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

We used the same printworks as l’Action Française . I was dandled on Maurras’ lap, stroked Pujo’s beard. Maxime Real del Sarte wasn’t bad either. Such delightful old men!

June 1940. I leave the merry band of Je suis partout , though I miss our meetings at the Place Denfert-Rochereau. I am weary of journalism and beginning to nurture political ambitions. I resolve to become a Jewish collaborator. Initially, I embark on a little high-society collaborationism: I patronise tea parties with the Propaganda-Staffel, dinners with Jean Luchaire, suppers on the Rue Lauriston, and carefully cultivate Brinon as a friend. I avoid Céline and Drieu la Rochelle, too Jewified for my taste. I quickly make myself indispensable; I am the only Jew, the ‘good Jew’ of the Collaborationist movement. Luchaire introduces me to Abetz. We arrange to meet. I set out my conditions: I want 1) to replace that vile little Frenchman Darquier de Pellepoix at the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, 2) to be given complete freedom of action. It seems to me absurd to eliminate 500,000 French Jews. Abetz seems keenly interested but does not follow up on my proposals. Nonetheless, I remain on excellent terms with him and with Stülpnagel. They advise me to contact Doriot or Déat. I don’t much like Doriot because of his communist past and his braces. Déat, I see as something of a radical-socialist schoolmaster. A newcomer impresses me by his beret. I would like to say a word about Jo Darnand. Every anti-Semite has his ‘good Jew’: Jo Darnand is my idealized image of a good Frenchman ‘with his warrior face surveying the plains’. I become his right-hand man and form solid ties with the Milice : the boys in navy blue have their good points, take my word for it.

Summer, 1944, after various military raids in the Vercors region, we hole up in Sigmaringen with members of the Franc-Garde. In December, during the Ardennes Offensive, I am gunned down by a GI named Lévy who looks so like me he could be my brother.

In Maurice’s bookshop I found all the back-issues of Le Gerbe , of Pilori and Je suis partout and a few Pétainist pamphlets on the subject of training ‘leaders’. Aside from pro-German literature, Maurice possesses the complete works of forgotten writers. While I read the anti-Semites Montandon and Marques-Rivière, Des Essarts becomes enthralled by the novels of Édouard Rod, Marcel Prévost, Estaunié, Boylesve, Abel Hermant. He pens a brief essay: What Is Literature? which he dedicates to Jean-Paul Sartre. Des Essarts is an antiquarian at heart, he intends to rehabilitate the reputations of the 1880s novelists he has just discovered. He might just as easily defend the style of Louis-Philippe or Napoleon III. The last section of his essay is entitled ‘A Guide to Reading Certain Writers’ and is addressed to young persons eager to improve their minds: ‘Edouard Estaunié,’ he writes, ‘should be read in a country house at about five in the afternoon with a glass of Armagnac in hand. When reading O’Rosen or Creed, the reader should wear a formal suit, a club tie and a black silk pocket handkerchief. I recommend reading René Boylesve in summertime, in Cannes or Monte-Carlo at about eight in the evening wearing an alpaca suite. The novels of Abel Herman require sophistication: they should be read aboard a Panamanian yacht while smoking menthol cigarettes. .’

Maurice, for his part, is writing the third tome of his memoirs: The Revenant , a companion volume to The Sabbath and The Hunt .

As for me, I have decided to be the greatest Jewish — French writer after Montaigne, Marcel Proust and Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

I used to have the passions and the paroxysms of a young man. Today, such naivety makes me smile. I believed that the future of Jewish literature rested on my shoulders. I looked toward the past and denounced the two-faced hypocrites: Capitaine Dreyfus, Maurois, Daniel Halévy. Proust, with his provincial childhood, was too assimilated to my mind. Edmond Fleg too nice, Benda too abstract — why play the pure spirit, Benda? The archangel of geometry? The great ascetic? The invisible Jew?

There were some beautiful lines by Spire:

Oh fervour, oh sadness, oh violence, oh madness,

Indomitable spirits to whom I am pledged,

What am I without you? Come then defend me

Against the cold, hard Reason of this happy earth. .

And, again:

You would sing of strength, of daring,

You will love only dreamers defenceless against life

You will strive to listen to the joyous songs of peasants,

To soldiers’ brutal marches, to the graceful dances of little girls

You shall have ears only for tears. .

Looking eastward, there are stronger personalities: Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka. . I loved Heine’s poem ‘Doña Clara:’ in Spain, the daughter of the Grand Inquisitor falls in love with a handsome knight who looks like Saint George. ‘You have nothing in common with the vile Jews,’ he tells her. The handsome knight then reveals his identity:

Ich, Señora, eur Geliebter,

Bin der Sohn des vielbelobten,

Großen, schriftgelehrten Rabbi

Israel von Saragossa. 1

Much fuss was made of Franz Kafka, the elder brother of Charlie Chaplin. A few Aryan prigs put on their jackboots to trample his work: they promoted Kafka to professor of philosophy. They contrast him with the Prussian Emmanuel Kant, with the Danish genius Søren Kierkegaard, with the southerner Albert Camus, with J.-P. Sartre the half-Alsatian, half-Périgourdine penny-a-liner. I wonder how Kafka, so frail, so timid, could withstand such an onslaught.

Since becoming a naturalised Jew, Des Essarts had unreservedly embraced our cause. Maurice, on the other hand, worried about my increasing racism.

‘You keep harping on at old stories,’ he would say, ‘it’s not 1942 anymore, old man! If it were, I would be strongly advising you to follow my example and join the Gestapo, that would change your perspective! People quickly forget their origins, you know! A little flexibility and you can change your skin at will! Change your colour! Long live the chameleon! Just watch, I can become Chinese, Apache, Norwegian, Patagonian, just like that! A quick wave of the magic wand! Abracadabra!’

I am not listening to him. I have just met Tania Arcisewska, a Polish Jew. This young woman is slowly killing herself, with no convulsions, no cries, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world. She uses a Pravaz syringe to shoot up.

‘Tania exerts a baleful influence over you,’ Maurice tells me, ‘why don’t you find yourself a nice little Aryan girl who can sing you lullabies of the homeland.’

Tania sings me the Prayer for the Dead of Auschwitz . She wakes me in the middle of the night and shows me the indelible number tattooed on her shoulder.

‘Look what they did to me Raphaël, look!’

She stumbles over to the window. Along the banks of the Rhône, with admirable discipline, black battalions parade and muster outside the hotel.

‘Look at all the SS officers, Raphaël! See the three cops in leather coats over there on the left? It’s the Gestapo, Raphaël! They’re coming to the hotel! They’re coming for us! They’re going to gather us back to the Fatherland!’

I quickly reassure her. I have friends in high places. I have no truck with the petty pissants of the Paris Collabo . I’m on first name terms with Goering; Hess, Goebbels and Heydrich consider me a friend. She’s safe with me. The cops won’t touch a hair on her head. If they try, I’ll show them my medals; I’m the only Jew ever to be awarded the Iron Cross by Hitler himself.