Monsieur le Commandant

by Romain Slocombe

  ‘Four, five years, I would say …’6 Pulling a sheet of paper from a folder lying on his desk, he pointed out certain lines.

  ‘You see, we shall proceed by year, in an order whose logic defies me. The Commission, God knows why, decided to start with 1936, the year of the Popular Front. The years 1939 and 1940 will be next, then 1937 and 1938, followed by 1927 up to 1935, the year that concerns you. So your daughter-in-law’s case won’t come up until … 1945, perhaps?’

  Bringing the tips of his long, spatulate fingers together, Monsieur Langeron leaned forward.

  ‘Madame Husson wouldn’t have anything to hide from us, by any chance? Concerning her religion? I ask because the Commission’s main task will be to denaturalise Jews.’

  I feigned indignation.

  ‘You know my views, Monsieur le Préfet. You certainly won’t find any Yids in my family.’

  His face grew sullen at these words. He dryly shut the folder.

  ‘So much the better for you, Monsieur Husson. Because the situation is hardly going to improve for the Israelites. Nonetheless, for the sake of a writer of your stature, and that of your daughter-in-law, who is no doubt a most respectable individual, I am prepared to make her file disappear … if that is what you wish.’ He gave me a probing look. Monsieur Langeron waited, observing me with some interest.

  I finally managed to stammer out: ‘I would be very grateful if you could, Monsieur le Préfet.’

  He nodded his head.

  ‘Fine. You can count on me.’

  Monsieur Langeron jotted down Ilse’s place and date of birth, as well as her Christian name and surname and those of her parents. Picking up the telephone receiver, he asked a certain Monsieur Anfray to come and see him in his office. Then the Prefect rose and put a curt end to our interview.

  16.

  That autumn, which saw me lose a son, was otherwise replete with pleasurable compensations.

  These were first and foremost political and spiritual. France, having been secularised to the brink of death, had found a new Saviour. While she had felt the dismal and tragic impact of her failures – having forgotten and scorned the ancient French traditions of moral living and family virtues – my Motherland had seen her sins forgiven by God’s mercy. After sixty years, she had been delivered from the yoke of radicalism and anti-Catholicism, universal suffrage and parliamentarianism, the malicious and imbecilic domination of schoolteachers … Military defeat proved to be an opportunity for recovery, a promise of regeneration.

  My fellow academician Jacques Chardonne wrote: ‘Maréchal Pétain has counselled France wisely. And the most sensible of revolutions has taken place in silence. It is sweet because it is irresistible.’7 Monsieur Roger Bonnard, Dean of the Bordeaux Law Faculty, declared in La Revue du Droit public: ‘In our leader, Maréchal Pétain, France now has a guide of incomparable and almost superhuman wisdom and thoughtful command that will prevent her from going astray and lead her along the path of truth.’ In Le Petit Parisien, I read these judicious words of J.-H. Rosny the Younger, the venerable President of the Académie Goncourt: ‘As France sets off behind her leader, Pétain, in a Collaboration that is destined to raise Europe to the greatest heights of her power, it has been most profitable to draw up an inventory of the moral forces at her disposal. Is literature not one of those forces, one of the most powerful tools for ensuring the superiority of any civilisation?’ Pierre Taittinger dedicated a book ‘To the Maréchal, the new Christ, who has sacrificed himself to redeem a vanquished France’. And to complete that redemption, we were to learn from our conquerors. As early as 1939, the prodigious Céline, the scourge of Israel, had begun urging – in L’École des cadavres, which his publisher Robert Denoël had rightly called the application of the Jewish Theory to France, and a prophetic book – a total alliance between Hitler’s Germany and France. Bernard Grasset, who had been received by the Maréchal in Vichy in the summer of 1940 and returned to Paris in early August, and who had always been most generous in his encouragement of me, announced that Germany must serve as an example to us. I shared my publisher’s national-socialist perspective. We had both long admired your Führer, who understands the importance of publishers and writers, and for whom no political action has meaning unless it serves to frame and underpin a spiritual one.

