by Allan Massie
The committee’s debate was now becoming wider. Proposals flew hither and thither. One cynic even suggested building a mausoleum, but he made the suggestion sotto voce. The argument lasted for several sessions. At last Lucien, who had up to now contented himself with offering restrained and, as it were apologetic, objections to each new proposal, addressed the committee.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘we seem to have reached an impasse. It is, I think, because we have been proceeding in the wrong direction. We have been thinking of man-made objects. But the Marshal is both our gift from God and a force of Nature in himself. I think we should base our thoughts on that understanding. Now, on the one hand, as Under-secretary of the Ministry of Education, I know very well where the true and enduring monument to his work and influence is to be found; it rests in the hearts and minds of our schoolchildren. They are the future of France and they are being formed according to his wisdom and understanding. It is possible, therefore, to argue that we need no other memorial to the National Revolution. Nevertheless, I recognise the desire of this committee to have such a memorial, to have something tangible and enduring which will say to future generations: thus we revered Pétain, thus we ask you to remember him. But we cannot agree on such a memorial because, as I say, we are thinking in the wrong manner. Let us therefore pause to consider the Marshal and what he represents, to consider this gift from God and force of Nature. Is it not then apparent that it is in Nature itself that we must seek the right memorial? The Marshal shelters us from sun, rain and adversity. His strength gives us strength, and a suitable memorial will bear witness to the nature of his strength. He is simple and serene and enduring. Does it not seem that he is like a great tree, and that only a tree – let me be more specific – a great oak tree – will be the proper monument to his Being and his Work for France.’
This speech was greeted with general acclaim, and so it was that, on a May morning, a cavalcade of official cars lurched out of Vichy, into the mountains, to the forest of Troncais, for the ceremony of dedication. They had brought a tame Bishop along, of course, to do the deed. All the court was present, but Lucien, as the author of the plan, was granted the privilege of travelling with the Marshal. It was unfortunate that Pétain was in a bad temper. He was suffering from indigestion, and complained for most of the journey. It must have been disappointing for Lucien, but then, I suppose indigestion is a force of nature just as the Marshal was; though I doubt if he consoled himself with that thought.
However, they arrived at last, and Pétain pulled himself together. He was always admirable on parade. Seeing him stand, erect, on the little podium provided (after much debate), his moustaches puffing in the breeze, his face pink and glowing, was to understand the rightness of the ceremony. He didn’t even fidget when the Bishop spoke for much longer than he had been told to, though later in the car he said to Lucien,
‘Went on a bloody bit, didn’t he. All the same, these preaching fellows. What they need, I’ve always told my chaplains, is a half-hour square-bashing every morning.’
For the Marshal, though loquacious on the subject of Christian values, had in fact little time for the Church’s ministers. If it was really the Army of Christ, he seemed to feel, they should be a damn sight more soldierly.
You may wonder at my tone. I treat this affair as an absurdity, because when you come to think of it, there could hardly be anything more absurd than lugging an octogenarian suffering from indigestion into the middle of a distant forest in order that he might be present at a ceremony in which he was compared to an oak tree and at which he would stand solemnly and watch this tree being dedicated to his memory.
Still, he was pleased enough.
‘Went off very well, I thought,’ he said to Lucien. ‘Good idea of yours, makes me feel my self-denial is appreciated.’
Then he fell asleep and didn’t wake until they stopped for lunch.
Lucien published an article: ‘Reflections on the Pétain Oak’. Its peroration ran: ‘Finally, we ask, what does this signify for France, for our country which the Marshal loves, serves and incarnates? When our children ask us to explain the meaning of the Pétain Oak, what shall we finally say? In one sentence, this: The National Revolution is also a Natural Revolution. Its roots are buried deep in the soil of France, like the oak tree’s, and it rises from the good earth of France sturdy and magnificent. Our children are young saplings under the protection of that mighty oak.’
Poor Lucien, I don’t think it can have occurred to him that the spreading branches of a great tree deny light to whatever grows under it.
For a time that spring and early summer Vichy was quiet. The war seemed far away. There was no resistance, even in the occupied zone. The censorship authorities reported that of the more than five hundred thousand mentions of the Marshal they had recorded in the two and a quarter million letters intercepted in April, 95 per cent were wholly favourable. There were rumours that he maintained contact with de Gaulle. ‘He’s an old fox, playing a deep game,’ people said. But in May Lucien was told that the British had offered information about a journey de Gaulle was planning to the Near East, so that French planes could intercept him, and thus rid both Churchill and Pétain of an embarrassment.
‘The Marshal would never consent to his murder,’ Lucien said. ‘On the other hand,’ he told Anne that evening, ‘his arrest would be another matter. Do you know that the Marshal now refers to him as a viper he nursed in his bosom?’
Anne said: ‘Your brother is with de Gaulle. You ought to find a means to warn him. It’s not right that Frenchmen should conspire against each other in this way.’
‘When have we not done so?’ Lucien asked.
