Roger Martin du Gard and Maumort by Martin Benjamin Franklin;

Author:Martin, Benjamin Franklin; [Martin, Benjamin Franklin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press

Chapter 8

DISCOMFITED

AFTER THE GERMANS TOOK control in Nice during the fall of 1943, their security apparatus began hunting down the usual targets: Jews, Communists, active members of the Resistance, and prominent opponents of Vichy, beginning with the outspoken. Six months later, by the spring of 1944, they were ready to search out the quieter ones, men and a few women whose names appeared on a black list compiled by French collaborators. In 1941 and 1942, several prominent French literary figures, among them Jean Paulhan, François Mauriac, Paul Valéry, and Georges Duhamel, created the clandestine “National Committee of Writers” (Comité national des écrivains) as an “intellectual resistance.” Roger joined near the end of 1942 and would later claim to have played no role other than “to learn afterward what had been done in our name.” But he did, in fact, take risks. At the beginning of February 1944, the Gestapo arrested Oscar von Wertheimer, a Hungarian Jewish author of historical novels, who had taken refuge in Nice. Local Resistance leaders hid his wife and daughter but needed money to get them away. Without hesitation, Roger sold the manuscript of his Confidence africaine to pay for their escape to a convent near Toulouse. And so he was a target. By the end of April, his friends in the Resistance warned him to leave as soon as possible. Since the beginning of the year Christiane and Marcel had urged him to take refuge in Figeac, and now he agreed.1

Roger and Hélène began packing, and remembering how little they had carried away from Le Tertre, decided to take almost everything they had at the Cimiez apartment. The Resistance provided a trusted driver who loaded his truck with almost a ton of their belongings, and they set off on May 12. Three days later after hard going through neglected roads, they arrived in Figeac—actually, about eight miles outside Figeac, at the Château de Roquefort, which Christiane had rented to keep them out of sight. She had expected that it would be in poor condition, but the reality was far worse: a ruin, huge drafty rooms, filthy with years of dust, a haven for rats and spiders, no running water, no gas, no heat, no telephone, no mail, no automobile. Heroic efforts by all rendered it “habitable,” but nothing more. In a letter to his sister-in-law, Marie-Louise, Roger called it the “Château of Misery” and compared it to the dilapidated Russian country houses in Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. He wrote Maria van Rysselberghe that they had “the life of the sixteenth century.” Far worse, Christiane had unwittingly placed Roger close to the caves where the local Resistance hid their weapons and took refuge from German patrols.2

For the next three months, Roger and Hélène, who were now sixty-three and fifty-seven years old, respectively, and far from good health, did their best to survive in this isolation. Almost pathetically, they tried to get around on bicycles until August 18, when Hélène caught a wheel in stony ground and fell on her right elbow.

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