The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Seated next to the President of the Republic, Castor attended the première of Shoah. I was not invited to the unveiling of the commemorative plaque at 11 bis rue Schoelcher.

  As at the rue de la Bûcherie, we each had our own desk, but now they were bigger and more practical and the vast space in the atelier meant I did not feel guilty when I was not working. Truth be told, I worked a great deal and wrote a lot at the rue Schoelcher, both for Les Temps modernes and France Dimanche. I was the link between these two apparently contradictory activities, it was the same man who wrote the articles, with the same anxiety as he began each article, the same seriousness, the same scrupulousness, the same attention to detail ensuring that famous unity of self. We could write for four or five hours at a time without speaking to each other, but I would unhesitatingly interrupt Castor to read her a passage from something I was writing for France Dimanche and ask her opinion. In addition to rewriting, I was asked to write about a number of difficult criminal investigations and frequently accepted. It amused and interested me, I learned much: how to question, be cunning, to take risks – it was here I learned the lessons that would repay me a hundredfold during the making of Shoah, which in many respects can be considered a criminal investigation. A man named Bobine, who had barricaded himself in a farm in the Cévennes in a siege situation, threatened to shoot me even as I negotiated with him. He dashed from one window to another, aiming his loaded hunting rifle at me, then suddenly fired, missing me only by some miracle. The bullet ripped through the shoulder pad in my anorak. Bobine was suspected of having murdered three people. On another occasion – Castor and Sartre were in Switzerland on the first leg of their summer holiday – I was sent with a young photographer to Villeneuve-sur-Lot to investigate a murder. We arrived after a terrible overnight train journey and at Villeneuve station I rented a car, a convertible Renault 4CV, to drive fifty kilometres along winding roads with treacherous bends to the crime scene. At three o’clock we wrapped up our inquiry and, eager to return to Paris as fast as possible, I headed back. The Renault 4CV was the standard French car of the time, it was a narrow four-seater and was skittish, but cheap. The tyres on the one I had rented were bald – I had forgotten to check them before we set out – and I may also have been driving a little fast along the twisting road. The car suddenly skidded, nothing serious, this had happened to me before, all I needed to do was steer into the skid then gently correct it. But my passenger, the photographer, panicked and did the worst thing possible, throwing himself across me, grabbing the steering wheel and jerking it violently the other way. The car rolled, bouncing onto the roof, back onto the wheels, the roof again, until it finally came to a halt, like a stunt in a movie. Back then, safety belts did not exist and I was catapulted out through the roof and knocked unconscious. When I came to, I felt a terrible pain all over my body, I was lying face down, my feet, legs, my belly in the deep ditch on the verge, my chest and my head lying on the tarmac. There was a crowd of people around me, I could see the crazy photographer – I won’t give his name, though I will never forget it – bounding from one side to the other, taking photographs of me from every conceivable angle and it was impossible to guess whether he was doing this as a joyful, conscientious professional or to cover himself in case of an investigation. A large crowd had gathered, drawn by the accident. Through my mounting pain I heard imperious voices say, ‘Whatever you do, don’t move him, don’t turn him over, his spine is probably broken.’ Other voices: ‘Don’t give him anything to drink.’ It was the day of the annual fair in Villeneuve-sur-Lot, a Sunday of festivities that mobilized firemen, ambulances and police. As a result, I spent four hours lying in the ditch because, even after they had been alerted, the rescue services could not reach me, their sirens and flashing lights proving utterly ineffective at clearing the roads that would lead them to me. I was admitted to the religious hospital in Cahors only late in the afternoon and was not examined until the following morning. I had no broken bones, neither spine, nor ribs, hand nor foot, arm nor leg nor skull, but my body was covered with spectacular bruises and contusions that would cause me great pain for some time and took several weeks to fade. The pain was such that the doctors prescribed Palfium, another name for morphine. I have happy memories of Sister Apollonie hovering over my motionless body with a thermometer, because I was running a high fever, her blue and white wimple framing her fresh face, and saying, ‘Go ahead, stick in the bayonet.’ At about five o’clock – just at the time bullfights usually begin – she would administer the Palfium and in that moment I experienced ecstasy, happiness greater than I have ever known in my life. All pain vanished as I lay there revelling in pure time, spending a blissful night, a faint anxiousness as night wore on, faint at first then mounting because suddenly, at dawn, the pain would return, all the more excruciating since the memory of that blissful peace I had just experienced did not fade. I rang the bell, called out to my friend Sister Apollonie, who never failed to come, and asked her for more Palfium. She tried to make me understand that it was important I did not become dependent, I was given painkillers that had no effect, placebos that I recognized as such, every fibre of my being waiting for that return to ecstasy, that blessed hour when I would be given my drug.

