5 “Comprenne qui voudra,” Au rendez-vous allemand, Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1945.
6 An allusion to French singer-songwriter Georges Brassens’ La Tondue.
7 The Peat Bog Soldiers (originally in German, Börgermoorlied) was written in 1933 by German prisoners at the Börgermoor camp. This penitentiary, one of the first Nazi camps, was situated in the marshy area of Emsland.
8 In the early stages of the Occupation, following the Vichy government’s appeal, more than 300,000 volunteers left France for German soil. Later, in 1942, Pierre Laval devised the Relève, whose goal was to slowly repatriate prisoners of war in exchange for volunteer workers. The ingenious system, based on reciprocity, had not worked as intended.
9 Albert Camus in the journal Combat, October 29, 1944.
10 Adapted from Mary Caws, Selected Poems of René Char. New York: New Directions.
11 This has led two specialists, Philippe Blanchet and Médéric Gasquet-Cyrus, to comment humorously that “Marseille French might be completely French, but it’s completely something else!” (Le Marseillais de poche, Paris, Assimil, 2004)
Table of Contents
COVER
A Pinch of Time
The Curtain Rises
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THE CURTAIN FALLS
Afterword
Endnotes
Guide
Cover
Contents
A Pinch of Time Page 18