Thomas, in the end, had managed to arrange an interview for me with Schulz. “Since things aren’t really getting anywhere, I think it’s worth the trouble. Try to handle him tactfully.” I didn’t have to make much of an effort: Schulz, a scrawny little man who mumbled into his moustache, his mouth streaked with a bad dueling scar, spoke in long circumlocutions that were sometimes hard to follow and, while he stubbornly leafed through my file, didn’t leave me many openings to speak. I managed to get two words in about my interest in the Reich’s foreign policy, but he seemed not to notice. The upshot of this interview was that people were taking an interest in me in high places and that we’d see at the end of my convalescence. It wasn’t very encouraging, and Thomas confirmed my interpretation: “They have to ask for you over there, for a specific job. Otherwise, if they send you anywhere, it will be Bulgaria. True, it’s quiet there, but the wine isn’t so great.” Best had suggested I contact Knochen, but Thomas’s words gave me a better idea: after all, I was on leave, nothing was forcing me to stay in Berlin.
I took the night express and arrived in Paris a little after dawn. The controls didn’t pose any problems. In front of the station I happily contemplated the pale gray stone of the buildings, the bustle in the streets; because of the restrictions, there weren’t many vehicles, but the streets were congested with bicycles and carts, through which the German cars made their way with difficulty. Suddenly joyous, I went into the first café and drank a Cognac, standing at the bar. I was in civilian clothes, and no one had any reason to take me for anything but a Frenchman; I found a curious pleasure in this. I walked calmly up to Montmartre and checked into a discreet little hotel, on the side of the hill, above Pigalle; I knew this place: the rooms were simple and clean, and the owner devoid of curiosity, which suited me. For this first day, I didn’t want to see anyone. I went out for a walk. It was April, spring was starting to show through everywhere, in the pale blue of the sky, the buds and flowers coming out on the branches, a certain liveliness or at least a lightness in people’s steps. Life, I knew, was hard here, the sallow tint of many faces betrayed the difficulties of finding food. But nothing seemed to have changed since my last visit, aside from the traffic and the graffiti: on the walls now you could see STALINGRAD or “1918,” usually erased and sometimes replaced by “1763,” no doubt a brilliant initiative of our services. I headed downhill toward the Seine, then went slowly rummaging through the booksellers along the quays: to my surprise, next to Céline, Drieu, Mauriac, Bernanos and Montherlant, they were openly selling Kafka, Proust, and even Thomas Mann; permissiveness seemed to be the rule. Almost all the sellers had a copy of Rebatet’s book, Les Décombres, which had been published the previous year: I leafed through it with curiosity, but put off buying it till later. I finally decided on a collection of essays by Maurice Blanchot, a critic from the Journal des débats, some of whose articles I had read with interest before the war; it was an advance copy, probably resold by a reviewer, bearing the title Faux Pas; the bookseller explained to me that the publication of the book had been delayed because of the paper shortage, while assuring me that it was still the best thing written recently, unless I liked Sartre, but he didn’t like Sartre (I hadn’t even heard of Sartre then). At the Place Saint-Michel, near the fountain, I sat down at a table on a terrace and ordered a sandwich and a glass of wine. The previous owner of the book had cut open only the first pages; I asked for a knife and, while I waited for the sandwich, cut the remaining pages, a slow, placid ritual that I always savored. The paper was of very poor quality; I had to be careful not to tear the pages by going too fast. After eating, I walked up to the Luxembourg. I had always loved this cold, geometric, luminous park, traversed with a calm agitation. Around the great circle of the central fountain, along the lanes curving out among trees and flowerbeds still bare, people walked, hummed, conversed, read, or, their eyes closed, sunbathed in the pale sun, a long and peaceful murmuring. I sat down on a metal chair with chipped green paint and read a few essays at random, the one on Orestes first, which actually had more to do with Sartre; this latter had apparently written a play where he used the figure of the unfortunate matricide to develop his ideas on man’s freedom in crime; Blanchot judged it harshly, and I could only approve. But I was especially charmed by an article