by Leon Werth
France always took nourishment from abroad. This assimilating is its whole history since at least the 16th century. But since 1930, part of France, faced with a brutalized Europe, has been in a state of hypnosis; sometimes from admiration, sometimes from horror.
Madame Charroux, who was in tears the other night because in front of the Germans two Frenchmen forgot the dignity of the conquered, is speaking to me today about Communism. Fear of Communism puts her in a trance. But she fears only a word. What she knows about Communism comes from newspapers. She doesn’t know that Stalin killed it. And I wonder whether her hatred of the distant Stalin doesn’t equal that of the nearby Hitler.
Our current distress momentarily overcomes my self-centeredness.
What is real? The war, politics, man, God? God exists, perhaps, but at more of a distance than religions put him. As he is represented to us, he’s an easy answer, good for peace, good for war, good for saints and for common criminals. It makes me think of those allin-one tools that mechanics disdain—crowbar, pliers, hammer and screwdriver at the same time.
For the moment, the only civilization I’ve been deprived of is that of matchboxes. Matches are no longer to be found … That doesn’t bother me. I have a lighter. The childishness of mankind! I’m fond of this lighter and no other. I prefer it out of sentiment. I’m the man with a lighter. I’m a pathetic thing tied to his habits, his quirks, clinging to my pipe and my lighter. My lighter is not just primal fire, the fire of a savage. It’s a lighter in a thousand, an amulet, a fetish. If I lost it, I would lose my entire past with it.
I won’t go to Ouzouer with my wife to find bread. Thanks to the mayor, who is an old man, and a young baker, the village has bread. But I haven’t the strength any longer to go looking for history, the repercussions of history, in a hamlet. I’m waiting for history to come to me. I’m wandering around the courtyard among the cars and the well.
I’m inventing battles, clever strategies. The Germans are allowed to advance as far as the Loire. On the opposite bank, our cannons await. Behind the Germans, our forces advance. The Germans are caught in a crossfire. They try to escape toward their flanks, but our aircraft fly over their lines, ranging between our forward units on the right bank and our artillery on the left bank. Our planes work like plows digging a furrow. Bodies are falling on top of bodies, the same motion as earth turned over by a plowshare. Pleading arms reach toward the sky. They are mowed down. And, no more than a reaper can spare a stalk of wheat once his scythe is swung, our airmen cannot spare the supplicants.
I remake history. Hitler, defeated, is being guarded by a group of sturdy artillerymen, the ones we met outside Lorris who were going to fight at the Loire. Carbines slung over their shoulders, they surround him, this man in a trench coat, a rat in a trap, a rat who can’t turn back. An irritable Parisian hurls a “So, little man, it didn’t go the way you wanted?…” at him. But the others keep their distance and remain impassive: a wall of men surrounding the beast.
Stretched out on the straw with no other view than the plaster on the wall, shutting my eyes to the world like a sick animal, I give myself over to stupid ruminations that have the ease and flow of dreams. Could what we call history be anything more than men’s vainest illusions? What we attribute to history in wartime and to the powerful in peacetime, isn’t it a sign of our own incapacity? We make history as the sick make sickness. We’re responsible for history like the insane are responsible for the creation of asylums.
Maybe Spengler is right. Lucien Febvre quite rightly ranked him, with Count Keyserling, among philosophy’s journalists, who made history a thing in itself. Only it is real; men are nothing but empty exteriors. History is God’s chessboard. The Germans are playing and winning.
But no … nations exist only in their comic-opera aspects, their picturesque qualities, their legends, their books: the Italy of painters, the Spain of dances, the France of Descartes.
A country’s characteristics, are they real or fabricated by historians, which is to say, by history’s journalists, who are worth no more than the others?
There will always be wars, say those who think in proverbs. But what stupidity to think that war will always be the last resort of history or of men!
