Impure Luck

It’s a known fact: the future postwar idols—Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, and their companions—are quite busy during the years 1943–45. Plays (Les Mouches, Le Malentendu) are put on with the approval of the German censor. Sartre’s talent as a playwright is commended by the Pariser Zeitung, and de Beauvoir’s novel, L’Invitée, is nominated for the 1943 Goncourt Prize. “All the happiness I thought I had given up was blossoming again; it even seemed that it had never been so abundant.” Mme. de Beauvoir is settled at the Hôtel la Louisiane: “None of my refuges had ever come so close to my dreams.”

Happiness.

I can already hear the grumpy remarks of historians who dare to upset this sweet paradise by reminding us that in those same years of “abundant happiness,” the gas chambers were working at full blast and that somewhere on the Russian plains, at the Battle of Kursk, the fate of the war was being decided by the millions of the dead and the “men with broken faces.” How can these bilious historians be quieted? Ah yes, they must be forgetting the heroism of the two illustrious Parisian Resistance members fighting under the pseudonyms of Miro and Castor. Fear not, the identity of these ultra-secret agents (Sartre and Beauvoir) will not be uncovered under torture by the Gestapo, but at the performance of Huis clos (No Exit). In January 1944, one of these courageous resisters leaves to go skiing in Morzine with her young lover, Bost. And in the month of March, she attends the reading of a piece written by Picasso, the title of which dispels any melancholy feelings among those victims of the Occupation: Le Désir attrapé par la queue (Desire Caught by the Tail). We can have a little fun, can’t we?

Later, this surrealist farce, directed by Camus, will lead to a long night of partying. The “actors,” Sartre, Michel Leiris, de Beauvoir, and Dora Maar, mingle with the members of the audience, among whom one spies Georges Braque, Jacques Lacan, Armand Salacrou, Georges Bataille, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Madeleine Renaud. The evening is such a success that the whole exceptional group decides to organize more “fiestas” and to meet, depending on the night, either where Beauvoir lives, at the Louisiane, or in the shaded setting of the Cour de Rohan, where the Battailles live. On the program: a buffet, wine, music, dancing, sketches, vocal improvisations by Sartre. We are under the Occupation, Monsieur! So we try to find enough living people for each fiesta. The parcels that the aptly named “valisards” import from the countryside do not tolerate the springtime heat very well, provoking a famous scene observed by Simone de Beauvoir and Jacques-Laurent Bost, both distraught: Sartre, as if he were launching a grenade, throws a rabbit, unsuitable for consumption, out the window.

The terrible constraints of wartime will not, however, stand in the way of the most grandiose fiesta: it takes place on June 5 (yes, the night before June 6, 1944) in the spacious apartment—literary noblesse oblige—where Victor Hugo once stayed with Juliette Drouet. The hosts, Charles Dullin and Simone Jolivet, assisted by Sartre and Beauvoir, have dreamed big: the living room is drowning in flowers, the walls are bedecked with garlands and ribbon, the buffet would make the greatest caterers jealous, and the wine is flowing in waves. There are writers, editors, actors, and that most prominent of couples: Camus and his passion du jour, Maria Casarès, who stars in his Malentendu (Misunderstanding) at the Théâtre des Mathurins.

That same night, I believe, an American officer will shout to his men, who have landed on the beaches in Normandy and are trying to cling to the cliffs riddled with bullets, “Die as far away as possible, guys!”

I mention the diversions of these “engaged writers” for the same reason that Jean-Claude speaks to me about them: during his very long life, he had come across certain people who had participated in those unforgettable fiestas, and had even maintained a semblance of a friendship with Albert Camus (several of the writer’s books, affectionately dedicated, are sleeping in the old man’s library). And since we are talking about “stars” who were not yet known by that term, Jean-Claude confides to me with an indulgent smile: “That Camus was a hell of a womanizer. One day, he started flirting so insistently with my wife Jacqueline that I was obliged to set things straight with him.”

Time passed, and thanks to the foresight and courage of a few biographers, the idols lost some of their gilding. Idolatrous as we were, we finally opened our eyes; perplexed, we discovered the unimaginative and muddled thinking of their fanciful works and a mixture of humanist pompousness and Nietzschean posturing in their philosophical and moral prose.

Morality: that’s where we really feel the pinch!

“I don’t judge them,” Jean-Claude has often told me, “and the fact that they feasted while others were going off like lambs to the slaughter, that’s their business. We have seen this in every war. Yes, the soldiers and the pen-pushers. Except that after the war, those pen-pushers wouldn’t stop giving us lessons in morality. To be free, you should do this! To be an engaged intellectual, do that! Personally, I open my Petit Robert and I read: ‘Engagement: introduction of a unit into battle, fighting confined to a single area and of short duration.’ And the authors of the dictionary could have added that despite this ‘short duration,’ there is more than enough time to get a hole blown through you.”