  I joined Eugène Deloncle’s brand-new Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire, whose acronym MSR can so neatly be read in French as ‘Aime et sers’, meaning ‘love and serve’, and whose founding members included my friends the gifted journalist Jean Fontenoy and General Lavigne-Delville, hero of the Great War, as well as the industrialist Eugène Schueller, owner of L’Oréal and Monsavon. The movement, which is supported by your Ambassador, His Excellency Monsieur Abetz, has adopted the mandate to build a new Europe, in cooperation with National Socialist Germany and all other European nations liberated from liberal capitalism, Judaism, Bolshevism and Freemasonry; to reduce those Jews remaining in France to a lowly status that will prevent them from polluting our race; and to forge a socialist economy that will ensure the fair distribution of wealth by raising salaries and increasing production.

  The compensations were creative, too. In Paris, the major publishing houses (other than two that had been owned by Jews and had had to be shut down) went back to work to satisfy the urgent demand of a public hungry for books. Assured of the certainty of being published, I started work on three new projects: an historical novel, Constance de Saxe; a four-act play, Rollo; and an essay on Saint Aubert, Bishop of Avranches, who built the sanctuary of Mont Saint-Michel after the archangel appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Now is the moment of salvation and strength, and the reign of our Lord and the power of Christ. You will build me a temple here so that the children of this land shall invoke me and I shall come to their aid.’ The parallels with the current circumstances were obvious, and I intended to dedicate the essay to the Maréchal, whom all the little children of France had invoked and who had come to their aid.

  At the same time, under the enlightened instruction of the Occupier, the Parisian publishing world had been purified by the banning of the works of, among others, the Mann brothers, the psychoanalyst Freud, Zweig, the poet Heine (another Jew), Trotsky, the recent pamphlets of Malraux and, later, Gide – courtesy of the German–Soviet pact – for his Return from the USSR (although it is the sole work of merit by that Voltaire of pederasty). These were, in the main, books that had systematically poisoned French public opinion with their mendacity and tendentiousness. Betraying the hospitality that France had extended to them, these political refugees – and the Jews in particular – had, in their writings, pushed tirelessly for a war from which they had shamelessly hoped to profit.

  But what mattered most to me was this: I had regained my home, my office, my writing desk; my window overlooking Quai de Verdun, at which, seized by renewed inspiration, I sat and watched the timeless landscape that Rollo,8 ‘Hrolf the Walker’, and his Nordic pirates had once gazed upon, voracious and enthralled. In the longboats known as sea serpents, they had sailed the coasts, prowled the river mouths and, in search of a new homeland free from the oppressive rule of Harald Fairhair, ravaged France, burned its cities and pillaged its abbeys. Here the Seine bent in upon itself like the coil of some gigantic snake risen from the depths of time, carving the white cliffs of Vexin, embracing the fertile, silt-rich plain that shimmered in the distance, and upon which men bent themselves in turn.

  I reconnected with my work, and with solitude, bolstered by the hills of my Duchy of Normandy, its ancient ruined towers, its sloping pastures and placid, slow-moving livestock; its rich harvests, its trees heavy with apples, plums and cherries, the shade of its hedgerows; the heron circling above the islands, the cormorants playing in the backwaters, and in the vast sky the larks, the gulls and the salt wind wafting in from the sea.

  Ilse and Hermione did not come to Andigny that summer.

  Olivier left Paris in early October with the aim of crossing the border into Spain. />
  In mid-autumn I received a call from my daughter-in-law. This was a few days after the Maréchal’s meeting with your Führer at which, together, these two great men laid the foundations for a sincere Collaboration at the heart of the new European order. For France, it was the end of its withdrawal from history and the dawn of its revival. Ilse’s voice was tense and anxious. She asked if she and the little one could come and spend Saturday and Sunday with me. Nothing could have given me greater pleasure. I awaited them, my heart pounding, on the station platform.

  The German descended from the train cautiously. At the villa, my daughter-in-law took off her coat in the front hall and announced that she was pregnant.

  I felt as if it was I who was being kicked in the stomach. ‘Olivier?’ I asked, stupidly.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Of course Olivier. Who else?’

