La Place De L'Étoile

by Patrick Modiano

  Maurice is delighted to be mentoring a young man. Doubtless he is remembering the first visits he made, his heart pounding, to Gide and Cocteau. He is greatly pleased with my Drieu and Brasillach. I attempted to address the following question: what were the motives that prompted Drieu and Brasillach to collaborate?

  The first part of this study was entitled: ‘Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, or the eternal love affair between the SS and the Jewess.’ One subject recurs frequently in the novels of Drieu: the Jewish woman. That noble Viking, Gilles Drieu, had no hesitation about pimping Jewish women, a certain Myriam for example. His attraction to Jewish women can also be explained in the following manner: ever since Walter Scott, it has been understood that Jewish women are meek courtesans who submit to the every whim of their Aryan lords and masters. In the company of Jewish women Drieu had the illusion of being a crusader, a Teutonic knight. Up to this point, there was nothing very original in my analysis, Drieu’s commentators have all focussed on the role of the Jewess in his writings. But Drieu as collaborator? This I explain easily: Drieu was fascinated by Doric masculinity. In June 1940, the real Aryans, the true warriors, descend on Paris: Drieu quickly shucks off the Viking costume he hired to violate the young Jewish girls of Passy. He discovers his true nature: beneath the steely blue gaze of the SS officers, he softens, he melts, he suddenly feels an oriental languidness. All too soon, he is swooning into the arms of the conquerors. After their defeat, he immolates himself. Such passivity, such a taste for Nirvana are surprising in a man from Normandy.

  The second part of my study was entitled ‘Robert Brasillach, or the Maid of Nuremberg.’ ‘There were many of us who slept with Germany,’ he confessed, ‘and the memory of it will remain sweet.’ His impulsiveness reminds me of the young Viennese girls during the Anschluss. As German soldiers marched along Ringstraße, girls dressed up in their chicest dirndls to shower them with roses. Afterwards they strolled in the Prater with these blonde angels. Then came a magical twilight in the Stadtpark where they kissed an SS Totenkopf while murmuring Schubert lieder in his ear. My God, how handsome the youths were on the far side of the Rhine! How could anyone not fall in love with Hitler Youth Quex? In Nuremberg, Brasillach could scarcely believe his eyes: the bronzed muscles, the pale eyes, the tremulous lips of the Hitlejungend and the cocks you could sense straining in the torrid night, as pure a night as falls over Toledo from Los Cigarrales . . . I met Robert Brasillach at the École Normale Supérieure. He affectionately referred to me as his ‘dear little Moses’, or his ‘dear little Jew’. Together, we discovered the Paris of Pierre Corneille and René Clair, dotted with pleasant bistros where we would sip glasses of white wine. Robert would talk maliciously about our teacher André Bellessort and we would plan delightful little pranks. In the afternoons, we would ‘coach’ dim-witted, pretentious young Jewish numbskulls. At night, we would go to the cinematograph or share with our fellow classmates a copious brandade de morue. Towards midnight, we would drink the iced orangeades Robert so loved because they reminded him of Spain. This, then, was our youth, the deep morning never to be regained. Robert embarked on a brilliant career as a journalist – I remember an article he wrote about Julien Benda. We were strolling through the Parc Montsouris and, in his manly voice, our own ‘Grand Meaulnes’ was denouncing Benda’s intellectualism, his Jewish obscenity, his Talmudist’s senility. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to me suddenly, ‘I’ve probably offended you. I’d forgotten you were an Israelite.’ I blushed to the tips of my fingers. ‘No, Robert, I’m an honorary goy! Surely you must know that Jean Lévy, Pierre-Marius Zadoc, Raoul-Charles Leman, Marc Boasson, René Riquieur, Louis Latzarus, René Gross – all Jews like me – were passionate supporters of Maurras? Well, I want to work at Je suis partout, Robert! Please, introduce me to your friends! I’ll write the anti-Semitic column instead of Lucien Rebatet! Just imagine the scandal: Schlemilovitch calls Blum a yid!’ Robert was delighted at the prospect. Soon, I struck up a friendship with P.-A. Cousteau, ‘the bronzed and virile Bordeaux boy,’ Caporal Ralph Soupault, Robert Adriveau, ‘dyed-in-the-wool fascist and sentimental luminary of our dinner parties’, the jolly Alain Laubreaux from Toulouse and, lastly, Lucien Rebatet of the mountain infantry (‘Now there’s a man: he wields a pen the same way he will wield a gun when the day comes’). I immediately gave this peasant from the Dauphiné a few helpful ideas for his anti-Semitic column. From that day on, Rebatet was constantly asking for my advice. I’ve always thought that goys are like bulls in a china shop when it comes to understanding Jews. Even their anti-Semitism is cack-handed.

