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

We take out meals at le Bergues. In the afternoons, Des Essarts works on a book about pre-revolutionary Russian cinema. As for me, I translate Alexandrian poets. We settle on the hotel bar to work on these trivial tasks. A bald man with eyes like embers regularly comes and sits at the table next to ours. One afternoon, he speaks to us, staring at us intently. Suddenly, from his pockets, he takes an old passport and proffers it. To my astonishment I read the name Maurice Sachs. Alcohol makes him talkative. He tells us of his misadventures since 1945, the date of his supposed death. He was, successively, a Gestapo officer, a GI, a cattle trader in Bavaria, a broker in Anvers, a brothel-keeper in Barcelona, a clown in a Milan circus under the stage name Lola Montès. He finally settled in Geneva where he runs a small bookshop. To celebrate this chance meeting, we drink until three in the morning. From that day forth, we and Maurice are inseparable and we solemnly vow to keep secret the fact that he is alive.

We spend our days sitting behind piles of books in the back office of his bookshop, listening as he brings 1925 to life for us. In a voice made gravelly by alcohol, Maurice talks about Gide, Cocteau, Coco Chanel. The adolescent of the Roaring Twenties is now a fat old man gesticulating wildly at the memory of Hispano-Suiza automobiles and Le Boeuf sur le Toit.

‘Since 1945, I’ve been living on borrowed time,’ he confides, ‘I should have died when the moment was right, like Drieu la Rochelle. Trouble is: I’m a Jew, I have the survival instincts of a rat.’

I make a note of this comment and, the following day, bring Maurice a copy of my study Drieu and Sachs: where primrose paths lead . In the study, I show how two young men in 1925 lost their way because they lack depth of character: Drieu, the grand young man of Sciences-Po, a French petit bourgeois fascinated by convertibles, English neckties and American girls, who passed himself off as a hero of the Great War; Sachs, a young Jew of great charm and dubious morals, the product of a putrid post-war generation. By 1940, tragedy is sweeping Europe. How will our two bright young things react? Drieu remembers that he was born on the Cotentin Peninsula and spends four years singing the ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’ in a shrill falsetto. For Sachs, occupied Paris is an Eden where he can lose himself in wild abandon. This is a Paris that offers him pleasures much more intense that the Paris of 1925. Here it is possible to traffic in gold, rent apartments and sell off the furniture, trade ten kilos of butter for a sapphire, convert the sapphire into scrap metal, etc. Night and fog mean there is no need for explanations. But above all, there is the thrill of being able to buy his life on the black market, to purloin each beat of his heart, to feel himself the prey in a hunt! It is difficult to imagine Sachs in the Résistance, fighting alongside French petty bureaucrats for the reinstatement of morality, legality and the light of day. Towards 1943, when he can feel the baying pack and the ratcatchers moving in, he signs up as a volunteer in Germany and, later, becomes an active member of the Gestapo. I have no wish to upset Maurice: I have him die in 1945 and pass over in silence his various incarnations from 1945 to the present day. I conclude thus: ‘Who would have thought that, twenty years later, the charming young man of 1925 would be savaged by dogs on the plains of Pomerania?’

Having read my study, Maurice says:

‘It’s very neat, Schlemilovitch, the parallel between Drieu and myself, but I have to say I would prefer a parallel between Drieu and Brasillach. Compared to them I was a mere prankster. Write something for tomorrow morning and I shall tell you what I think.’

Maurice is delighted to be mentoring a young man. Doubtless he is remembering the first visits he made, his heart pounding, to Gide and Cocteau. He is greatly pleased with my Drieu and Brasillach . I attempted to address the following question: what were the motives that prompted Drieu and Brasillach to collaborate?