  I apologised for my indiscretion and clumsiness. Then I said, ‘Does he know?’

  She shook her head, then, clearly exhausted, went to sit in the drawing room.

  ‘He left twenty-eight days ago. I’ve had no news of him since. He has a good friend, Jacques Duchesne, at the BBC. When Olivier manages to reach England safe and sound, someone is supposed to say over the radio, “And we shall go to Valparaíso”. May I listen to your wireless?’

  My reaction was violent. ‘Listen to dissidents? Me?’

  Tears welled in her lovely blue eyes. I bent down and took her by the hand.

  ‘Forgive me, my little one. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Yes, I understand. We’ll listen together, if you’d like …’

  She smiled at me, and her smile erased a good many things. And that, Monsieur le Commandant (you see, I keep nothing from you!), is how I violated a ban that I nevertheless respect, and the wisdom of which I would have been the first to acknowledge.

  That evening, on the programme ‘The French Speak to the French’, there were any number of messages, each more poetic and sibylline than the next, but no one mentioned leaving for Valparaíso.

  Shortly after her return to Paris, Ilse took a bad tumble as she was leaving her office at the Opéra, where she had found work thanks to her husband’s connections. She was taken to the hospital and almost lost the baby. The doctors put her ankle in plaster and prescribed complete rest until the birth. Someone phoned me. I was able to arrange an ambulance to transport my daughter-in-law to Villa Némésis.

  I went to Paris over the weekend to fetch Hermione, and I enrolled her temporarily in our local primary school. I should have preferred placing her with the Sisters of the Sainte-Blandine Institute, who offered better schooling, but Ilse was adamantly opposed and I decided it was best not to upset her in her current condition.

  Devoting my days to writing, I did not stop for lunch, but in the evenings I took supper with Ilse and Hermione in my daughter-in-law’s bedroom on the second floor.

  I had our wireless set installed there.

  My daughter-in-law remained on her back, her plastered leg resting on cushions.

  One Thursday night in December, as I listened with her – I confess, I had succumbed to the detestable habit – some time after 9.30 p.m. a French voice spoke to us from London: ‘And we shall go to Valparaíso … I repeat: And we shall go to Valparaíso.’

  Ilse sat up in bed and wept for joy in my arms.

  17.

  My grandson, Omer Aristide Husson, was born on 19 March 1941 in the unseasonable cold of early spring.

  The birth was drawn-out and difficult. I paced away the entire day in my office, unable to write or read a single line, listening to the heart-rending cries that reached me all the way from the floor above, to the harried steps of the servants on the stairs, to the injunctions of the midwife and of Dr Dimey, who was overseeing the event.

  I felt as if I myself were the father of the child being born – I experienced all the same anxieties, to say the least. I had alerted the doctor to the fact that, should it come down to the Cornelian dilemma between the life of the mother and that of the child, he must at all costs save my daughter-in-law. At last, towards eleven o’clock in the evening, I heard a rising wail. The cook knocked at my door a few moments later to tell me that it was a boy, that Madame Husson had lost consciousness but that the doctor was certain that both were out of danger. When she closed the door behind her, I got down on my knees, my forehead pressed against the drawer of my desk, and thanked the Lord and Our Lady the Virgin Mary for having spared Ilse. I am ashamed to write it, but old soldier that I am, I wept, and my body trembled uncontrollably.

  In the father’s absence, and in a political balancing act of which any man would be proud, I chose the names of two great French statesmen: Aristide Briand and Philippe Omer Pétain. The former had bestowed his spiritual patronage on my friend Jean Luchaire’s review Notre Temps. As to the latter, Ilse begrudged me ‘Omer’ and positively vetoed ‘Philippe’. Omer, a monk at Luxeuil, was sent in the year 637 to re-evangelise the Morini, and founded the abbey of Sithiu, known today as Saint-Omer, where he was buried. A charter dating back to 663 tells us that he lost his sight late in life. Without going into detail, I explained to my daughter-in-law that giving a newborn one of the Maréchal’s Christian names was like making an inconvertible pledge of allegiance to the new ideas, and that, seeing as foreigners and ‘wogs’ had come in for their share of bad press of late, could serve if need be as a defence against anyone who might wish to make trouble for ‘recently naturalised citizens in our family’. Ilse blushed at these words, and silently acquiesced. Embarrassed, I added that if his father should be unhappy with any of these names, the boy could always be known within the family simply as ‘Aristide’, to which his father could hardly object. The German nodded again and gave a little smile, apparently reassured. Then she turned a love-filled gaze upon the cradle, where her miserable tadpole of a son lay wrapped in his swaddling clothes. His red wrinkled face filled me with loathing.