  Since it had been agreed that I would join Castor and Sartre in Basle, I had the hospital send a message that as a result of force majeure I was unable to come. Castor panicked and before long both of them were at my bedside, having cut short their holiday, changed their plans to be with me. Castor spent the afternoon in my room with her ‘knitting’ – by which I mean a book – while I hurled curses and insults at Sister Apollonie who was immovable as to the time I was given my Palfium. Sister Apollonie and Castor, a lapsed Catholic famously educated at Cours Désir, became as thick as thieves, siding against me. By the time Sartre joined us in the evening, I would already be in a state of bliss. I was touched by his affection for me and, though I tried in vain to persuade them to continue their holiday as planned, they stayed in Cahors until the pain finally subsided and I was discharged. Travel plans were seriously revised, Castor having decided, with her constantly renewed enthusiasm, that the three of us should explore the Lot and Limousin, visiting Gordes and the Lascaux caves. This unforeseen parenthesis was to end at Toulouse where we would go our separate ways.

  I often travelled with Sartre, both in France and abroad. I remember a Paris–Athens drive, leaving La Coupole on the boulevard Montparnasse after an early breakfast in the joyous spirit of adventure of Paris–Dakar, Sartre chirruping like a bird, somewhere between six and eight stopovers scheduled, as well as a number of ‘specials’ planned by Castor who always insisted on deviating from the shortest route in her determination not to miss some wonder of nature or art. Turin or Milan, Venice, Trieste, Belgrade, where Sartre would be received by Serbo-Croatian writers and possibly by Josip Broz Tito himself, Skopje and the Macedonian writers, these were the planned stopovers, and finally, the Parthenon as the supreme pleasure. It was a long trip, with no motorways – they barely existed at the time – except for a section between Croatia and Belgrade christened the autoput, commissioned by Tito, a 300-kilometre stretch built by brigades of young volunteers – who sang as they worked – drawn from the various peoples of the Federation of the Yugoslav nations, united by the partisans’ war they waged against the Nazis and, as we know, doomed fifty years later to slaughter each other. The autoput had nothing in common with the slick, smooth, well-signposted motorways of today: workers’ songs are no compensation for skill and expertise. Arriving at night in some unfamiliar foreign town was like something out of vaudeville, or some scholastic disputatio that sometimes led to violent arguments and lengthy sulks. The guiding principle that ruled Sartre’s heart and his actions demanded that he be dependent on no one but himself in a profound ontological mistrust of others – ‘Hell is other people’, the famous line from Huis clos, was, I can attest, lived and personified by him in everyday life. To find the hotel, in dimly lit streets with un
readable signposts, with me at the wheel, Castor in the passenger seat beside me armed with a map, and Sartre, with another map in the back seat, each devising a route that rarely coincided. Voices were raised, each was determined to be right, I kept driving, following conflicting orders, round and round in circles, so close to our goal yet hopelessly lost as exhaustion set in, something that made Sartre particularly cantankerous. During one of our first trips, when I naïvely said to Sartre, ‘I’ll ask someone,’ he was beside himself at the very idea. So I said nothing for a while; then, with Castor’s support, I decided to ask anyway. I rolled down the window and uttered the magic word centrum, intelligible in any language. The answer quickly put an end to our peregrinations but Sartre scowled, his face and his mood that of a bulldog.

  His Cornelian determination to be dependent on no one led him to extremes: I would watch him suffer for days with a vicious toothache resulting in abscesses and gumboils, and still he carried on writing, claiming he could master the pain, since it was unthinkable that he should ask anyone – even a dentist – for help. In conflating his body’s misadventures with his sovereign liberty, it was logical that the cure, too, depended entirely on him. When we travelled, he always carried an enormous sum of money in his back pocket, money for the journey but also as guarantor of his autonomy. This should not be mistaken for avarice, or as some penchant for hoarding. It was quite the contrary: he was always the most generous of men, throwing his sous (‘le sou’, as we have seen, being his favourite use of litotes) to the four winds and to anyone who asked. He never owned anything, never bought an apartment and died renting a spartan two-room flat. It would be wrong to think that it was easy for him to refuse the Nobel Prize, he was in desperate need of money and the prize money would have been a godsend, alleviating his financial worries for quite some time. Knowing how much it would have helped, I urged him to accept since, as I told him, he would be stuck with the Nobel whether he accepted or refused. But he did not give in to my tempting sophisms. ‘I might,’ he said, ‘have accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for what I did to help the Algerian people.’

