Monsieur le Commandant

by Romain Slocombe

  While I appreciated the originality of the story and the talent of the actors, I had eyes only for Elsie Berger, in her all-too-brief appearances as the heroine’s best friend. My son’s fiancée glowed on screen with a charm comparable to that of her peers Miriam Hopkins, Nancy Carroll or Leila Hyams – three pretty blondes appearing in the pictures of that time, and whom the German resembled. But Ilse’s voice and mannerisms were all her own. And to this very day, her almost silent expression of jealous admiration for her best friend’s bold confession seems to me to epitomise the eternal temptation of adventure and flight, perdition even, that spirit of adolescence and rebellion that society requires us to set aside, or to extirpate. Yet it seems to me that this spirit of adventure – which is in fact a thirst for creation, for God’s work – is not a bad thing in itself.

  And it occurred to me that Ilse, too, barely out of adolescence herself when I had met her that summer, had yet to find a way to harness the ambition, the impetuous drive, the desire to experiment, to learn and to embrace things, that was bubbling inside her – that noble, grandiose self-belief whose rightful use it is our task to discover. And, truth be told, I doubted that Olivier was man enough to respond to such yearning.

  3.

  For several long months we heard no more about Ilse Wolffsohn. All through the autumn, and then the winter, I was taken up with calling upon members of the Académie Française, and inviting some of their number to dine at la Tour d’Argent, Prunier or Lapérouse. This was the third time I had set my sights on a seat in the Institute. I won’t go into the old grudges and jealousies that had scuttled my two previous attempts, the latter of which had been particularly painful to me. The elections in the spring represented my last chance. I beat my rival by a single vote in the second ballot and was enrolled in the immortal assembly, taking a seat that had once been occupied by the Dreyfusard Sully Prudhomme. As you might imagine, I would have preferred to take Racine’s seat! François Mauriac, who was younger than I, was elected a few months later; I would have found it humiliating had it happened the other way round.

  The year 1933 was equally important to your country, Monsieur le Commandant, as Adolf Hitler rose to the chancellorship in January and Germany withdrew from the League of Nations just a few months later, the first step in a plan to liberate herself from all encumbrances in order to achieve her great destiny.

  In November, Le Matin and L’Information, our most influential financial newspaper, printed interviews with Chancellor Hitler, conducted by Monsieur de Brinon, in which the great man guaranteed French security and expressed the finest regard for our country.

  Ilse Wolffsohn returned to France at Christmas that year, spending the holidays with us in Andigny. I went to meet the young actress and my son at the station, accompanied by Marguerite. To me, Ilse’s complexion seemed waxen, her face thinner. Olivier mentioned that she was still recovering from a nasty bout of flu, and that she had family worries. I must admit that my wife and I knew next to nothing about the Wolffsohns. Ilse, whose parents Olivier had met but once in Berlin, rarely mentioned them, and neither did my son. All we were able to gather was that her father was a chemist working in heavy industry, and that she had a younger brother, a student.

  When the children married in March 1934, it was that young man, Franz, who travelled from Germany for the ceremony, which was held in l’Église de la Madeleine. No other member of the family was present. It was a beautiful, big wedding; many members of the Academy did me the honour of attending. Ilse, delicate and radiant in her white veil, looked like a young goddess descended from the Nordic pantheon, and all without exception were love-struck. The student brother, a pleasant-looking but serious young man, shook me firmly by the hand and murmured solemnly in impeccable French: ‘Monsieur Husson, I am entrusting Dorte to you. So that through you – a war hero, a member of the Academy, and a great poet – and through all you represent, the spirit of Eternal France may watch over her!’ He called his sister ‘Dorte’, no doubt an affectionate nickname she had had since childhood. I did not have the opportunity to talk to him again. Early the next day, Franz Wolffsohn boarded a train at the Gare de l’Est and we never saw him again.