They were happy together that summer. They went to the races, ate in restaurants, walked in the mountains. Lucien commemorated their activities in a long poem, indifferent in quality, but sure in feeling.
On the 8th of June they heard that British forces had attacked French troops in Syria. ‘It’s war again,’ people said, the Marshal himself among them. But that war was far distant. Then on the 22nd of June Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. For the first days Lucien was jubilant. If there was a crusade against atheistic Bolshevism, then there could at last be no doubt that Vichy was on the side of virtue and the angels. I have a witness who remembers him saying that: a curious story, for he had concealed such doubts till then, from all, I suppose, except perhaps Anne.
Hugh, these notes grow ever more fragmentary, and, I fear, unhelpful. The fact is – you will have to accept it – that the period of Lucien’s life between the fall of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union is largely time lost. Only a few shafts of light penetrate the darkness. I have given you what I can; you don’t want me to invent what I neither know nor can truly imagine.
We are trapped here, it seems to me, in the lie of biography. Biography pretends to tell the truth about people’s lives, but it can deal only with what is revealed, and this is not the most truthful element. Autobiographical revelation is always itself an artistic construction, and therefore unreliable: it offers an approved version, it is like Soviet history, from which everything inconvenient is expunged. When biography relies, as it often does, on letters, we, the readers, receive the least characteristic of utterances.
What I would really like to know is what Lucien and Anne said when they were alone, on the terrace of their apartment, dining at the corner table of a little restaurant, lying in bed after love-making. I don’t know this, and I’m not capable of making it up, and I don’t think it would help you if I did.
Here I sit, in my dull hotel room, with its stained mahogany, and a table flecked with cigar-ash, the brandy bottle at my right hand, and a smeared glass showing that I have been drinking for a long time, listening for voices. But all I hear belong to the present. There is the absurd Baroness, there is the clerk who every morning tells me that the Journal de Genève may be a dull paper, but is to be believed, ‘and that’s something, sir, in the world of today’; and I feel o
ppressed by the thought that I have failed you, Hugh, in this task which I so reluctantly undertook, as I have failed myself in every part of my life.
Thinking of Anne, I thought and dreamed last night of my own wife, and she seemed equally remote and insubstantial.
My hotel room begins to seem like a prison cell, like the one in which my father hanged himself.
Forgive this melodrama. You will be relieved to know that I have something authentic, in my father’s hand, to send you in my next batch. But I want to read it again myself first.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Document 11: Manuscript of
Lucien de Balafré, dated December 31, 1941
AM I AN egotist? Certainly. I dislike myself but am fascinated by the story of my own life, and by my own thoughts. Yet these are frequently banal, or would seem so to me if presented by others. This is perhaps why I dote on Stendhal, though finding his opinions ridiculous and disagreeable. It’s his honesty that appeals, even when he does not realise he is deceiving himself. Or do I mean ‘especially when …’
In several of his books I have made marginal notes reading: ‘This is me.’
‘All my life,’ he says somewhere, ‘I have had a horror of coarse individuals.’
Yet, like me, he couldn’t remain in his own room with his books.
This has been a momentous year in which the agony of the world has intensified. And I have found happiness. Is that absurd? Or wicked?
There is a frost outside, a mild frost. The trees sparkle and the air is like champagne. I have just drunk my coffee, and the little black cat which Anne brought home last month is stretched out in the sunshine on my desk. Anne herself is still asleep. I looked through a few minutes ago, and she was curled up like a child. I touched her cheek with my fingers, and she uttered a little moan, as if of pleasure, or rather as if asking for the postponement of pleasure. My heart turned over.
I had lunch in Paris in the autumn with Monsieur Laval. He wishes to return to the government, but on his own terms, and he believes I might be useful to him. ‘You have, I know, the Marshal’s ear,’ he said.
For a moment I thought he was going to reach forward and tweak mine, as if he was Napoleon.
Laval is disgruntled. He believes everything is in danger of going wrong. This is because he is excluded from government.
‘It is absurd,’ he told me, ‘not to desire a German victory, however much one dislikes Germans. That is the best hope for France. Otherwise we shall have a Communist government or else become mere appendages of the Anglo-Saxons. Believe me, if Germany loses the war, Europe is finished. The new world will be divided between the Anglo-Saxons and the Russians. We’ll only be a battleground. Do you know, when I was in Moscow in ’35, I saw nobody smile. There was only one exception: Stalin himself.’
He smoked incessantly, sipped brandy and gulped mineral water.
‘Of course de Gaulle is necessary, in case that happens,’ he said. ‘He would then do what he could to save something of France. But the Reds would be too strong for him. Believe me, I know, I’ve been in my time a man of the Left myself. No, my friend, there are only two men who can save France. One is de Gaulle, the other Laval. You realise this in your own family, for your brother is with de Gaulle, isn’t he? As for you, you should stick to Laval.’
He was loquacious, indiscreet, charming and repulsive.
