JULY

Paris

On 6 July, for the first time, Monsieur Maurice Bardèche holds a copy of his book. He has travelled in a Europe he defines as a slum, and written it in rage and loathing. In Lettre à François Mauriac, he attacks the French Resistance for what he views as contempt of the law. He defends the Vichy Regime and French collaboration with the Nazis, and criticises l’épuration légale, the judicial purge of collaborators and sympathisers currently under way to cleanse today’s France from yesterday’s dirt. The world is an unlovely place in Maurice Bardèche’s eyes.

The new book explodes in the market like a bomb, selling 80,000 copies. Maurice Bardèche calls himself a Fascist writer — but one day he will be more than that.

Roswell

Sheep rancher William ‘Mac’ Brazel comes across some twisted debris in the New Mexico desert. He reports it to the local authorities, describing it as wreckage from a flying saucer. At least one radio station interrupts its scheduled programme to issue a news bulletin.

Delhi

Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer and one of Dickie Mountbatten’s old friends from Oxford days, arrives in India for the first time in his life. It is 8 July, and it is hot. Reluctantly, he has accepted the task of drawing the country’s new borders, for — according to the Lord Chancellor, who appointed him — Nehru and Jinnah will never reach agreement. In the Lord Chancellor’s view, Radcliffe possesses two enviable characteristics that make him particularly well suited to the task: his brilliance as a lawyer, and his ignorance of India.

He is given five weeks, no more, no less. The work is divided up between two committees: one is responsible for drawing the border between India and West Pakistan, the other for dividing India from East Pakistan. Would it perhaps be advisable to involve someone from the UN, as Jinnah proposes? No, that would take too long. Are there any other committee members with experience of drawing borders? Does Radcliffe take on any advisers? Does he carry out any field research? No.

He flies over northern India once, and looks out of the window. He visits Lahore and Calcutta. Apart from that, he sits in his bungalow in Delhi, shut in among maps, large quantities of maps. Responsible for regions that are home to 88 million people.

Sète

The SS President Warfield, once an American pleasure steamer, has left Marseille and moored in another French port, Sète. Its crew is composed of young Jewish Americans. What they lack in seamanship, they more than make up for in knowledge of integral calculus, baseball, and philosophy. The vessel, originally designed for 400 passengers and calm waters, will soon sail into world history at a speed of 12 knots and with just over 4500 people on board.

At dawn on 9 July, the passengers arrive in Sète, by train or lorry, or on foot: 1600 men, 1282 women, and 1672 children and adolescents, all with forged visas for Colombia. Former concentration camp inmates with knapsacks, wearing three or four layers of clothing to make it easier to carry their belongings. Numerous pregnant women, and the orphaned children from the camp at Strüth, near Ansbach.

Four-and-a-half thousand people. How is it possible for them all to arrive in Sète and board a ship without the French authorities intervening? Is it because Sète lies within the constituency of the French Transport Minister, a staunch advocate of Zionism? Or because many customs officers, harbour workers, and border-control officials are active in the Socialist Party?

Or is because of the Tour de France? Today is the day on which the eyes, hopes, and adoration of the French are focused on the cyclist René Vietto, the magnificent young man from the Midi who is in the lead and looks like a winner. The Tour — the men, the sweat, the struggle of the twelfth stage — hasn’t been held for seven hard years, but today it runs by Sète like a wild machine with spokes glittering in the sun.

Meanwhile, the refugees board the ship. It takes six hours. The makeshift beds in what was once the President Warfield’s ballroom fill up rapidly. There is no way back now — just men, women, children, expectant mothers, and elderly people, and the thought of the Gaza shore where they are to land.

Then nothing happens. The ship waits for a pilot to guide her out of the harbour, but in vain. The British will not let the French allow the ship to leave, so the French will not let the pilot provide assistance. But with 4554 people on board, enough water for just seven days at sea, and only 13 toilets, time itself becomes the pilot. On 10 July, the ship departs without either assistance or authorisation. Songs, prayers, children’s cries and hopes drift over the sea, a mist of anticipation.

Paris

The life of young Maurice Bardèche took a new turn when he left the village of Dun-sur-Auron and the modest existence of a son of an umbrella-maker. A scholarship enabled him to go to the prestigious Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. As a gauche, rustic 18-year-old, he felt lost in the metropolis. But shortly after his arrival, something happened which was to set the course of the rest of his life.