  I feel I should mention here that last year, on the occasion of the French writers’ visit to Berlin, I was saddened to learn that the young man, a member of a subversive organisation hostile to the government of the Third Reich, had been arrested, condemned to death and executed in 1940 at Hamburg prison. It will be easy for you to verify that information. Naturally, I did not tell Ilse this; better for her to imagine him still alive and hiding somewhere in Germany.

  *

  The year 1934 was, dare I say, the most wonderful year of my life. At the age of fifty-eight, in full possession of my intellectual and physical powers, I felt my literary efforts reaching their zenith. My work had been translated into any number of languages and performed in the best theatres; each of my novels had been hailed as a masterpiece by the critics. In the autumn, I was awarded the Prix Renaudot. My poetry collections were studied in schools and academies. I was offered very well-remunerated lectures. Unlike that of so many others, my wealth had barely been touched by the economic chaos, thanks to some wise investments and to two buildings in Paris that had come with Marguerite’s dowry. My son, a gifted musician, had recently wed a splendid young actress – I hoped that my daughter Jeanne would soon find her way to the altar – and shortly thereafter, proud and abashed, Olivier announced that his wife was expecting a happy event in November.

  Ilse seemed to have renounced her film career for good, which amazed me, since I had been so impressed by her performance in Mädchen in Uniform. But like Olivier I had no desire to see her head east again, and I hastened to suggest that my daughter-in-law move into Villa Némésis, far from the miasmas of the big city, at least for the duration of her pregnancy, which she could bring to term in conditions optimal for both mother and child. The idea of practising, like Victor Hugo, the ‘art of being a grandfather’ – which I would once have found repugnant – now enchanted me. Even Marguerite seemed to have overcome her early reservations about the German.

  We gave the couple our best guest room on the third floor, with a magnificent view of the bend in the Seine, with the island and the plain beyond, all the way to the cliffs of La Roquette. My son divided his time between the Eure and the capital, where he rehearsed with the orchestra while his wife settled in as our permanent guest in Andigny.

  *

  My God, what memories of that fine summer!

  Towards the end of June, we rented the Chalet Haset in Trouville – a little gem of art nouveau architecture – for ten days. The races and the Grand Prix de Paris were over and the season was just beginning; crowds invaded the boardwalk and pier, and all who were considered, in Paris and abroad, to be major figures in the arts, the nobility, finance and politics seemed to have come together to mount a common, elegant assault on the Normandy coast, jostling and mingling and swept up in the same whirlwind of activity. The recent troubles – the night of 6 February, ‘the magnificent, instinctive revolt, the night of sacrifice’, as it was welcomed by Robert Brasillach, that had rattled the Whore Republic, and the Bolshevik protests six days later – seemed to have been forgotten, at least for the duration of the summer season. Lounging serenely on the soft sand of the beach at the end of the day, I fell victim to a fantasy as I watched Ilse in the orange light of sunset, my eyes following her as she strolled along the water’s edge on my wife’s arm, the waves arriving and dying at their feet, their dresses blowing as one in the breeze. I fancied that I had suddenly been restored to my youth in the Belle Époque …

  I noticed, too, that the young woman was filling out at the waist. That face whose charming profile I so admired, now aglow in the failing light, radiated the promise of the new life growing within her. The only sorrow I felt, for a brief instant – the confession pains me, but you will read others far more terrible by the end of this letter – was the bitter, jeal
ous regret of not being myself the source of that tiny seed now germinating in those tender depths.

  In November of that year 1934, the Franco-German Committee was established under the auspices of your current Ambassador to Paris, His Excellency Monsieur Otto Abetz. The members of the French Guidance Committee were:

  Monsieur Fernand de Brinon, now Ambassador of the Vichy Government to Paris;

  Monsieur Georges Scapini, Deputy, now Envoy for prisoners of war;

  Monsieur Gaston Henry-Haye, Senator, now Ambassador of France to Washington, DC;

  Monsieur Gaston Bergery, Deputy, now Ambassador to Ankara;

  Monsieur François Piétri, Deputy, now Ambassador to Madrid;

  Monsieur Jean Montigny, Deputy, former colleague of Monsieur Laval;

  Monsieur Jean Goy, Deputy, President of the Union Nationale des Combattants and ardent follower of the Maréchal since 1935;

  Professor Fourneau of the Academy of Medicine;

  My friend and colleague Abel Bonnard of the Académie Française, now Minister of National Education;

  Professor Bernard Faÿ, current Director of the Bibliothèque Nationale;

  and me, Paul-Jean Husson.

