Patrick Modiano - The Occupation Trilogy - La Place de l'Étoile – The Night Watch – Ring Roads

I had been warned; thereafter they completely ostracised me.

Adrien Debigorre, who taught us French literature and language, had an imposing beard, a black frockcoat, and a club foot that elicited mocking comments from the students. This curious character had been a friend of Maurras, of Paul Chack and Monsignor Mayol de Lupé; French radio listeners will probably remember the ‘Fireside chats’ Debigorre gave on Radio-Vichy.

In 1942, Debigorre is part of the inner circle of Abel Bonheur, the Ministre de l’Éducation nationale. He is indignant when Bonheur, dressed as Anne de Bretagne, declares in a soft tremulous tone: ‘If we had a princess in France, we should push her into the arms of Hitler’, or when the minister praised the ‘manly charms’ of the SS. Eventually he fell out with Bonheur, nicknaming him la Gestapette , something Pétain found hilarious. Retiring to the Minquier islands, Debigorre tried to organise commandos of local fishermen to mount a resistance against the British. His Anglophobia rivalled that of Henri Béraud. As a child he had solemnly promised his father, a naval lieutenant from Saint-Malo, that he would never forget the ‘trick’ of Trafalgar. During the attack on Mers-el-Kébir, he is said to have thundered: ‘They will pay for this!’ During the war, he kept up a voluminous correspondence with Paul Chack and would read us passages from their letters. My classmates missed no opportunity to humiliate him. At the beginning of class, he would stand up and sing ‘Maréchal, nous voilà’! The blackboard was covered with francisques and photographs of Pétain. Debigorre would talk but no one paid him any heed. Sometimes, he would bury his head in his hands and sob. One student, a colonel’s son named Gerbier, would shout ‘Adrien’s blubbing!’ The whole class would roar with laughter. Except me, of course. I decided to be the poor man’s bodyguard. Despite my recent bout of tuberculosis, I stood six foot six and weighed nearly 200 pounds, and as luck would have it, I had been born in a country of short-arsed bastards.

I began by splitting Gerbie’s eyebrow. A lawyer’s son, a boy named Val-Suzon, called me a ‘Nazi’. I broke three of his vertebrae in memory of SS officer Schlemilovitch who died on the Russian front during the Ardennes Offensive. All that remained was to bring a few little Gauls to heel: Chatel-Gérard, Saint-Thibault, La Rochepot. Thereafter it was I and not Debigorre who read Maurras, Chack or Béraud at the beginning of class. Terrified of my vicious streak, you could hear a pin drop, this was the reign of Jewish terror and our old schoolmaster soon found his smile again.

After all, why did classmates make such a show of seeming disgusted?

Surely Maurras, Chack and Béraud were just like their grandfathers.

Here I was taking the trouble to introduce them to the healthiest, the purest of their compatriots and the ungrateful bastards called me a ‘Nazi’. .

‘Let’s have them study the Romanciers du terroir ,’ I suggested to Debigorre. ‘These little degenerates need to study the rural novels celebrating their fathers’ glories. It’ll make a change from Trotsky, Kafka and the rest of that gypsy rabble. Besides, it’s not like they even understand them. It takes two thousand years of pogroms, my dear Debigorre, to be able to tackle such books. If I were called Val-Suzon, I wouldn’t be so presumptuous. I’d settle for exploring the provinces, quenching my thirst from French springs! Listen, for the first term, we’ll teach them about your friend Béraud. A good solid writer from Lyons seems entirely appropriate. A few comments on novels like Les Lurons de Sabolas. . We can follow up with Eugène le Roy: Jacquou le Croquant and Mademoiselle de la Ralphie will teach them the beauties of the Périgord. A little detour through Quercy courtesy of Léon Cladel. A trip to Bretagne under the aegis of Charles Le Goffic. Roupnel can take us on a tour of Bourgogne. The Bourbonnais will hold no secrets for us after reading Guillaumin’s La Vie d’un simple . Through Alphonse Daudet and Paul Arène we will smell the scents of Provence. We can discuss Maurras and Mistral! In the second term, we can revel in the Touraine autumn with René Boylesve. Have you read L’Enfant à la balustrade ? It’s remarkable! The third term will be devoted to the psychological novels of the Dijon author Édouard Estaunié. In short, a sentimental tour of France! What do you think of my syllabus?’

