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

Then come the Swiss boarding schools in Lausanne and my first crushes. The Duisenberg given me for my eighteenth birthday by my Venezuelan uncle Vidal glides through the blue evening. I pass through a gate and drive through the park that slopes gently to Lake Leman and leave the car by the steps leading up to a villa twinkling with lights. Girls in pale dresses are waiting for me on the lawn. Scott Fitzgerald has written more elegantly that I ever could about these ‘parties’ where the twilight is too tender, the laughter and the shimmering lights too harsh to bode well. I therefore recommend you read the author, you will have a precise idea of the parties of my adolescence. Failing that, read Fermina Marquez by Larbaud.

If I shared the pleasures of my cosmopolitan classmates in Lausanne, I did not quite resemble them. I often went off to Geneva. In the silence of the Hôtel des Bergues, I would read the Greek bucolic poets and strive to elegantly translate the Aeneid . In the course of one such retreat, I made the acquaintance of a young aristocrat from Touraine, Jean-François Des Essarts. We were the same age and I was astounded by the breadth of his knowledge. At our first meeting, he recommended that I read — in no particular order — Maurice Scève’s Délie , Corneille’s comedies, the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz. He initiated me into the grace and the subtleties of French.

In him, I discovered precious qualities: tact, generosity, a great sensitivity, a scathing wit. I remember Des Essarts used to compare our friendship to the one between Robert de Saint-Loup and the narrator of In Search of Lost Time . ‘You’re a Jew, like the narrator,’ he would say, ‘and I’m related to the Noailles, the Rochechouart-Mortemarts and the La Rochfoucaulds like Robert de Saint-Loup. Don’t worry, for a century now the French aristocracy have had a soft spot for Jews. I’ll show you a few pages by Drumont in which this upstanding man castigates us for it bitterly.’

I decided never to return to Lausanne and, without the slightest compunction, sacrificed my cosmopolitan friends for Des Essarts.

I turned out my pockets. I had exactly a hundred dollars. Des Essarts did not have a centime to his name. Even so, I suggested he give up his job as sports correspondent for La Gazette de Lausanne. I had just remembered that, during a weekend spent in England, some friends had dragged me to a manor near Bournemouth to see a collection of old automobiles. I tracked down the name of the collector, Lord Allahabad, and sold him my Duisenberg for fourteen thousand pounds. On such a sum we could live decently for a year without having to depend on having money wired by my uncle Vidal.

We moved into the Hôtel des Bergues. I still have dazzling memories of this early period of our friendship. In the morning, we would loiter among the antique dealers of old Geneva. Des Essarts passed on to me his passion for bronzes. We bought some twenty pieces which cluttered up our rooms, among them a verdigris allegory representing ‘Toil’ and a pair of magnificent stags. One afternoon, Des Essarts informed me that he had acquired a bronze footballer:

‘Parisian snobs will soon be falling over themselves to pay big money for these things. Take my word for it, my dear Raphäel! If it were up to me, the thirties style would be back in vogue.’

I asked him why he had left France:

‘Military service did not suit my delicate constitution,’ he explained, ‘so I deserted.’

‘We shall fix that,’ I told him. ‘I promise to find you a skilled craftsman here in Geneva to make you false papers: you’ll be able to go back to France anytime you like without having to worry.’

The dubious printer we managed to track down produced a Swiss birth certificate and passport in the name Jean-François Lévy, born in Geneva on July 30, 194—.

‘Now I’m one of your lot,’ said Des Essarts, ‘I was bored of being a goy.’

I immediately decided to send an anonymous confession to the left-wing Paris newspapers. I wrote as follows:

‘Since November last, I have been guilty of desertion but the French military authorities have decided it is safer to hush up my case. I told them what today I am declaring publicly. I am a jew and the army that spurned the services of Capitaine Dreyfus can do without mine. I have been condemned for failing to fulfil my military duties. Time was, the same tribunal condemned Alfred Dreyfus because he, a jew, had dared to choose a career in the army. Until such time as this contradiction can be explained to me, I refuse to serve as a second-class soldier in an army that, to this day, has wanted nothing to do with a Maréchal Dreyfus. I urge all young French Jews to follow my example.’

I signed it: JACOB X.

As I had hoped, the French left feverishly took up the moral dilemma of Jacob X. It was the third Jewish scandal in France after the Dreyfus affair and the Finaly Affair. Des Essarts got in on the game, and together we wrote a dazzling ‘Confession of Jacob X’ which was serialised in a Parisian weekly: Jacob X had been taken in by a French family whose name he chose not to reveal consisting of a Pétainist colonel, his wife, a former canteen worker, and three sons, the eldest of whom joined the mountain infantry, the second the marines, the youngest had been accepted to the military academy of Saint-Cyr.

The family lived in Paray-le-Monial and Jacob X had grown up in the shadow of the basilica. The living room walls were bedecked with portraits of Gallieni, of Foch and Joffre, with colonel X’s military cross and a number of francisques . Under the influence of his adoptive family, the young Jacob X came to worship the French army: he, too, would go to Saint-Cyr, he, like Pétain, would be a maréchal. At school, Monsieur C., the history master, discussed the Dreyfus Affair. Before the war, Monsieur C. had held an important post in the PPF. He was well aware that Colonel X had betrayed Jacob X’s parents to the Germans and his life had been spared after the liberation only because he had adopted the little Jew. Monsieur C. despised the pétainisme of the X family: he revelled in the idea of causing dissension within the family. After the lesson, he called Jacob X over and whispered: ‘I’m sure you find the Dreyfus Affair very upsetting. A young Jewish boy like you must feel personally affronted by such injustice.’ To his horror, Jacob X discovers he is a Jew. Having identified with Maréchal Foch, with Maréchal Pétain, he suddenly discovers that he is like Capitaine Dreyfus. And yet he does not seek to avenge himself through treason like Dreyfus. He receives his call-up papers and can see no way out but to desert.

The confession divided French Jews. The Zionists advised Jacob X to emigrate to Israel. There he could legitimately aspire to the baton of a maréchal. The assimilated, self-loathing Jews claimed that Jacob X was an agent provocateur in the pay of neo-Nazis. The Left passionately defended the young deserter. Sartre’s article, ‘Saint Jacob X: Actor and Martyr’ sparked the offensive. Everyone will remember the most germane passage: ‘Tomorrow, he will think of himself as a Jew, but a Jew in abjection. Beneath the glowering stares of Gallieni, Joffre and Foch whose portraits hang on the walls of the living room, he will become a vulgar deserter, this boy who, since childhood, had worshipped the French army, “La Casquette du père Bugeaud” and Pétain’s francisques . In short, he will experience the delicious shame of feeling Other, that is to say Evil.’

Various pamphlets circulated demanding that Jacob X return in triumph. A public meeting was held at la Mutualité. Sartre pleaded with Jacob X to forego anonymity, but the obstinate silence of the deserter discouraged even the best intentioned.