In one of the open passageways around the institute’s courtyard, he ran into two young men of the same age standing on chairs and declaiming poetry by Baudelaire in unison. One of the pair was Robert Brasillach. He was tanned, with dark, almost black, hair, a round face, and spectacles, observed the young Bardèche, who was also struck by Brasillach’s style of dress and good humour. To Bardèche’s surprise, the attraction was mutual. They became so close that their schoolmates nicknamed them Brassilèche and Bardach.

Then Maurice Bardèche fell in love with Robert Brasillach’s sister Suzanne, got engaged, married her, and took her on a honeymoon trip to Spain during the Civil War. Accompanied by Robert Brasillach.

It was a friendship that would come to mean everything. Bardèche and Brasillach worked and argued against democracy together. In 1935, they wrote a pioneering work on the history and aesthetics of film; they wrote about literature and about politics. In their eyes, France was being weakened by alcoholism, a lower birth rate, and a Jewish invasion. The solution was to be found in the concept of heroism, men with a powerful physique, a cult of fresh air and sport, and attacks on both Communism and bourgeois society.

Je suis partout was France’s main Fascist newspaper, with a print run approaching 300,000. Robert Brasillach became its editor-in-chief. Defining himself as a ‘moderate anti-Semite’, he called for Jews to be excluded from the social community and, later, ‘removed’ from France altogether, ‘including “the little ones”’. The publication supported Benito Mussolini, took a positive view of the Spanish Falangists, and welcomed the British Fascists, the Romanian Iron Guard, and the Belgian Fascists. From 1936, it sympathised with Hitler and Nazism. Brasillach praised Nazi Germany’s ‘well-organised beauty’, whereas the French Republic was likened to a ‘syphilitic prostitute, stinking of cheap scent and vaginal secretions’.

During the war, Brasillach used his pen to betray and unmask Resistance members and urge that they be killed. For this, he was arraigned in 1945 and sentenced to death.

He was not alone. Some 170,000 French citizens were brought to trial after the end of the war, charged with being sympathisers or collaborating with the Nazis. Of these, 50,000 were punished by being stripped of their civil rights — a so-called ‘national degradation’ — and about 800 were executed. In addition, tens of thousands were extrajudicially murdered by lynch mobs and through show trials. Nearly 10,000 women were punished by having their heads shaved and being subjected to public humiliation for alleged ‘horizontal collaboration’.

Yet Robert Brasillach’s death sentence caused outrage. Much of literary France protested, even Fascist-haters. François Mauriac, the author and champion of the Resistance, visited General de Gaulle with a plea for the sentence on his political opponent to be revoked — this was, after all, a question of freedom of expression — and de Gaulle granted his request. Mauriac also took the initiative of writing a petition calling for Brasillach to be pardoned. Its signatories included Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel, Colette, Albert Camus, and Jean Cocteau, while Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, and André Gide refused.

For members of the Resistance, it was precisely Robert Brasillach’s writings that made him a traitor; his death would symbolise the death of Fascism. Despite his earlier promise, de Gaulle gave in to their pressure, and the sentence was reinstated. Brasillach died by firing squad in February 1945. Maurice Bardèche collapsed in grief and bitterness.

It is only now, two years later, that he is returning to his old self and to the world, writing two books in protest against what he describes as the falseness of the times, of democracy, and the hypocrisy surrounding l’épuration, the purge, the false penalties for false crimes. Having nearly gone under, he is reborn in a new shape, as a political animal: ‘I am a Fascist writer.’

As soon as his book on the Resistance and the war trials, Lettre à François Mauriac, is printed, he starts work on the next.

Maurice Bardèche is lost. His country is alien to him, and the way in which its history is being written is equally alien. Hatred has got a grip on justice and put it out of kilter; hatred has become the new goddess of the age. Everywhere, he feels, hatred of the losing side is in evidence. Not that he has any particular fondness for Germany or the Germans, he clarifies. It is not the German people he loves, not even National Socialism, but bravery, loyalty and the fraternity of combat.

Nor does he know anything about these men, he writes, these generals and statesmen brought to trial and sentenced in Nuremberg — though he reads all 40 volumes of shorthand notes from the International Military Tribunal, the first major trial. He knows only that they are on the losing side. That is all that counts. Their army was that of a small European country, he writes, which fought the armies of the rest of the world — and lost. Should they now also be accused, punished, and executed for that reason?