  We used the same printworks as l’Action Française. I was dandled on Maurras’ lap, stroked Pujo’s beard. Maxime Real del Sarte wasn’t bad either. Such delightful old men!

  June 1940. I leave the merry band of Je suis partout, though I miss our meetings at the Place Denfert-Rochereau. I am weary of journalism and beginning to nurture political ambitions. I resolve to become a Jewish collaborator. Initially, I embark on a little high-society collaborationism: I patronise tea parties with the Propaganda-Staffel, dinners with Jean Luchaire, suppers on the Rue Lauriston, and carefully cultivate Brinon as a friend. I avoid Céline and Drieu la Rochelle, too Jewified for my taste. I quickly make myself indispensable; I am the only Jew, the ‘good Jew’ of the Collaborationist movement. Luchaire introduces me to Abetz. We arrange to meet. I set out my conditions: I want 1) to replace that vile little Frenchman Darquier de Pellepoix at the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, 2) to be given complete freedom of action. It seems to me absurd to eliminate 500,000 French Jews. Abetz seems keenly interested but does not follow up on my proposals. Nonetheless, I remain on excellent terms with him and with Stülpnagel. They advise me to contact Doriot or Déat. I don’t much like Doriot because of his communist past and his braces. Déat, I see as something of a radical-socialist schoolmaster. A newcomer impresses me by his beret. I would like to say a word about Jo Darnand. Every anti-Semite has his ‘good Jew’: Jo Darnand is my idealized image of a good Frenchman ‘with his warrior face surveying the plains’. I become his right-hand man and form solid ties with the Milice: the boys in navy blue have their good points, take my word for it.

  Summer, 1944, after various military raids in the Vercors region, we hole up in Sigmaringen with members of the Franc-Garde. In December, during the Ardennes Offensive, I am gunned down by a GI named Lévy who looks so like me he could be my brother.

  In Maurice ’s bookshop I found all the back-issues of Le Gerbe, of Pilori and Je suis partout and a few Pétainist pamphlets on the subject of training ‘leaders’. Aside from pro-German literature, Maurice possesses the complete works of forgotten writers. While I read the anti-Semites Montandon and Marques-Rivière, Des Essarts becomes enthralled by the novels of Édouard Rod, Marcel Prévost, Estaunié, Boylesve, Abel Hermant. He pens a brief essay: What Is Literature? which he dedicates to Jean-Paul Sartre. Des Essarts is an antiquarian at heart, he intends to rehabilitate the reputations of the 1880s novelists he has just discovered. He might just as easily defend the style of Louis-Philippe or Napoleon I. The last section of his essay is entitled ‘A Guide to Reading Certain Writers’ and is addressed to young persons eager to improve their minds: ‘Edouard Estaunié,’ he writes, ‘should be read in a country house at about five in the afternoon with a glass of Armagnac in hand. When reading O’Rosen or Creed, the reader should wear a formal suit, a club tie and a black silk pocket handkerchief. I recommend reading René Boylesve in summertime, in Cannes or Monte-Carlo at about eight in the evening wearing an alpaca suite. The novels of Abel Herman require sophistication: they should be read aboard a Panamanian yacht while smoking menthol cigarettes . . .’

  Maurice, for his part, is writing the third tome of his memoirs: The Revenant, a companion volume to The Sabbath and The Hunt.

  As for me, I have decided to be the greatest Jewish–French writer after Montaigne, Marcel Proust and Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

  I used to have the passions and the paroxysm
s of a young man. Today, such naivety makes me smile. I believed that the future of Jewish literature rested on my shoulders. I looked toward the past and denounced the two-faced hypocrites: Capitaine Dreyfus, Maurois, Daniel Halévy. Proust, with his provincial childhood, was too assimilated to my mind. Edmond Fleg too nice, Benda too abstract – why play the pure spirit, Benda? The archangel of geometry? The great ascetic? The invisible Jew?

  There were some beautiful lines by Spire:

  Oh fervour, oh sadness, oh violence, oh madness,

  Indomitable spirits to whom I am pledged,

  What am I without you? Come then defend me

  Against the cold, hard Reason of this happy earth . . .

  And, again:

  You would sing of strength, of daring,

  You will love only dreamers defenceless against life

  You will strive to listen to the joyous songs of peasants,

  To soldiers’ brutal marches, to the graceful dances of little girls

  You shall have ears only for tears . . .