I knew the pre-1914 Weimar. Weimar, “capital and residence,” which meant that, as capital of the Grand Duchy of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach, the city had the honor of being the residence of the grand duke. Count Kessler invited me. There we discussed only Kultur and Bildung.a At the Goethe Archive, old people, or young people who could be mistaken for old people, were studying Goethe’s grammar and philosophy. The Nietzsche Archive was a shrine. Nietzsche’s sister, Madame Förster-Nietzsche, was keeper of the temple. There I met Professor Andler; bright Viennese; Norwegians, who resembled shepherds; and Swedes, who dressed in Poiret.
The grand duke had “modern” ideas. On the advice of Count Kessler, he had sent for Henri Van de Velde, who, leaving Brussels and giving up Neo-Impressionist painting, devoted himself to rejuvenating architecture and the “minor arts” in the Grand Duchy of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach. “We don’t dress the way we did in the time of Voltaire or Frederick II. We don’t want to live in the past like a hermit crab. Our houses and our furniture should be our own.” Germanic obedience: Van de Velde designed nail heads and the manufacturers of Saxony adopted his models.
Kessler and his friends weren’t lying. Nietzsche for them didn’t awaken a greater Germany, rather he was a new master of the Ego, a Dionysian Ego as he meant it, an aristocratic Ego gorged on culture. Renoir, Cézanne, Monet, Seurat, Van Gogh were their passwords. They constituted a sort of court modeled on times past, where artists met the world’s great men.
Did they have the ulterior motive of world domination? Did they already believe in the historical necessity of a war they didn’t want? I wouldn’t know how to respond. But even if they believed that only Germany could bring order to the world, that order for them was only the order of external rules, hygiene and transportation networks. France was Greece for them. But, deeply naive, they saw in France only its classic writers and its painters after Watteau. They dreamed of a world whose sole values would be knowledge of the arts and elegant customs. In reality, they didn’t just dream of it. They created it, in part. But for themselves alone. An artificial island.
I remember the park, with its stereotypically romantic trees, belonging to the poet Richard Dehmel and Monsieur von Mützenbecher, head of the theater of the Grand Duchy of Baden.
I’m dreaming. My dream erases the years. Monsieur von Mützenbecher appears before me, not in a suit jacket or black morning coat, as I was used to seeing him, but in a German officer’s uniform. I turn over on the straw. Monsieur von Mützenbecher is saluting me. I can see that he is surprised by my reserve. These people have hardly any imagination or taste. An oaf like all the others. Does he think I’m going to jump into his arms?
“Weimar,” I say to him, “Weimar and Nietzsche and your idolatry of French painting; all that was only a fifth column.”
“No,” he responds, “the German aristocracy never loved Hitler.”
“But it serves him.”
“No, it serves Germany. Even if Germany is wrong, even if Germany is criminal; did you want us to betray her? We are not in the days when generals committed treason without dishonoring themselves. You must admit, that is one of the effects of your democracy … Thus we, the officers, have been obligated to follow our troops. It is history turned upside down.”
He bursts out laughing, a false laughter, a philosophical laughter.
“This is the world inverted, like a glove turned inside out. But our meeting is the spark, the spark that rights the world … Look …”
And indeed I see German soldiers forming up, leaving, marching in step toward the Rhine, returning home.
I no longer saw the Loire. The Loire was no longer anything more to me than a strategic myth. From the courtyard I see shrubs, fields. I have no connection to this featureless, flat lan
dscape, which seems laid out by chance and to which only chance has led me. And I sense clearly that I’m granted these two meters of courtyard and the straw I have for the night only reluctantly. Such as when I apologized to Soutreux for whatever trouble I might cause her, and she replied, “But no … you can certainly stay here for a day or two.” Other landscapes, old homesteads, I yearn for them, I can’t let go; I’d like to be there in the blink of an eye, by a miracle. I’ve left pieces of my life there. Such as my cousin Nicot’s house overlooking the Saône. How nicely it all comes together: the river, the old gate, the ancient garden, the welcome and hospitality, the ten-year-old Chardonnay rich as hazelnuts, the 1840 folding screen that instantly puts me into a fairy tale. The house in Saint-Amour, the house in Villars, I’ve thought about them the way thinking of fruit makes one’s mouth water.