on Melville’s Moby-Dick, where Blanchot speaks of this impossible book, which had marked a moment of my own youth, of this written equivalent of the universe, mysteriously, as a work that presents the ironic quality of an enigma and reveals itself only by the questions it raises. To tell the truth, I didn’t understand much of what he was writing there. But it awoke in me a nostalgia for a life that I could have had: the pleasure of the free play of thought and language, rather than the ponderous rigor of the Law; I let myself be carried along happily by the meanderings of this heavy, patient thinking, which dug a way for itself through ideas the way an underground river slowly carves itself a path through the rock. Finally I closed the book and continued my walk, first toward the Odéon, where more writing covered the walls, then up the Boulevard Saint-Germain, almost empty, toward the Assemblée Nationale. Every place awoke precise memories in me, of my preparatory years and afterward, when I had entered the ELSP; I must have been rather tormented in those days, and I remembered the quick surge of my hatred for France, but these memories, given the distance, reached me as if appeased, almost happy, wreathed in a serene, probably distorted light. I continued toward the Invalides esplanade, where passersby were congregating to watch some workers who, with draught horses, were plowing up the lawns so as to plant vegetables; farther on, near a light tank of Czech manufacture stamped with the swastika, indifferent children were playing with a ball. Then I crossed the Alexandre III Bridge. At the Grand Palais, the posters announced two exhibitions: one entitled Why Did the Jew Want War?, the other a collection of Greek and Roman art. I felt no need to broaden my anti-Semitic education, but antiquity attracted me; I paid for my ticket and went in. There were some superb pieces there, most of them probably borrowed from the Louvre. For a long time I admired the cold, calm, inhuman beauty of a large Apollo with Cithara from Pompeii, a life-size bronze now turned greenish. He had a slender, not entirely formed body, with a child’s sex and narrow, well-rounded buttocks. I walked from one end of the exhibition to the other, but I kept coming back to him: his beauty fascinated me. He might have been nothing but an exquisite, ordinary adolescent, but the verdigris that was eating away at his skin in large patches conferred a stupefying profundity upon him. One detail struck me: regardless of the angle from which I looked at his eyes, painted realistically directly on the bronze, he never looked me in the eye; it was impossible to capture his gaze, drowned, lost in the void of his eternity. The metallic leprosy was blistering his face, his chest, his buttocks, almost devouring his left hand, which must have held the vanished cithara. His face seemed vain, almost smug. Looking at him, I felt overcome with desire, with a wish to lick him; and he was decomposing in front of me with a calm, infinite slowness. After that, avoiding the Champs-Élysées, I walked through the silent little streets of the eighth arrondissement, then slowly climbed back up to Montmartre. Night was falling, the air smelled good. At the hotel, the owner showed me a little black-market restaurant where I could eat without ration cards: “It’s full of lowlife, but the food is good.” The clientele in fact seemed made up of collaborators and black-market dealers; I was served a top cut of sirloin with shallots and green beans, and some decent Bordeaux in a carafe; for dessert, a tarte Tatin with crème fraîche, and, supreme luxury, real coffee. But the Apollo from the Grand Palais had awakened other desires. I went down to Pigalle and found a little bar that I knew welclass="underline" sitting at the counter, I ordered a Cognac and waited. It didn’t take long, and I brought the boy back to my hotel. Under his cap, he had curly, unruly hair; a light down covered his stomach and darkened in curls on his chest; his olive skin awoke in me a furious desire of mouth and of ass. He was as I liked them, taciturn and available. For him, my ass opened like a flower, and when he finally slipped it in, a ball of white light began to grow at the base of my spine, slowly rose up my back, and annihilated my head. And that night, more than ever, it seemed to me that in this way I was responding directly to my sister, incorporating her into me, whether she accepted it or not. What happened in my body, under the hands and sex of this unknown boy, overwhelmed me. When it was over, I sent him away but didn’t fall asleep; I lay there on the creased sheets, naked and spread out like a child crushed with happiness.