  Looking eastward, there are stronger personalities: Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka . . . I loved Heine’s poem ‘Doña Clara:’ in Spain, the daughter of the Grand Inquisitor falls in love with a handsome knight who looks like Saint George. ‘You have nothing in common with the vile Jews,’ she tells him. The handsome knight then reveals his identity:

  Ich, Señora, eur Geliebter,

  Bin der Sohn des vielbelobten,

  Großen, schriftgelehrten Rabbi

  Israel von Saragossa.*

  Much fuss was made of Franz Kafka, the elder brother of Charlie Chaplin. A few Aryan prigs put on their jackboots to trample his work: they promoted Kafka to professor of philosophy. They contrast him with the Prussian Emmanuel Kant, with the Danish genius Søren Kierkegaard, with the southerner Albert Camus, with J.-P. Sartre the half-Alsatian, half-Périgourdine penny-a-liner. I wonder how Kafka, so frail, so timid, could withstand such an onslaught.

  Since becoming a naturalised Jew, Des Essarts had unreservedly embraced our cause. Maurice, on the other hand, worried about my increasing racism.

  ‘You keep harping on at old stories,’ he would say, ‘it’s not 1942 anymore, old man! If it were, I would be strongly advising you to follow my example and join the Gestapo, that would change your perspective! People quickly forget their origins, you know! A little flexibility and you can change your skin at will! Change your colour! Long live the chameleon! Just watch, I can become Chinese, Apache, Norwegian, Patagonian, just like that! A quick wave of the magic wand! Abracadabra!’

  I am not listening to him. I have just met Tania Arcisewska, a Polish Jew. This young woman is slowly killing herself, with no convulsions, no cries, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. She uses a Pravaz syringe to shoot up.

  ‘Tania exerts a baleful influence over you,’ Maurice tells me, ‘why don’t you find yourself a nice little Aryan girl who can sing you lullabies of the homeland.’

  Tania sings me the Prayer for the Dead of Auschwitz. She wakes me in the middle of the night and shows me the indelible number tattooed on her shoulder.

  ‘Look what they did to me Raphaël, look!’

  She stumbles over to the window. Along the banks of the Rhône, with admirable discipline, black battalions parade and muster outside the hotel.

  ‘Look at all the SS officers, Raphaël! See the three cops in leather coats over there on the left? It’s the Gestapo, Raphaël! They’re coming to the hotel! They’re coming for us! They’re going to gather us back to the Fatherland!’

  I quickly reassure her. I have friends in high places. I have no truck with the petty pissants of the Paris Collabo. I’m on first name terms with Goering; Hess, Goebbels and Heydrich consider me a friend. She’s safe with me. The cops won’t touch a hair on her head. If they try, I’ll show them my medals; I’m the only Jew ever to be awarded the Iron Cross by Hitler himself.

  One morning, taking advantage of my absence, Tania slashes her wrists. Though I was careful to hide my razor blades. Even I feel my head spin when I accidentally see those little metal objects: I feel an urge to swallow them.

  The following day, an Inspector dispatched especially from Paris interrogates me. Inspecteur La Clayette, if memory serves. This woman, Tania Arcisewska, he tells me, was wanted by the police in France. Possession and trafficking of drugs. You never know what to expect with foreigners. Bloody Jews. Fucking Mittel-European delinquents. Well, anyway, she’s dead and it’s probably for the best.

  I’m surprised by the eagerness of Inspecteur La Clayette and his keen interest in my girlfriend: former member of the Gestapo, probably.

  As a memento, I kept Tania’s collection of puppets: characters from the commedia dell’arte, Karagiozis, Pinocchio, Punchinello, the Wandering Jew, the Sleepwalker. She had placed them around her before killing herself. I think they were her only friends. Of all the puppets, my favourite is the Sleepwalker, with his arms outstretched and his eyes tight shut. Lost in her nightmare of barbed wire and watchtowers, Tania was very like him.

  Then Maurice disappeared. He had always dreamed of the Orient. I can imagine him living out his retirement in Macau or Hong Kong. Maybe he’s recreating his days in the Forced Labour unit on a kibbutz somewhere. I think that’s the most plausible scenario.

  For a week, Des Essarts and I were utterly at a loss. We no longer had the strength to concern ourselves with things of the mind and were frightened for the future: we had only sixty Swiss francs to our name. But Des Essarts’ grandfather and my Venezuelan uncle Vidal drop dead the same day. Des Essarts assumes the titles of Duke and Lord; I have to make do with a vast fortune in bolivars. I was dumbfounded by my uncle Vidal’s will: apparently being dandled on an old man’s knee for five years is enough to make you his sole heir.