I’d like to escape, to escape to any time, any place where I don’t know the price of mattresses, of beveled-glass windowpanes and gardeners’ hours. I hope to console myself contemplating three rosebushes against a background of locust trees. It’s a momentary pleasure. An old habit. Man isn’t only an eye. These are the war’s roses, the debacle’s roses, Soutreux’s roses.
Some German planes pass overhead, practically hedge-hopping. We’re watched even from the sky.
A rumor circulates that the Italians are in Nice. At that point I didn’t know I possessed Nice. I didn’t know I was the owner of Nice … I didn’t realize all my proprietary instincts. Nice had just been snatched away from me.
The vieux monsieur comes over to me looking desperate and furious.
“I had salvaged a jar of red-currant preserves … The Germans took it.”
Aufresne is washing and polishing his unusable car, which has a leaky piston rod. He prunes a hedge. He knows how to kill a rabbit and turn its skin inside out like a glove. He rakes the courtyard. Not just to make himself useful and to please Soutreux. This departmentstore department manager turned proprietor has remained rustic and a do-it-yourselfer. Just as leisure soothes my boredom, activity relieves his.
He contemplated the words of the Quaker pharmacist. “That man is right,” he said, “England will save us … England has mastery of the seas; Germany will be able to do nothing against a blockade organized by England.”
This is how he translated the mystical pharmacist’s providential dogma into economic terms. France had been taken, but he had the English fleet and was launching it across the seas.
I’m not mocking him. Such an emotional reaction doesn’t seem ridiculous to me. But I don’t know how to juggle mastery of the seas.
A bond has been established between the Aufresnes and us because like us they endure uncomfortably Soutreux’s hospitality, her on-and-off congeniality and hostile silence; because like us they feel the baseness of her reverse nationalism in the victors’ presence; and because like us they were ashamed by the indecent welcome she gave the German soldiers.
What a place, what circumstances for striking up a friendship! But beautiful friendships aren’t born by accident, even the most pathetic of accidents. They are prepared before the first encounter, via separate pathways. And the impact of that encounter isn’t for everybody.
I had some difficulty keeping up a conversation with Aufresne. His kind of bourgeois knows only how to talk about business. I’m not saying he’d lost his soul; he no longer had the language to express it.
Corot’s father sold cloth. But he didn’t own an automobile and the political issues facing him were not international. And in Corot’s father’s time the newspapers still had an artisanal character: they weren’t yet mass-producing news and doctrine. The difference between articles in the Constitutionnel and articles in a newspaper today is the difference between a bolt-action breechloader and a machine gun.
Aufresne mulls over more ideas than a peasant, but a peasant knows much better how to weigh an idea and distinguish what is concrete in it and what is beyond knowing.
Once I was told, “The Dutch peasant is superior to the Belgian peasant because he has read at least one book: the Bible.” The descendants of Corot’s father in the France of 1940 hadn’t read a book, I mean a real book. They read newspapers and magazines. They think in captions and snapshots. This is apparent when they touch on problems of any breadth, politics in particular. Deep down they feel everything escapes them, but they don’t admit it. Then they force themselves to give shape to vague ideas, to feelings they’ve been fed. They personalize them, manipulating France or Britain like marionettes; they gesticulate, raise their voices, it’s as if all the muscles in their bodies are working, as if some towering rage or unknown despair is animating them: they want to create truth out of nothingness. When I hear my contemporaries deal with politics I often think about the madwoman in La Salpêtrière who believed the world did not exist beyond what she created, minute by minute. And “squatters” is what she called the chaotic beings she assembled to make the world and “supplement the diligence of the gods,” much like our contemporaries vainly assemble “squatters” in politics.
In the same way, Aufresne, who is the calmest of men, is agitated by history. He fears the workers of Belleville and Billancourt. If they’re at work, won’t they revolt? Who will keep them in line?
“We need to wait,” he tells me. “It’s better not to return to Paris for a few days … not before food supplies have been organized. They can’t let us die of hunger …”
I recall he intended “they” to mean the French government. We didn’t think the Germans’ stay in Paris could last more than a few days.