  Despite what you might be justified in believing, Monsieur le Commandant, the feeling described above was not born of any kind of jealousy, or resentment at not being the father. The truth is that Aristide, who will soon be a year and a half old, is an extraordinarily ugly child. As with Hermione but worse, it was clear to me that the marks of his heredity had skipped a generation before revealing themselves once more. From the outset, all the most repugnant physical characteristics of the sons of Abraham, as confirmed in the exhibition on ‘France and the Jew’ at the Palais Berlitz in September last year, seemed to me to have been obtrusively thrown together in that monstrous brat. I recognised in him, with a disgust that you can well imagine, the precise scientific description set out by Professor Montandon: the convex nose; the outsized and protruding lower lip; the moist, bulging eyes; the curly hair; the large, protuberant ears; the exaggerated facial expressions. In addition, the baby’s gestures lacked control, and its muscle tone seemed flabby.9

  Ten days after my grandson’s birth, on 29 March 1941, the Maréchal’s government established, under French law and entirely independently of the occupying authorities, the Commissariat-General for Jewish Questions and appointed Xavier Vallat as its director. A prominent veteran of the War of 1914–1918, where he lost a leg and an eye, Vallat was a man of deep-rooted Catholic and nationalistic convictions, determined to eradicate totally Jewish culture from France, like a surgeon wielding his scalpel to remove a deadly tumour sprung from a foreign body.

  In an article I wrote on this issue in Le Journal d’Andigny, whose columns were open to me, I welcomed all such measures that moved the country forward in the right direction. At the same time, I was grateful, despite myself, that my daughter-in-law, protected by her naturalisation and by the fact that her true race was not publicly known, had not had to register as a Jew at police headquarters, which would certainly have caused her problems in her professional life as France finally and vigorously began to purge its public offices of all Levys, Kahns and Dreyfuses. Firm measures were also being taken against foreign Jews. I read in La Sema
ine that five thousand Polish, Czechoslovakian and Austrian Jews, identified with the help of files prepared by Monsieur André Tulard and his assistants, had been summoned to gathering places set up for the occasion, then arrested and transported by the French gendarmerie to a concentration camp near Orléans that had once been a prison camp and was now refitted for this salutary operation.

  But it wasn’t all so straightforward.

  While the harmful ferment was being eliminated from the public stage, by a strange and cruel twist of fate the very opposite was occurring in my private life. As I tragically lost my loved ones one by one – Jeanne, Marguerite, Olivier, all of good, pure French Catholic stock – the impure elements around me, even here at Andigny, an ancient fiefdom of the Norman heartland, were growing and thriving: Ilse, Hermione, Aristide …

  Against my own will, my family and my life were being ‘Judaised’. Little by little, a surreptitious leprosy was eating away the fabric of a good French Christian family. The attack was all the more cunning for its recourse to a weapon that had always been difficult to defend against – I am referring to love. Familial love to begin with – because, despite everything, I was somewhat fond of Hermione and would probably end up finding something of worth even in the tadpole – but above all authentic love, the state of ‘being in love’ described by José Ortega y Gasset: sickness, obsession and mania.

  Obstinately, and with the perverse masochism of the hypochondriac who ploughs through medical texts in his determination to confirm even the most minor symptom of the illness he suspects, I went back to the writings of the subtle Spanish philosopher.

  When we fall into the state of mental withdrawal and psychic angina we call ‘being in love’, we are lost. In the early days we can still resist; but when the imbalance between the attention we pay to one woman and that we begrudge to others and to the rest of the universe becomes disproportionate, it is no longer within our power to halt the process.