would reassert themselves, causing children to shout in terror, "The Arabs are attacking!" Adults, when describing their new lives in France, would still look instinctively over their shoulders, in case the O.A.S. might be listening: "You never know; it's all still so close.…" If they missed the cheap domestic help of the fatmas, the exiles also claimed to miss the companionship of the "good Arab" and the whole ambience of the Muslim world in which they had grown up.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1662