33 Days: A Memoir by Leon Werth

Author:Leon Werth [Werth, Leon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Europe, World War II, Political, France, Literary, Personal Memoirs, War & Military, Biography & Autobiography, Military, Fiction, History
ISBN: 9781612194264
Google: mcqdBAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2015-05-11T12:00:00+00:00

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

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