The next day, I went to the editorial office of Je Suis Partout. Almost all my Parisian friends worked there or gravitated around it. This went back quite a long way. When I had gone to Paris to take my preparatory classes, at seventeen, I didn’t know anyone. I was attending Janson-de-Sailly as a boarder; Moreau had allocated a small monthly allowance for me, as long as I got good grades, and I was relatively free; after the carceral nightmare of the three preceding years, it would have taken a lot less to turn my head. But I behaved, I didn’t do anything stupid. After classes, I would dash over to the Seine to hunt through the booksellers’ stalls, or else join my friends in a little bar in the Latin Quarter, to drink cheap red wine and set the world to rights. But I found my classmates a little dull. Almost all of them were from the upper middle class and were getting ready to follow blindly in their fathers’ footsteps. They had money, and they had been taught very early on how the world was made and what their place in it would be: the dominant one. Toward workers, they felt only scorn, or fear; the ideas that I had brought back from my first trip to Germany—that workers were just as much a part of the nation as the middle class, that the social order had to be arranged organically for the advantage of all, not just a few of the well-off, that workers should not be oppressed but rather offered a life of dignity and a place in this order so as to counter the seductions of Bolshevism—all that was foreign to them. Their political opinions were as narrow as their feeling of bourgeois propriety, and it seemed to me even more pointless to try to discuss with them fascism or German National Socialism (which had just, in September of that year, won a crushing electoral victory, thus becoming the second largest party in the country and sending shockwaves across the victors’ Europe) than to talk about the youth movement ideals preached by Hans Blüher. Freud, for them (if they had even heard of him), was a sexual maniac, Spengler a mad, monomaniacal Prussian, Jünger a warmonger flirting dangerously with Bolshevism; even Péguy they found suspect. Only a few students on scholarship from the provinces seemed a little different, and it was mostly toward them that I gravitated. One of these boys, Antoine F., had an older brother at the École normale supérieure, which I had dreamed of attending, and it was he who took me there for the first time, to drink rum toddies with his brother and his dorm mates and discuss Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, whom I was just discovering. This Bertrand F. was a carré, or “squared”—a second-year student; the best study rooms, with sofas, engravings on the walls, and stoves, were mostly occupied by cubes, or the “cubed,” third-year students. One day, passing by one of these rooms, I noticed a Greek inscription painted on the linteclass="underline" IN THIS CARREL WORK SIX FINE AND GOOD MEN (hex kaloi kagathoi)—AND A CERTAIN OTHER ONE (kai tis allos). The door was open, so I pushed it and asked in Greek: “So who is this other one?” A young man with a round face raised his thick glasses from his book and answered in the same language: “A Hebrew, who doesn’t know Greek. And you, who are you?”—“Another too, but made of finer stuff than your Hebrew: a German.”—“A German who knows Greek?”—“What better language to speak with a Frenchman?” He burst out laughing and introduced himself: he was Robert Brasillach. I explained to him that I was in fact half French, and had lived in France since 1924; he asked me if I had gone back to Germany since, and I told him about my summer trip; soon we were chatting about National Socialism. He listened attentively to my descriptions and explanations. “Come back whenever you like,” he said at the end. “I have some friends who will be happy to meet you.” Through him, I discovered another world, which had nothing to do with that of the civil servants in training. These young people cultivated visions of the future of their country and of Europe that they argued about bitterly, while also drawing on a rich study of the past. Their ideas and interests burst out in all directions. Brasillach, together with his future brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche, was a passionate student of the cinema and had me discover not only Chaplin and René Clair but also Eisenstein, Lang, Pabst, Dreyer. He brought me to the offices of L’Action française, in their printing house on the Rue Montmartre, a fine narrow building with a Renaissance staircase, full of the din of the rotary presses. I saw Maurras a few times; he would arrive late, around eleven at night, half deaf, bitter, but always ready to open his heart and vent his spleen against the Marxists, the bourgeois, the republicans, the Jews. Brasillach, at that time, was still completely under his spell, but Maurras’s stubborn hatred for Germany formed an obstacle that I couldn’t overlook, and Robert and I often quarreled about it. If Hitler reached power, I asserted, and united the German worker with the middle class, once and for all countering the Red Peril, and if France did the same, and if the two together managed to eliminate the pernicious influence of the Jews, then the heart of Europe, both nationalist and socialist, would form, along with Italy, an invincible bloc of common interests. But the French were still bogged down, floundering in their petty shopkeepers’ interests and their backward-looking spirit of revenge. Of course, Hitler would sweep aside the unjust Versailles clauses, that was a pure historical necessity; but if the healthy forces of France could on their side liquidate the corrupt republic and its Jewish puppets, then a Franco-German alliance would not only be a possibility, but would become an inevitable reality, a new European entente that would clip the wings of the British plutocrats and imperialists, and would soon be ready to confront the Bolsheviks and bring Russia back into the bosom of civilized nations. (As you can see, my German trip had served my intellectual education well; Moreau would have been horrified if he had known the use I put his money to.) Brasillach, in general, agreed with me: “Yes,” he said, “the postwar is already over. We have to act quickly if we want to avoid another war. That would be a disaster, the end of European civilization, the triumph of the barbarians.” Most of Maurras’s young disciples thought likewise. One of the most brilliant and caustic of them was Lucien Rebatet, who wrote the literary and film criticism in L’Action française under the name of François Vinneuil. He was ten years older than I, but we quickly formed a friendship, drawn to each other by his attraction to Germany. There were also Maxence, Blond, Jacques Talagrand who became Thierry Maulnier, Jules Supervielle, and many others. We met at the Brasserie Lipp, when someone had money in his pocket, or else at a restaurant for students in the Latin Quarter. We feverishly discussed literature and tried to define a “fascist” literature: Rebatet put forward the names of Plutarch, Corneille, Stendhal. “Fascism,” Brasillach said one day, “is the very poetry of the twentieth century,” and we could only agree with him: fascist, fascio, fascination (but later on, having become wiser or more prudent, he would confer the same title on communism).