Maurice Bardèche suffers with those he considers the victims of the war — the people of Germany — and that is why he now writes the book Nuremberg ou la Terre promise.

The courage and suffering of the German people deserves respect. So he says what no one else is saying, writes what no one else is writing: that the evidence of a genocide of the Jews is forged. Of course Jews died, but that was as a result of starvation and illness, not of murder. All the documents that mention a ‘Final Solution’ in fact refer to moving the Jews out of Nazi Germany, nothing else. The fact is, he writes, that what has happened to the Jews is their own fault. They supported the peace of Versailles, and they supported the Soviet Union. The real war crimes were committed by the Allies when they bombed Dresden and other cities. The gas chambers, moreover, were used to disinfect the prisoners, nothing more.

‘I am not taking up the defense of Germany. I am taking up the defense of the truth’ he writes, formulating his creed and writing his bible. Revisionism is born, and Maurice Bardèche is its father.

London

The summer is as hot as the winter was cold. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre wander around in the British capital on 15 July, warm and hungry.

London leaves a sombre impression. So many buildings bombed to pieces, such shabby clothes, so little food. As if there is still a war on. Everything is serious and poor, Simone notes in a letter to her beloved Nelson. On the other hand, the people are very brave. And an increasingly dense layer of green is spreading over the ruins. Wild flowers, purple, red, and yellow, are growing in the bombsites, strange, unexpected gardens emerging where once a house stood. In the parks, people lie in the grass, unashamedly kissing. Fortunately, there is no shortage of scotch and soda.

Bucharest

The leader of Romania’s anti-Communist movement, Ion Diaconescu, is jailed. Sentenced to life imprisonment.

Palestine

The American Ralph Bunche is the UN representative on the Committee tasked with finding a solution to the Palestine question, the one who leads much of the work behind the scenes. Just a year later, he will be asked to accompany Folke Bernadotte on his mission to mediate the Palestine conflict. When Bernadotte is murdered by the Stern Gang under the leadership of Yitzhak Shamir, it is Ralph Bunche who takes over as peace mediator, for which he will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

But now? His view of the situation? Of the Committee and its work?

Its members are unprepossessing, lacking in competence; it is one of the worst groups he has ever worked with. It includes people who are small-minded, vain, and, in many cases, either mean-spirited or dull-witted. It is hard to understand how such a mediocre collection of individuals could have been entrusted with tackling so grave a problem. On 17 July, Bunche writes as follows in a private letter:

It might be a good idea for all the Committee members to get blessed at all the holy places and to kiss all the holy rocks from which the various gods ascended from time to time, since the Committee is expected to work a miracle. In my view the Committee will need to combine the intervention of Christ, Mohamed and God Almighty to do the job.

There does not appear to be any miracle in sight. Instead, Ralph Bunche organises the Committee’s work. It is also Bunche who finally draws up the two proposals for a solution, which the Committee submits to the UN General Assembly.

International waters

No sooner are the 4554 refugees on board the SS President Warfield out of Sète harbour than they have company. They are trailed by two British warships, one on either side of the ship. Megaphone warnings, threats. As soon as the refugee vessel reaches Palestinian waters, the British have the right to board her. Everyone knows; everyone is on tenterhooks.

On 16 July, another three British warships arrive. No one sleeps on board the refugee ship. The barbed wire along the railings is reinforced. Tins of kosher corned beef and potatoes are taken out to use as ammunition. On 17 July, the refugees raise the flag with the Star of David and rename the ship Exodus 47, in the name of memory, myth, and biblical invocations:

Warning: I must warn you that illegal passage of your passengers into Palestine will not be allowed; and your ship will be arrested if you try to do so … Force will be used if our sailors are attacked. Your leaders and all sensible passengers must stop the hot heads from futile resistance.

Reply: On this boat, Exodus, are more than 4000 people, men, women, and children, whose only crime is that they were born Jews. We have nothing against your sailors and officers, but unfortunately they have been chosen to implement a policy to which we shall never acquiesce, for we shall never recognise a law forbidding Jews to enter their country. We are not interested in the shedding of blood, but you must understand that we shall not go to any concentration camp of our own free will, even if it happens to be a British one.

At night, just off the coast of Gaza, two destroyers with their lights off move into place on either side of Exodus, making it impossible to manoeuvre the ship. British soldiers leap aboard, the blessed tins of corned beef are thrown at them, and steam from the pipes arranged around the gunwale gushes out.