He lets out a sad little laugh as he recites this definition, conscious that its truth is nothing in the face of the dogmas decreed by the idols. Varlam Shalamov probably experienced the same feeling: in 1955, nearly blind, his health destroyed, he was leaving the gulag while Sartre, succumbing to the charms of the Soviet regime, was declaring that the freedom of thought in the USSR knew no bounds.

In 1945, Lieutenant Schreiber does not have enough distance to seize the spirit of the times; that postwar boiling over with guilty consciences, culpabilities disguised as dandies’ grins, political contortions, cowardice, and turnarounds. Still, he understands why the idols were so successful: their writings offer a plenary indulgence to that petite bourgeoisie conscience of which they are the flamboyant representatives. Such absolution works for everyone, except for those who have done nothing wrong. Like Francis Gilot, the eighteen-year-old tank driver killed during the taking of Toulon.

The French army, actually, is the first victim of the intellectual simony that develops in Saint-Germain-des-Prés while Lieutenant Schreiber’s comrades are crossing the Rhine. When they return, the die is cast. Caught up by daily life, these latecomers have neither the time nor, especially, the media or people skills that would be needed to reestablish the truth. A few years later, the shadow of Indochina and Algeria will lead them toward causes that are even more difficult to defend.

In the end, there is only one way for a soldier to confront the lies of the idols: to tell the story of his life. By a twist of fate, one of the Parisian fiestas may have unfolded while Lieutenant Schreiber’s tank squadron was heading into battle. Two events, perfectly simultaneous. In a beautiful apartment decorated with flowers, a party is taking place, blending music, songs, wine, feasting, humor, quips, attempts at seduction, kisses, new books passing from hand to hand—yes, this whirlwind of young and replete bodies, smiling faces, gazes veiled with desire, the quivering of all of those Jean-Pauls, Simones, Michels, Alberts, Georges, Marias, Olgas, Pablos, Wandas … and on that same soil, in that same country, at the very same moment, in the middle of a plain that is frozen and shaken by explosions, a young officer standing on his tank calls out to his two wounded comrades. They are crawling, leaving a long trail of blood in the snow. “Leper, Catherineau! Hold on!” He jumps to the ground, runs beneath a whistling of bullets and metal shards, and helps the soldiers hide behind his tank. One of them has lost an arm, the other has had his foot torn off by a shell.

This simultaneity speaks for itself.

The appropriateness of silence in the face of the idols’ duplicity became clear to me one day when I asked Jean-Claude why, since he was acquainted directly or indirectly with this whole beautiful intellectual world, he had never tried telling them what he had really experienced, suffered, and realized because of the war. He pursed his lips, preparing a shortened answer, probably to save himself from the confession he was hesitating to make. Then, suddenly, his features froze, and he ended up murmuring:

“I had among my friends several survivors of Nazi camps. They would never talk about it, and even in the middle of summer they would wear long sleeves so that no one could see the number tattooed on their wrists. Just as it was with the war—but to an even greater degree—what they were put through could not be expressed in our human language. There was also another reason for this muteness, though. They could have said everything, but they didn’t want to talk to people peacefully drinking their glass of wine on the terrasse of a café, eating their rib steak, going to the movies, calling to invite each other to dinner. Or to a fiesta … I realized that silence was their only possession. Everything had been taken from them: their health, their youth, the life of their loved ones, the faith they had in humanity. Everything except that number they were hiding. And their silence.”

He stopped speaking; then, as always, looking to avoid an overly solemn thought, he added, “So, when talking to Camus, I preferred instead to nicely tell him off so he would stop bothering my wife.”

On May 15, 1945, on Pont de l’Alma, Lieutenant Schreiber runs into the man who made such a difference in his path as a soldier: Captain de Pazzis, squadron chief in the Fifth African Chasseur Regiment. The man embraces him warmly, expresses his joy at seeing him again (“Damnit, Schreiber, you made it out!”); then, taking a step back, he examines his young comrade’s uniform.

“Wait, but that cross, where is it?”

“You mean the Legion of Honor, my captain?”

He sees Pazzis turn pale with indignation. “No, I won’t stand for this!” the officer exclaims, and without any explanation he leaves and goes straight to the Ministry of War. In November 1944, when he left the squadron, Pazzis gave a very clear order to his successor, Captain de la Lance: “I was stingy when it came to medals. Especially in Schreiber’s case. He’s earned the cross of the Legion of Honor twenty times over. As soon as you have the chance, please rectify this injustice.” A few months later, when two officers reminded Captain de la Lance about this request, his answer fell like a guillotine blade: “I know that Schreiber earned the Cross long ago. But a Jew will never receive the Legion of Honor under my command!”

A foreigner in this festive Paris, the lieutenant tells himself that it is perhaps his origins that are once more playing against him. He holds onto this explanation because it seems less difficult to bear than the abyss of six years of war that have transformed him into a lost phantom in a world of indifferent people.