  My granddaughter Hermione was born on 2 October 1934, six weeks before her due date. The newborn being healthy and of normal weight, I concluded that she had actually been conceived several weeks before the wedding. Such things are of little importance to me. My wife, on the other hand, sought to keep up appearances by referring to Hermione for months as our ‘adorable little premature baby’.

  What did bother me, however, was that I had been expecting to welcome a miniature Ilse into the bosom of my family – a darling little blonde with her mother’s laughing blue eyes – whereas our Hermione had an olive complexion, brown eyes and dark hair. Just like my son Olivier, that is.

  Is that why I almost never behaved like the doting and protective grandfather that I should so have loved to be? The baby and later the toddler would laugh as she held out her little arms to me, but I could only ever respond with reticence to her touching invitations. I was wary when I picked Hermione up, hugged her reluctantly and hastened to find someone to relieve me of her. I now ask myself: Was it because she looked too much like Olivier, the son who was so different from me and over whom I continued to prefer my darling Jeanne?

  Or was it because I was already beginning to suspect something else?

  4.

  The years passed.

  Beyond the Rhine, your Reich created its first three Panzer divisions. In 1935, Marshal Göring – who had met Maréchal Pétain and Pierre Laval (then Minister of Foreign Affairs and soon to become President of the Council) in Warsaw on the occasion of the funeral of Marshal Pilsudski, and found them to be congenial – announced that his country was in the process of creating a powerful air force to include, in addition to numerous fighters, a significant number of bombers and a strong assault command.

  The League of Nations could offer nothing more than token protests to these treaty violations. The French Nation, gangrenous with the corrupting individualism born of that absurd republican theory of human rights, seemed to be mired in staggering apathy. Democratic anarchy, so lucidly denounced by Charles Maurras, had unleashed the four scourges upon us: Jewish, Protestant, Foreigner and Freemason. Disorder was paving the way for the downfall of the Motherland, and I could not fail to register the irreversible debasement of France that had long cost us our rightful place in the world – first place.

  All this time, our little Hermione was growing. Tawny, joyful, intelligent. The only faults I found in her were suggestions of frivolity and pridefulness, which are readily forgivable in a child.

  Ilse, barely touched by maternity, was as young, radiant and beautiful as ever, the light that, on each of her visits to Normandy, illuminated my existence.

  Olivier became First Violin of the Paris Symphony Orchestra.

  My son began, with my approval, to enquire into obtaining French nationality for Ilse on the basis of new laws authorising it after one year of marriage to a French citizen and residence on national territory.

  I wrote and wrote, showered with meaningless honours as the Whore Republic wallowed in her filth. The year 1936 brought my ancient Gallo-Roman nation the humiliation of being governed by a Jew, Léon Blum – as cunning as a Talmudic scholar, as perfidious as a scorpion, as grudging as a eunuch and as hate-filled as a viper – a Bulgarian, German, Jewish cross-breed, a prophet of error, a glum-faced Machiavelli grafted onto the head of France. In Paris, radio took on a Yiddish accent. Drawn from the darkest ghettos of the Orient by the news of their racial triumph, the hook-noses and crinkle-hairs were suddenly everywhere. Ashkenazis fleeing the ghettos of Poland and Romania flooded in by the hundred thousand. Members of this rabble succeeded in having themselves stripped of their national rights in order to be shielded from expulsion, while their precarious health landed them in our hospitals in their thousands. And so they came – the misfits, the bloodsuckers, the crippled. France had become the world’s cesspool. Our access roads became sewers, turning our lands into a swamp that grew more swarming and fetid by the day. It was a vast tide of Neapolitan scum, Levantine dregs, dismal Slavic stench, appalling Andalusian destitution, the spawn of Abraham and Judean pitch.