Quite a few shots are fired during the ensuing two-hour battle, before the British finally take control of the vessel, which is then sailed into Haifa. One hundred and forty-six people injured, three dead, splinters of wood, a wrecked ship.

The Jews catch a glimpse of Palestine before they are swiftly dusted with anti-lice spray to ward off typhus, loaded onto three British ships, and packed off back to France.

Do the British realise that everything will be turned against them, absolutely everything?

Cairo

The art of death: fann al-mawt. The art of dying: al-mawt fann.

Introducing these concepts in earnest, Hasan al-Banna turns the march of time towards our present, bringing the love of death into his version of Islam.

There lies the land, there the olive trees stand, and the rose bushes. Dust and bloom, dryness and shade. There, strangers force their way in and colonise, aliens trampling on the very soul of home. That is why, writes the clockmaker’s son, it is the duty of a Muslim — indeed his greatest commitment — to engage in jihad.

An obligation which there is no evading.

Once upon a time, it all looked different. The Arab world, oppressed by French and British colonialism, dreamed of a revived empire. There, Jewish settlements in the region would help boost economic growth. The pan-Arabic ideas of the time encompassed both Arabs and Jews. Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration, which supported the idea of a Jewish national home in Palestine, was celebrated by the future Prime Minister of Egypt, Ziwar Pasha. A few years later, Ahmed Zaki, a former Egyptian cabinet minister, congratulated the growing Zionist movement with the words: ‘The victory of the Zionist idea is the turning point for the fulfilment of an ideal which is so dear to me, the revival of the Orient.’

In Jerusalem, on 1 April 1925, the Egyptian Minister of the Interior, Ismail Sidqi, had no qualms about inaugurating the first Hebrew university on Mount Scopus.

As criticism of immigration into Palestine became increasingly widespread, the Egyptian press responded by writing about Zionists and Zionism, but avoided the word ‘Jews’ so as to protect the country’s indigenous Jewish population from hate. Local Nazis in Cairo wrote to Berlin in 1933 to complain that it was pointless wasting time and money on anti-Jewish pamphlets, as no one was interested. Instead, they proposed, the propagandists should aim their efforts at the point where the interests of Arabs and Jews conflicted most — Palestine.

It might all have been different: if the First World War hadn’t broken out; if Mussolini hadn’t seized power in 1922; if Adolf Hitler hadn’t written Mein Kampf in 1925; if al-Banna hadn’t established the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928.

The Brotherhood’s worthy social work — helping the poor and the elderly, and opening schools in disadvantaged parts of Egypt — attracts sympathy and garners support. But there is another side: the shirts, the marches, the idea of a healthy soul in a healthy body, the mistrust of democracy and the multi-party system, the dream of a revolution of purity. Echoes of Fascism, from one continent to another.

And so Palestine is to become ‘the market where we make a bargain by winning one of the two advantages, victory [over the Jews] or martyrdom’.

Where jihad was once interpreted as ‘struggle’, al-Banna adds death as its objective. Poems are written, songs intoned about liberation from the fear of death and burial under ‘an umbrageous shade’.

Haifa

Two men are standing on the quayside at Haifa on 18 July, watching the battered SS Exodus come in with her human cargo: the Swedish chairman of the Committee tasked with resolving the Palestine problem, and a member of his staff. They are wearing linen suits and hats to protect them against the heat. Were they brought here on purpose? Was it planned that the ship’s arrival in Palestine would coincide with the UN Committee’s visit?

The two men from the Committee watch the children, the first to disembark — over a thousand children — and speculate on whether this is a propaganda trick staged for the news cameras. The chairman, Emil Sandström, needs all the help he can get to understand Palestine and its undercurrents, both human and political. Here, too, he is seeking help, between the shadows and the flashlight whiteness of the day in the harbour of Haifa. Somehow, Sandström encounters the Exodus’s sole non-Jewish passenger, the Methodist minister John Stanley Grauel. ‘I have no solutions to the Palestine problem,’ says Grauel. Nonetheless, the Committee questions him, and it attaches great importance to his replies.

Mr Rand (Canada): Did you visit the camps in Europe?

Mr Grauel: When the Exodus was held back in Europe, I took the opportunity to travel to the camps.

Mr Rand (Canada): How would you describe the attitude to Palestine among the Jews in the camps?