  I spent two days with them in Toulouse and the end of that curious jaunt that resulted from my accident. Sartre was in dreadful shape; I had never seen him like that, and Castor herself seemed terror-stricken. He would sit for hours at a café table on the place du Capitole, his good eye almost as dead as the bad, absent from the world, from others, from himself, staring fixedly at the leg of a table, like Roquentin in Nausea staring at the root of a chestnut tree when contingency, the one truth in the universe, is suddenly, brutally, revealed to him. Sartre’s usual gaiety and hyperactive optimism had suddenly sunk into a chasm of meaninglessness, the obvious, irrefutable fact that ‘man is a useless passion’. Existential angst, whatever Sartre may have said when showing off – ‘I have never suffered from nausea,’ he maintains in his Carnets de la drôle de la guerre [War Diaries] – was not merely a philosophical concept but a reality. While in Sartre it manifested itself by gloom and inactivity, in Castor – since it was something they shared, and this was not unimportant in their relationship – it translated into an utterly unpredictable explosion. Sitting, standing, or lying down, in the car or on foot, in public or in private, she would burst into violent, convulsive sobs, her whole body racked with gasps, with heartrending cries punctuated by long howls of incommunicable despair. I don’t remember the first time, it happened many times during the seven years we spent together, but thinking about it now as I write, it was never associated with some wrong done to her nor some misfortune. On the contrary, she seemed to break on the rocks of happiness, to be crushed by it. When I witnessed these attacks, which hardened her, shut her away completely, I felt utterly helpless: no word, no gesture could help or soothe her. Awkward, terrified, I tried to hold her in my arms, to press my hands to her temples, to kiss her lips, to talk to her. Nothing worked, the convulsive overpowering dread had to progress through every stage until, after a considerable time, she would manage to calm herself, but always at the cost of an acute, excruciating awareness of the fragility of human happiness, of the mortal fate of what mortals call ‘happiness’, whose very nature is always threatened, compromised. The very thought of Sartre’s death, that he might die before she did, or that our relationship would one day end, something that, from the beginning, she insisted was certain, might trigger a violent attack. So violent that it involved and altered her whole body and its function: her usually sweet breath, ‘fragrant with long vegetal and rose-rich honeys’, as Rimbaud says in ‘Les Chercheuses de poux’, suddenly became putrid and I had to force myself even to get close to her. Fear showed itself in her in other ways: she was haunted by the obsessive belief that recounting every detail, of a day, a dinner, a week, was always and everywhere possible. Everything had to be said, everything immediately recounted with almost breathless haste, as though to defer the right moment or to be silent condemned to nothingness anything that was not immediately spoken. It truly entailed an inaugural, almost military, account of one’s activities, her desire to know everything and her fear of forgetting what was yet to be detailed made it impossible to linger on this or that significant event. She was in such a hurry to move on to the next point that she often did not hear what was said to her, or became muddled. The accounts, oral or written, she later gave, to Sartre for example – because, as in the shimmering, shifting whispers in Saint-Tropez I mentioned earlier, the first story became the story of a story of a story – are evidence of this confusion, an unambiguous symptom of neurosis. In the time that we lived together, it was not really obvious to me, since living with her meant I was spared the majority of these accounts. It was later, after our separation, when I came to see her twice a week, to take her out to a restaurant, that her fervent need to tell me everything the moment we met became unbearable because, having difficult or important things to say, I needed to impose my own timescale on our conversations; this was crucial to me. There would be a scene almost as soon as we met, I was incapable of producing the detached, quick-fire account she expected, I told her as much and she closed in on herself, her face took on an offended, sullen expression; only wine could harmonize our temporalities at which point we would spend long, happy hours, her fears now allayed, and her wonderful ability to listen that I mentioned earlier was given free reign.

  Chapter 13

  1958, I am thirty-three. For me, this is the year of ‘Le curé d’Uruffe’, of Général de Gaulle’s return to power, of my trip to China and North Korea and of the presentiment, which quickly became obvious, that my relationship with Castor had to take a new form. What links these moments in my life is something much deeper than mere chronological confluence.

  In Uruffe, an ordinary parish in Lorraine, the curate put a bullet through the neck of Régine Fays, a member of his flock, a girl of twenty, pregnant by him and about to give birth; then, having murdered her, he cut open her belly, delivered the baby and put out the child’s eyes with a penknife although not before, in an expeditious abridgement of the liturgy, he had baptized the baby and given it the last rites. It was a crime the like of which occurs once in a lifetime and France Dimanche asked me to cover the trial, which opened before the cour d’assises of Meurthe-et-Moselle on 24 January 1958, a cold morning, with all of Nancy shrouded in snow and ice. I will not recount here the disturbing life of Guy Desnoyers, the ‘murderer of Uruffe’ as Le Figaro had the audacity to call him in its issue that first day, with an adept sleight of hand managing simultaneously to extricate the curate from the Church and the Church from the curate. I followed the whole trial, including those parts of it that were held in camera, and I was present for the passing of the lenient sentence, which allowed the curate, guilty of double murder and a thousand sins, to escape the death penalty, the result of mitigating circumstances that were never stated during the two-day trial conducted by a prosecutor anxious above all to avoid raising any difficult questions.