The first part of this study was entitled: ‘Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, or the eternal love affair between the SS and the Jewess.’ One subject recurs frequently in the novels of Drieu: the Jewish woman. That noble Viking, Gilles Drieu, had no hesitation about pimping Jewish women, a certain Myriam for example. His attraction to Jewish women can also be explained in the following manner: ever since Walter Scott, it has been understood that Jewish women are meek courtesans who submit to the every whim of their Aryan lords and masters. In the company of Jewish women Drieu had the illusion of being a crusader, a Teutonic knight. Up to this point, there was nothing very original in my analysis, Drieu’s commentators have all focussed on the role of the Jewess in his writings. But Drieu as collaborator? This I explain easily: Drieu was fascinated by Doric masculinity. In June 1940, the real Aryans, the true warriors, descend on Paris: Drieu quickly shucks off the Viking costume he hired to violate the young Jewish girls of Passy. He discovers his true nature: beneath the steely blue gaze of the SS officers, he softens, he melts, he suddenly feels an oriental languidness. All too soon, he is swooning into the arms of the conquerors. After their defeat, he immolates himself. Such passivity, such a taste for Nirvana are surprising in a man from Normandy.

The second part of my study was entitled ‘Robert Brasillach, or the Maid of Nuremberg.’ ‘There were many of us who slept with Germany,’ he confessed, ‘and the memory of it will remain sweet.’ His impulsiveness reminds me of the young Viennese girls during the Anschluss. As German soldiers marched along Ringstraße, girls dressed up in their chicest dirndls to shower them with roses. Afterwards they strolled in the Prater with these blonde angels. Then came a magical twilight in the Stadtpark where they kissed an SS Totenkopf while murmuring Schubert lieder in his ear. My God, how handsome the youths were on the far side of the Rhine! How could anyone not fall in love with Hitler Youth Quex? In Nuremberg, Brasillach could scarcely believe his eyes: the bronzed muscles, the pale eyes, the tremulous lips of the Hitlejungend and the cocks you could sense straining in the torrid night, as pure a night as falls over Toledo from Los Cigarrales. . I met Robert Brasillach at the École Normale Supérieure. He affectionately referred to me as his ‘dear little Moses’, or his ‘dear little Jew’. Together, we discovered the Paris of Pierre Corneille and René Clair, dotted with pleasant bistros where we would sip glasses of white wine. Robert would talk maliciously about our teacher André Bellessort and we would plan delightful little pranks. In the afternoons, we would ‘coach’ dim-witted, pretentious young Jewish numbskulls. At night, we would go to the cinematograph or share with our fellow classmates a copious brandade de morue . Towards midnight, we would drink the iced orangeades Robert so loved because they reminded him of Spain. This, then, was our youth, the deep morning never to be regained. Robert embarked on a brilliant career as a journalist — I remember an article he wrote about Julien Benda. We were strolling through the Parc Montsouris and, in his manly voice, our own ‘Grand Meaulnes’ was denouncing Benda’s intellectualism, his Jewish obscenity, his Talmudist’s senility. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to me suddenly, ‘I’ve probably offended you. I’d forgotten you were an Israelite.’ I blushed to the tips of my fingers. ‘No, Robert, I’m an honorary goy! Surely you must know that Jean Lévy, Pierre-Marius Zadoc, Raoul-Charles Leman, Marc Boasson, René Riquieur, Louis Latzarus, René Gross — all Jews like me — were passionate supporters of Maurras? Well, I want to work at Je suis partout , Robert! Please, introduce me to your friends! I’ll write the anti-Semitic column instead of Lucien Rebatet! Just imagine the scandal: Schlemilovitch calls Blum a yid!’ Robert was delighted at the prospect. Soon, I struck up a friendship with P.-A. Cousteau, ‘the bronzed and virile Bordeaux boy,’ Caporal Ralph Soupault, Robert Adriveau, ‘dyed-in-the-wool fascist and sentimental luminary of our dinner parties’, the jolly Alain Laubreaux from Toulouse and, lastly, Lucien Rebatet of the mountain infantry (‘Now there’s a man: he wields a pen the same way he will wield a gun when the day comes’). I immediately gave this peasant from the Dauphiné a few helpful ideas for his anti-Semitic column. From that day on, Rebatet was constantly asking for my advice. I’ve always thought that goys are like bulls in a china shop when it comes to understanding Jews. Even their anti-Semitism is cack-handed.