Mr Grauel: Those I spoke to saw two alternatives — America or Palestine … As I see it, these people have nothing to look back on apart from terror, and nothing to look forward to. They bear being in camps on Cyprus or other places because they know that in one to two years they will come to the land of Israel, and when two hundred people travel there, a further thousand are given new hope.

Mr Rand (Canada): Can you say whether there were any weapons on board?

Mr Grauel: In my judgement, these people had nothing to fight with other than potatoes and tinned food … I would like to make a statement. After following the whole thing, I am certain they will insist on coming to Palestine and that nothing less than war and destruction will ever stop them.

The rammed ship being towed into harbour, the survivors who have nothing but the will to survive, the vessel renamed Exodus, which expands from a simple pleasure steamer into a symbol of refugee hope and refugee yearnings: it all creates a narrative disseminated worldwide, to every newspaper and to every newsreel in every cinema.

Once it is clear that the British intend to ship the former concentration camp prisoners back to France, the reaction is one of outrage and fierce criticism. Where the British seek to demonstrate steadfast adherence to principles and to deter any further unlawful attempts to reach Palestine, the world sees cruelty and a lack of common humanity. Returning passengers to Europe, to a France that is unable to provide for them, is inhuman, writes The Washington Post. Apparently the British temperament is such that the law must be obeyed at whatever cost, writes Léon Blum, the former Prime Minister of France. There is no scope for individual compassion.

Much of the world agrees. Send them to the camps on Cyprus, where other Jews are gathering to wait for a visa to Palestine, or at least send them to North Africa, people write. Do anything but return them to Europe. But the British carry out their plan. The four-and-a-half thousand Jews are shipped to Port-de-Bouc in the south of France and ordered to disembark. As if everything were complete, over and done with, the past reinstated. As if the voyage, the renaming of the ship, the potato battle, the hope, and the disillusionment had never occurred. But the refugees refuse to go ashore.

‘Jews are in dangerous mood’ British representatives telegraph to the Foreign Office. ‘Disembarkation by force is likely to entail serious fighting and there is danger of serious rioting on board.’ Nothing can be done.

Four-and-a-half thousand people seeking a life after death.

The heat. The wait. The world is watching.

Washington

Naturally, the news about the Exodus also reaches President Truman. It is 6 am on 21 July when he takes a call from the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr, who wants to discuss the refugees’ situation. The discussion lasts ten minutes. Truman is obliged to take the issue up with Secretary of State Marshall.

‘He’d no business, whatever to call me. The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement on world affairs,’ Truman writes later in a rapid, slapdash hand on loose sheets of paper which are inserted into the blue diary.

The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire.

London

On 19 July, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre attend the premiere of two of Sartre’s plays at a small theatre in Hammersmith. After the performance, they dine on corned beef. Rita Hayworth is there, but de Beauvoir is not attracted — not even by the film star’s beautiful breasts, she writes to her Nelson in Chicago.

It ought to be an amusing and interesting occasion, with both Sartre’s brain and Hayworth’s beauty, she continues, but Simone is bored. Jean-Paul is bored. Rita is bored. It is a very boring dinner.

New York

It takes a while for jazz journalist Bill Gottlieb to find Thelonious Monk in New York, so he claims. Inexplicable — why doesn’t he simply stroll into Minton’s Playhouse, go up to the piano, and say hello?

Naturally, he’s seen him on stage: to begin with it was Monk’s image that struck him most, rather than the pianist’s innovative harmonies. The goatee, the beret, the glasses with gleaming gold sidepieces: Monk is a law unto himself, his melodies veering off unexpectedly, with pauses and hesitations in mid-flow. When the two finally meet, they hit it off, united in their great admiration for Lady Day. Gottlieb is also a photographer, with numerous pictures of Billie Holiday in his collection. He gives Monk a photo published a year or so earlier, which Monk tapes on the ceiling above his bed.

A type of jazz that is not dance music. A sophisticated, improv-based jazz that never seeks to ingratiate itself, nervy and cool at the same time. The very definition of bebop is also a word-portrait of Thelonious Monk himself.

Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker speak of him as a god, but when Bill Gottlieb finally interviews him, Monk doesn’t wish to claim the honour of being the inventor of bebop.

‘For my part, I’ll say that’s just how I play.’

There are many people contributing musical ideas. On the other hand, the piano may be more important to bebop than most people realise, he continues. It lays down the underlying harmonies and the rhythm.