‘Pétain thinks he is in charge, but he’s too old. He no more steers the ship than the figurehead does. As for Darlan, the beautiful Admiral, he’s an imbecile, believe me.’
Laval bites his nails, and when he smiles you can see his bad teeth. Yet he’s right. He is our best hope.
When you talk with a man of power you are easily seduced into thinking: ‘This is real life.’ But it’s only a parody. Kneeling in prayer in a cold church just after dawn, holding your mistress in your arms, watching the first morning sun touch the branches of winter trees with pink and gold: all these, appealing at first to the senses, or perceived by the senses, belong to the whole man.
Moreover, they are good.
Speaking with Laval, I experienced the thrill of pain and its infliction.
Anne met me at the railway station. She was wearing a fur coat and a little fur hat.
‘You look like a kitten,’ I said; but her cheek was icy.
She kissed me and I came alive.
One popular lie: that we wish to be understood.
In fact, we flee understanding. My marriage to Polly dissolved because we understood each other too well. Anne does not understand me at all, and has the good manners not to wish to do so. That is the first reason why I live comfortably with her.
I do not believe God understands us either. Freedom from understanding is a condition of the freedom he has accorded us.
I saw others in Paris: Colette, who spends hours every day watching the coming and going in the Palais-Royal; she talked to me of the sufferings of the poor. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘that the poor have always suffered, old women especially; but this is more bitter. They have no hope and they haven’t enough to eat.’
I called on Drieu at the offices of the NRF, which he is now editing. He folded me in his arms. Since he failed to remove the cigarette which is held perpetually, like an Olympic flame, in the right corner of his mouth, I was apprehensive. But his delight in seeing me was itself delightful.
‘At last,’ he cried, ‘a true civilised friend. You’ve no idea how awful it is here in Paris. Sometimes I even find myself believing that Otto – you know the German Ambassador Otto Abetz, don’t you – is the only civilised man except for myself in the city. But they tell me you are in love, my friend, charming, charming. If it wasn’t for women, I would cut my throat, I get so depressed sometimes.’
Nobody could seem less depressed than Drieu. He swept me off to the Brasserie Lipp, to eat frankfurters and potato salad. He talked merrily, all the time, and smoked between forkfuls.
‘I am a Fascist now, you know,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Yes, I have the courage to call myself that, which is burning my boats if you like. But I am a Fascist, Lucien, because I have seen, I have measured, the progress of European decadence. We need a clean start, a break. Snap: that’s the past gone. Do you know, Mauriac was here the other night and they shouted at him, “Get out, Mauriac, friend of Jews, you’ve no place in Paris,” and he called back, “You don’t frighten me, lice.” You couldn’t imagine an exchange like that in Pericles’ Athens, could you?’
(But I could.)
‘It’s what I mean by decadence.’
We drank Alsatian wine.
‘I regard it as a symbol of Franco-German solidarity,’ he said. ‘A French wine with a German name. Perfect.’ (But the Germans have annexed Alsace: has he forgotten?)
He talked and talked, smoked and drank, pressed my arm as if we were the dearest friends he said we were, though we are only good friends, even friendly acquaintances, spoke to me as if he needed me, and urged me to write for his magazine.
‘You’ve no idea the tripe I get, ideologically sound perhaps, but of no literary quality. Sometimes I think even the Germans could do better.’
He called for another bottle.
‘Let’s put the snake back on the tree,’ he said.
‘Shall I tell you a secret?’ he said.
He leaned across the table. There was a little twitch in his right cheek. He took the cigarette from his mouth and stabbed it at me.
‘There are times when I’m afraid the Germans are going to lose the war. They’re such fools, you see. To invade Russia. That’s really crass. It’s breaking the first law of war: don’t invade Russia. Their only hope is the sheer inefficiency of Communism, and that’s really staggering. Stalin murdered the whole officer corps, you know.’
He stubbed out his cigarette, lit another.
‘I don’t mind confessing to you, Lucien, because you’re discreet, and a gentleman. My position is frightfully boring: the magazine, the whole business of collaboration,
of being a responsible person, it’s irritated me from the start. Yet I was so eager to get my hands on it. Strange. And I’m stuck. I’ve got to play the part to the end. To the curtain. And it’s absurd. To work, to labour, for an idea of Europe, when the Germans, who are alone in the position to remould Europe, really have no idea what they want, when my fellow-collaborationists, which is a good joke in itself, are divided, and divided fools; and to do all this in the middle of a population that wants Europe to be English, American or Russian, it’s wearying. I’m so tired and we’re not halfway through the comedy. The invasion of Russia is the opening of the third act, at most. And weariness breeds fear. I often feel like killing myself … Are you afraid, Lucien? Do you think we have been dealt the wrong cards..?’
What could I say? That in such times as ours fear stalks the corridors of night like a corrupt policeman?
To all appearances the war goes well. Hitler has advanced deep into Russia.
‘Remember,’ Drieu said, ‘Napoleon took Moscow.’
He already believes, clearly, that Germany will lose the war.