Debigorre was smiling and clasping my hands in his. He said to me:

‘Schlemilovitch, you are a scholar and patriot! If only the native French lads were like you!’

Debigorre often invites me to his home. He lives in a room cluttered with books and papers. On the walls hang yellowing photographs of various oddballs: Bichelonne, Hérold-Paquis and admirals Esteva, Darlan and Platón. His elderly housekeeper serves us tea. At about 11 p.m. we have an aperitif on the terrace of the Café de Bordeaux. On my first visit, I surprise him hugely by talking about the Maurras’ mannerisms and Pujo’s beard. ‘But you weren’t even born, Raphäel!’ Debigorre thinks it is a case of transmigration of souls, that in some former life I was a fierce supporter of Maurras, a pureblood Frenchman, an unrepentant Gaulois and a Jewish collaborator to boot: ‘Ah, Raphäel, how I wish you had been in Bordeaux in June 1940! Picture the outrageous scenes! Gentlemen with beards and black frockcoats! University students! Ministers of the RÉ-PU-BLI-QUE are chattering away! Making grand gestures! Réda Caire and Maurice Chevalier are singing songs! Suddenly — BANG! — blond bare-chested youths burst into the Café du Commerce! They start a wholesale massacre! The gentlemen in frockcoats are thrown against the ceiling. They slam into the walls, crash into the rows of bottles. They splash about in puddles of Pernod, heads slashed by broken glass! The manageress, a woman named Marianne, is running this way and that. She gives little cries. The woman’s an old whore! the slut! Her skirt falls off. She’s gunned down in a hail of machine gunfire. Caire and Chevalier suddenly fall silent. What a sight, Raphäel, for enlightened minds like ours! What vengeance!. . ’

Eventually, I tire of my role as martinet. Since my classmates refuse to accept that Maurras, Chack and Béraud are their people, since they look down on Charles Le Goffic and Paul Arène, Debigorre and I will talk to them about some more universal aspects of ‘French genius’: vividness and ribaldry, the beauties of classicism, the pertinence of moralists, the irony of Voltaire, the subtleties of psychological novels, the heroic tradition from Corneille to Georges Bernanos. Debigorre bridles at the mention of Voltaire. I am equally repulsed by that bourgeois ‘rebel’ and anti-Semite, but if we don’t mention him in our Panorama of French genius , we will be accused of bias. ‘Let’s be reasonable,’ I say to Debigorre, ‘you know perfectly well that I personally prefer Joseph de Maistre. Let’s make a little effort to include Voltaire.’

Once again, Saint-Thibault disrupts one of our lectures. An inopportune remark by Debigorre, ‘The utterly French grace of the exquisite Mme de La Fayette’, has my classmate leaping from his seat in indignation.

‘When are you going to stop talking about “French genius”, about how something is “quintessentially French”, about “the French tradition”?’ bellows the young Gaulois. My mentor Trotsky says that the Revolution knows no country. .

‘My dear Saint-Thibault,’ I said, ‘you’re starting to get on my nerves. You are too jowly and your blood too thick for the name Trotsky from your lips to be anything other than blasphemy. My dear Saint-Thibault, your great-great-uncle Charles Maurras wrote that it is impossible to understand Mme de La Fayette or Chamfort unless one has tilled the soil of France for a thousand years! Now it is my turn to tell you something, my dear Saint-Thibault: it takes a thousand years of pogroms, of auto-da-fés and ghettos to understand even a paragraph of Marx or Bronstein. . bronstein, my dear Saint-Thibault, and not Trotsky as you so elegantly call him! Now shut your trap, my dear Saint-Thibault, or I shall. .’