  I wrote an article for France Dimanche that I would d
elight in rereading today; it was satisfactory, to my mind, for what it contained, but unsatisfactory because considerations of space made it impossible for me to do an in-depth analysis. France Dimanche – the unity of self is found here – was like a pilot-fish, like the first stage of a rocket; I decided that I could not leave it at that, that I wanted to write another article, free of all constraints, for Les Temps modernes, a publication that had always afforded news items a status and a dignity every bit equal to that of literature and philosophy. Sartre and Castor eagerly devoured anything to do with human passions in the newspapers, they read crime novels, and at Les Temps modernes we never baulked from publishing accounts of the most deviant acts if we felt them to be revealing. So I set to work at my desk on the rue Schoelcher early in February, but Castor was determined not to miss out on her sacrosanct winter holidays and had planned that we would go skiing in Courchevel. I explained to her again that I could not juggle skiing and an article that was taking up all my time. In the end I forewent skiing, something that surprises me to this day, I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of doing so, given how much I loved hurtling down the pistes: in the two weeks we were in Courchevel I did not spend a single hour skiing. Castor went out on her own, while I barely left the dark room, writing from morning to night, not even going out for a breath of the pure, rarefied mountain air; every evening I gave her what I had written. I was taking mild doses of amphetamine at the time, one tablet of Corydrane could switch on, in Sartre’s words, ‘a sun inside my head’. One tablet was not enough for him, he needed a huge sun and took fistfuls of Corydrane, chewing them to a bitter paste, consciously ruining his health in the name of what he referred to as the ‘full employment’ of his brain. Corydrane helped me when I was writing several articles simultaneously, but it was important to measure the dose, the effects were short-lived and it was impossible to avoid the muscles stiffening in the lower jaw and the depression that followed the effects. I gave up a long time ago, even before amphetamines in all their forms were banned (RAF bomber pilots who had to make long flights to reach their targets stayed awake thanks to Benzedrine). My article was published in April 1958, in issue 146 of Les Temps modernes under the title ‘The Curate of Uruffe and the Church Interest’ – ‘the Church interest’ in the sense we talk about the ‘national interest’. I was immensely proud of this long piece, which immediately won praise from all who read it and has remained in their memories like a beacon; people still comment on it today. What is called ‘word of mouth’ was very influential, the article did not simply reach readers of Les Temps modernes, but also the judges, the barristers and – surreptitiously, of course – the Church. Great lawyers such as Georges Kiejman, who worked on several famous cases, asked me to do for them what I had done for the Uruffe murder case. One Sunday afternoon, when I was alone in the atelier on the rue Schoelcher, the doorbell rang unexpectedly. I opened the door to find Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and Françoise Giroud, the owners of L’Express. This was the first time I had met Jean-Jacques, but I had regularly bumped into Françoise in the offices of France Dimanche, where she was something of a star, with her own weekly column profiling personalities who, starting out with little or nothing, had ‘made a success of themselves’. Jacques-Laurent Bost had viciously mocked her in an unattributed article for Les Temps modernes titled ‘From Pickled Herrings to Caviar’, which I was wrongly thought to have written, and which proved to be a turning point in Françoise’s career and in her life. She was so hurt by the piece that she stopped writing the column and quickly joined the serious press, in this case L’Express, where, at Jean-Jacques’ behest, she proved a brilliant editor. They both worked Sundays and holidays and were utterly focused on consolidating the newspaper’s success, building on its eruption into the media world. Mauriac and Sartre had written for them and Françoise later got her revenge on Bost when she hired him. They had read my piece on the curate of Uruffe and had come to ask me, in a very formal manner, to join the editorial team of L’Express, offering terms that were difficult to refuse. Instead of leaping at the opportunity, however, I asked for some time to consider their offer, something that seemed to surprise, indeed to irritate them. And although their offer was flattering and tempting, in the end I said no. Something deep within me insisted I refuse; I did not want to lose the freedom I had and did not want to be a professional journalist. I could never have written ‘The Curate of Uruffe’ for L’Express as I had for Les Temps modernes. I was a lone wolf, I wanted to remain so, and limiting my range of options was becoming increasingly impossible.