He spends most nights at the piano, at Minton’s Playhouse. Saxophonists, trumpeters, and singers come, do their thing, and go. Days and nights come, do their thing and go. Thelonious Monk carries on working. It’s what he does.

Beirut

The unease among the members of the Arab League grows with each day that the UN Committee continues its work without their having the opportunity to put forward their view of matters. When Committee representatives contact them again, issue another invitation, and reiterate the plea that they call off their boycott, a three-day opening finally emerges. A meeting is arranged in the Lebanon.

The schedule is very tight, with conferences filling the days and dinners planned for the evenings, so the UN Committee’s delegates will not have too much time to walk about and talk to just anyone. Yet a crack emerges; dialogue is within reach.

On 21 July, the Arab League’s delegation congregates in Beirut to prepare for the talks. A shared document is to be presented. They agree to agree. A few try to get the Grand Mufti to take part, to soften his stance somewhat, but he sticks a piece of paper to the chair that has been set out for him, and that states his views. He refuses to attend in person.

On the next day, they finally meet, the UN Committee and the Arab League.

The Lebanese Foreign Minister reads out the Arab League’s joint position. It contains a demand for an immediate stop to all Jewish immigration into Palestine. A demand for the establishment of an independent Arab state on a democratic basis. A clarification of the fact that the Arab countries are linked with the Palestinian Arabs and therefore directly affected when the Zionists claim territories that belong to Transjordan, Syria, and the Lebanon. Finally, a declaration: the Arabs are convinced that a Jewish state will lead only to unrest and war throughout the Middle East.

There is an opening, too: with the creation of an Arab state, the Arabs would grant citizenship to the Jews who are entitled to it under existing laws.

The declaration ends with a clarification: ‘You cannot expect the Arabs to sit and watch this quietly without defending their natural interests.’ A Jewish state, if founded, ‘will not be able to exist for generations on end’, because the ‘foreign element’ will awaken the hatred of thousands of Arabs and they will use every ‘opportunity to get back what they have lost’.

That is how the conference closes on the first day.

On the next day, the UN delegates have the opportunity to ask questions. The Arab League maintains its united front. The Czech delegate points out that they cannot demand 100 per cent of everything; they must show some willingness to compromise. The Swedish chairman sets forth a variety of solutions for general debate: the creation of a bi-national state with limited Jewish immigration? A federal state comprising two independent units? The partition of Palestine and the creation of two independent states? All these questions meet with the same answer: an independent Arab state must be established on a democratic basis. Nothing else will do.

But outside the conference room, another message reaches Emil Sandström and his Committee. There are other voices, alongside the united voice; there is another tone, with some members of the Arab League able to envisage a partition. If Egypt assents to this solution, others will follow, the Committee hears. What matters is that no more Jews must arrive in the region. If the Arabs are given a guarantee of this, there will be a way to find a solution.

Confusion and frustration. Should the Committee trust the united front, the Arab League’s shared voice, or the choir singing out of tune on the sidelines? On 25 July, they leave the Lebanon without knowing for sure.

Jura

On the same day, the hens on the Isle of Jura have finally begun to lay eggs. George Orwell notes ‘Three eggs’ in his diary. Satisfied.

Paris

Simone de Beauvoir writes to Nelson Algren in her rather childish but candid English about what she has been thinking ever since they met: is it right to give your heart to someone if you aren’t prepared to give them your life? She loves him. Yes, she loves him, she repeats, but she knows she cannot leave behind her language, her country, her Saint-Germain-des-Prés with its cave-like clubs, not even for his sake, not even for the deep love she feels.

When we shall meet again, we do not know what will happen, I just know that whatever happens I could never give everything to you, and I just feel bad about it. Oh, darling, it is the hell to be far away and unable to look at each other when you speak about such important things. Do you feel it is love to try to speak the truth yet, more than just saying ‘I love you’? Do you feel I want to deserve your love as much as I want your love? You must read this letter with a very loving heart, with my head on your shoulder.

Algren replies the same day. He has been thinking of proposing to her when they next meet, but now, after this letter, these thoughts, these questions, he has regained his senses. For both of them, a marriage would mean a break with their respective homes, from Chicago, from Paris — being uprooted — and wouldn’t such a break be tantamount to spiritual and artistic suicide?

They agree to be together in a different way: she will visit him and he, if possible, will visit her, and they will then return to their homes and meet again later. They set their own rules for their transatlantic love, beyond convention and the law.