  Under the banner of the right to asylum, political refugees and common-law criminals were allowed in helter-skelter and without the slightest hindrance. All agreed on one point at least: their right to treat us as a conquered country. While some stole the bread out of French workers’ mouths, others continuously insulted our patriotism, and did it, what’s more, in our own newspapers. It was our duty to react. My friends and I took up our pens to demand the immediate closure of our borders. As my colleague Giraudoux, soon to be named commissioner in the Ministry of Information, declared without ambiguity, we were ‘in full agreement with Hitler that politics rises to its highest nature only when it is racial’.3 Gustave Hervé brought out a revised second edition of his book C’est Pétain qu’il nous faut, its cover adorned with a portrait of the Maréchal (then Vice-President of the High War Council). The printing was overseen by Paul Ferdonnet, who would later be French-language programmer for your Radio Stuttgart.

  I saw the red flags – rags drenched in the blood of the innocent victims of successive revolutions – flying over the silkworks and glass factory of Andigny, now occupied by workers tricked and led astray by Moscow’s union activists and agents. In Spain, Bolshevism and anarchy stood in the way of the righteous independence advocated by General Franco and the Church. My colleague Georges Bernanos, although a Christian, failed to understand the basic nature of the struggle, and we fell out. Happily, most of my colleagues in letters and ideas remained firmly on my side. The Académie Française, by the pens of eleven of its members, including me, had supported the action of the Italian Champions of Civilisation against the savage Ethiopians of Abyssinia. Maurras was elected to join us in the elite, where he naturally enjoyed my support. None of us hesitated to make our voices heard in the newspapers and weekly publications, where we expressed with righteous indignation what the vast majority of Frenchmen believed but kept to themselves: that the Jews were stealing work from our fellow citizens, illegally invading the country, and preparing for the ‘Jewish revolution’ in which Léon Blum was complicit. They would soon conspire to drag France, which was militarily unprepared, into their war of revenge and plunge us all into the abyss!

  In 1937, Stalin’s henchmen exploded bombs in the heart of Paris, in two buildings belonging to the employers’ council. Minister Dormoy and a few hacks in the pay of the Soviets attributed the attacks to a secret society known as ‘the Cowl’ in preparation for a coup that supposedly enjoyed support in the Army. Arrests were made even within the Maréchal’s inner circle, but it was all lies, shameless lies. Calumny spread by vermin!

  But let us move on, Monsieur le Commandant. The time has come for me to … My hand rebels against broaching the tale of the first of the t
errible tragedies that struck us to the core.

  It was summer, late summer, 1938. Europe, you will recall, was awash with rumours of war. Hermione would soon turn four. My son was on tour in Scotland with his orchestra. Ilse and her daughter were spending the season with us. My daughter Jeanne – who had recently introduced us to her fiancé, a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure whose ideas were at odds with my own – was supposed to stay with us for a few days, by herself, and then join this boy in the South of France to meet his family before he was called up (all young men were expecting to be dispatched post-haste to the trenches).

  Whose idea was it to go for a boat ride that sunny afternoon? Certainly not mine; perhaps it was Jeanne’s, or Ilse’s. Both of them rose from their deckchairs and took the little one with them, with the intention of ‘doing a once-round-the-island’. I wasn’t especially concerned; the weather was fine, there was hardly a breath of wind, and my daughter and daughter-in-law were both excellent swimmers. Only Marguerite protested, in vain. My wife and I watched as the three of them went laughing through the garden gate, crossed Quai de Verdun and descended to the jetty where we docked our little boat in the summer.

  Half an hour later, I heard cries, and then the entrance bell jangling furiously. I saw Ilse ringing at the garden gate. Terrified, drenched to the skin and carrying little Hermione, who was also soaking and howling in her mother’s arms.