  We decide to go back to France. I reassure Des Essarts: the French police are on the lookout for a Duke and Lord gone awol, but not for a certain Jean-François Lévy of Geneva. As soon as we cross the border, we break the bank at the casino Aix-les-Bains. I give my first press conference at the Hôtel Splendide. I’m asked what I plan to do with my bolivars: set up a harem? Build pink marble palaces? Become a patron of arts and literature? Devote myself to philanthropic works? Am I a romantic? A cynic? Will I become playboy of the year? Take the place of Rubirosa, Farouk, Ali Khan?

  I will play the youthful billionaire in my own way. Obviously, I have read Larbaud and Scott Fitzgerald, but I am not about to emulate the spiritual torments of A.W. Olson Barnabooth or the puerile romanticism of Gatsby. I want to be loved for my money.

  I discover I have tuberculosis and am panic-stricken. I must hide this inopportune illness which will otherwise lead to a surge in my popularity throughout the thatched cottages of Europe. Faced with a rich young man who is handsome and tubercular, little Aryan girls are apt to turn into Sainte Blandine. To discourage any such benevolence, I remind journalists that I am a Jew. Accordingly, I am drawn only to money and pleasure. People consider me photogenic: very well, I’ll pull faces, wear orangutan masks, model myself on the archetypal Jew that Aryans came to peer at in the Palais Berlitz in 1941. I evoke memories of Rabatête and Bardamu. Their insulting articles compensate me for my suffering. Sadly, no one reads these authors anymore. Society journals and the romance magazines insist on showering me with praise: I am a youthful heir of great charm and originality. Jew? In the sense that Jesus Christ and Albert Einstein were Jews. So what? As a last resort I buy a yacht, The Sanhedrin, which I convert into a high-class brothel. I moor it off Monte Carlo, Cannes, La Baule, Deauville. From each mast, three speakers broadcast texts by doctor Bardamu and Rabatête, my preferred PR people: Yes, through my millions and my orgies, I personally preside over the International Jewish Conspiracy. Yes the Second World War was directly triggered by me. Yes, I am a sort of Bluebeard, a cannibal who feeds on Aryan girls though only after raping them. Yes, I dream of bankrupting the entire French peasantry and Jewifying the region of Cantal.

>   I quickly grown weary of these posturings. With my friend Des Essarts, I hole up in the Hôtel Trianon in Versailles to read Saint-Simon. My mother worries about my poor health. I promise to write a tragicomedy in which she will have the starring role. After that, tuberculosis can slowly carry me off. Or maybe I’ll commit suicide. Thinking about it, I decide not to go out with a flourish. I would only end up being compared to L’Aiglon or Young Werther.

  That evening, Des Essarts wanted me to go with him to a masked ball.

  ‘And don’t come dressed as Shylock or Süss the Jew like you always do. I’ve rented you a magnificent costume, you can go as Henri I. I rented a Spahi uniform for myself.’

  I declined his invitation on the pretext that I had to finish my play as soon as possible. He took his leave with a sad smile. As the car was driving out the hotel gates, I felt a pang of regret. A little later my friend killed himself on the Autoroute Ouest. An inexplicable accident. He was wearing his Spahi uniform. There was not a scratch on him.

  I quickly finished my play. A tragicomedy. A tissue of invective against goyim. I felt sure it would rile Parisian audiences; they would never forgive me for flaunting my neuroses and my racism on stage in such a provocative manner. I set much store by the virtuoso finale: in a white-walled room, father and son clash; the son is wearing a threadbare SS uniform and a tattered Gestapo trench coat, the father a skullcap, sidelocks and a rabbi’s beard. They parody an interrogation scene, the son playing the role of the torturer, the father the role of the victim. The mother bursts into the room and rushes at them, arms outstretched, eyes wild. She wails the ‘Ballad of Marie Sanders, the “Jews Whore”.’ The son grabs his father by the throat and launches into the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ but cannot drown out his mother’s voice. The father, half choking, mewls the ‘Kol Nidrei’, the great Prayer of Atonement. Suddenly, a door at the back of the stage is flung open: four nurses circle the protagonists and, with difficulty, overpower them. The curtain falls. No one applauds. People stare at me suspiciously. They had expected better manners from a Jew. I’m an ungrateful wretch. A boor. I have appropriated their clear and limpid language and transformed it into a hysterical cacophony.