At the crossroads of a byway and the Gien road, two women and two children were resting. They were coming from the Paris area pushing a cart loaded with a trunk and two suitcases. Their clothes were neat and brushed, their faces washed and fresh-looking. As I pointed this out with admiration, one of the women said to me, smiling, “But it’s perfectly normal … water and straw can be found everywhere.”
When the Germans were camping at Les Douciers, Lerouchon held a salon in front of her trailer. A couple of soldiers balanced on folding stools. We could hear peals of laughter.
Behind the house, we opened a can of food (we got a little bread from Ouzouer and Soutreux brought us some soup). Lerouchon came from her trailer offering us three pieces of rabbit. “You’re welcome to it, I swear …” My wife, thanking her, refused, saying we had enough to eat. I confess, I admire that dignity and regret the rabbit. Something of the soldier was reconstituted in me. I truly believe I would have accepted, for I have been hungry for days and hiding it heroically. And Lerouchon has such an air of a camp follower offering a bottle. So much a camp follower that she doesn’t distinguish between French soldiers and German soldiers. It’s an air she has. I don’t believe her husband, who is at the front, would have anything else to reproach her for. Anyway she speaks of him readily. “Let’s hope nothing has happened to him … No, I’m sure nothing has … I can sense it …” She repeats several times, “I sense it … I sense it … I sense it …” And you might say she senses it with her nose: She juts forward a muzzle that grimaces and sniffs.
She has a battery-powered radio in her trailer. We listen to the German broadcast from Compiègne. Chancellor Hitler … the rail car … the 1918 monumentb … No commentary. It’s sober and terrible. It’s nighttime and a cow is mooing in the meadow.
Radio-Journal de France announces that a prefect who deserted has been dismissed and that there is fighting on the front in the Vosges and near Clermont-Ferrand.
I must look unhappy, because Lerouchon bursts out laughing, shouting in my ear.
“But laugh a little …”
What’s more, she reassures us about the fate of France.
“It will be a protectorate, like Morocco … We won’t be any unhappier; we’ll work like before …”
Lerouchon is a simple monster. Soutreux is more complicated. She isn’t plebeian, but rather a “petite dame,” simpering, precious and pretentious. Lerouchon ties hers
elf into knots; Soutreux more does somersaults. I’m not searching for the origins of the German salient these two women set up in the Loiret. I only wish to describe Soutreux as I saw her day by day, kind or contemptible, hateful or ridiculous; like a domesticated animal, closer to a dog or cat than a human being. She differed from the Lerouchon woman in that she did not express emotions in simple barks; she used a few twigs, a few slivers of ideas. She told us about a conversation between two Germans. One said that he believed in God but not the God of religions. Lerouchon would be incapable of retaining and repeating such lofty abstractions.
Soutreux’s husband—I get these details from Aufresne—is of very humble origins. An industrialist, he owns millions’ worth of merchandise in inventory. He is not a talkative man, but his steadiness and loyalty are certain. I can easily imagine this businessman, who is not the kind that collects paintings, who absolutely doesn’t give a damn about Jouvet’s stage directing, who though a “naturalized” bourgeois endures not knowing the rites of high society and takes pleasure in nothing more than hunting and fishing on the weekend.
Does he know his wife’s feelings and how she behaves? It can be assumed he disregards women’s opinions, particularly his wife’s. Soutreux herself told us he spends whole days around her without speaking. But the simplest prudence or most basic decency would have led him to restrain his wife from showing herself to be so scandalously German.
This taste for Germany is her distinguishing trait. Other than that, she is maternal with dogs. She is escorted by a group of yelping beasts, and this barking seems to delight her. They sleep in her bed. I admit I don’t like the foxhound much. She bends over him tenderly, murmuring gently, “Where is my little professor?” and the foxhound instantly howls as if at the moon without ever having to be coaxed. She has pity for the rabbit she’ll eat tomorrow and says “poor little animal” to it with touching warmth. She is sympathetic toward stray dogs, and God only knows how many are wandering about. But she grumbles if her butane or firewood is used to cook the baby’s cereal. To make it, the Aufresnes build a fire in the meadow.