mothers! Thereupon Marshal Foch had died, in the same month as the Rhine Army soldiers, to whom people had given rather less thought. What an opportunity to go and queue up at the end of Rue de Grenelle – in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, with Englishmen, nannies from the Champ-de-Mars, old ladies and priests – to see what the funerals of illustrious families are like, and how old victorious marshals settle into death wearing their chinstraps! But in April, when soldiers fraternized in the Gard with the striking miners they were actually supposed to evict from the pits, people were fed up with all these stories about servicemen whereas only marshals – at most – were really tolerable. Eventually, however, the ladies felt easier in their minds. They were the same ones who, a few years later, would talk about pre-crash days as in ’28 they had talked of pre-war days, and who could be heard in drawing-rooms saying that in the last war their sons had been taken, which for France’s sake they could accept, but that in the next war their money would be taken too. Their minds had to be set at rest. Luckily, that year Prefect Chiappe showed that with him public order was in no danger: after 1 May and 1 August, people told themselves it would be a long while before the communists had bandaged all their wounds.
It was indeed a difficult year to get through, for young men who placed all their hopes in the aggravation of disorder, and for whom the only desirable future consisted in not having one. Already their parents, forever paved with good intentions, were reviving career plans for them about which they had long been doubtful, bearing in mind what this strange, tottering world of the twenties held in store. Laforgue’s father, who had quite some time ago consoled himself for his son’s refusal to enter the Ecole Polytechnique, spoke to him about doing a doctoral thesis, after his agrégation:
— Who do you take me for? Philippe exclaimed.
Was it all going to start up again, then? Were they finally going to be compelled, after invoking all the shipwrecks befitting great ornamental centuries, to sail upon the level waters of bourgeois life, observing nautical regulations and all the red signals on bridges?
The prosperity of ’29, those Markets that were so healthy despite their ups and downs and any check in the contango rate, appeared as oppressive to them as the celebrated failed Revolution of ’19, ten years earlier, had seemed to their elders.
They had lived amid such thrilling uncertainty, since the time when, at school, their classes had been interrupted by air raids and shellbursts and every door that banged had made them think of an explosion, that it seemed impossible to them that the sad age of indolence miraculously suspended by the four years of the War could ever resume its course.
Laforgue and Rosenthal dated history from nineteen hundred and fourteen: they would have liked to be able to call ’29 Year XV, numbering the dates of a new era in the same way that the Russians spoke of Year XIII of the October Revolution. Were they now going to have to remain in the continuation of the Christian era, and feel themselves bound in perpetuity to Jesus, Charlemagne, Henri IV, Louis XIV, Voltaire, Napoleon and M. Thiers? For several months they foresaw the advent of an age of regress and boredom, such as had not been seen since the Restoration or the first years of the Third Republic, when they would lament the warlike and peaceful exploits of their elders, just as the young men of eighteen hundred and twenty had lamented the Revolutionary Wars, the Italian Campaign and Napoleon’s anabases from one end of Europe to the other, or the young men of eighteen hundred and eighty had lamented the Burning of Paris and the Commune with its sixty days of great innovations. Would they then be reduced to writing poems?
They were well aware that the public authorities and their families were conspiring, as in the past, to make them relapse into brilliant futures, careers, worries about advancement, money and successful marriages. These pretensions struck them as repugnant, but they trembled to see them confirmed by the becalming of history: in their entire adolescence, there was perhaps no year more disturbing than that year of ’29, when everything contributed to a non-stop purr of contentment.
Thank God, in November, the Wall Street crash was to reassure them: they welcomed it like news of a victory. Since they tended to confuse capitalism with important people, when they saw their fathers’ faces they convinced themselves that they had been quite right to stake their lives on the cards of confusion, and that they could indubitably count upon a world destined for great metamorphoses. There was no question of settling down into an order that was about to die, no question of making their beds.
— Didn’t we say so! they exclaimed.
But they had had a narrow escape.
None of them was more sensitive than Rosenthal to these plunges and abrupt recoveries of potential. You must picture Bernard founding Civil War only in order to play for time, in order to occupy his mind, until he got a chance to show what he was capable of. He would gladly have been heroic: there were no opportunities.
One evening towards the end of March, in Rue d’Ulm, Rosenthal exclaimed that the Revolution required far more than articles:
— One writes, he said, and one believes that the Revolution is made. One falls – we fall – into post-revolutionary fantasies. Are you satisfied? Yes or no? You’re not saying anything? One’s confidence in revolution can be measured only by the sacrifices one makes to it and the risks one runs for it . . .
— That’s more or less what I’ve always had the honour of telling you, replied Laforgue.
Next day, Bloyé said to Laforgue:
— It’s four months that the journal has been going now, that’s a long time . . . Rosenthal must have some ideas at the back of his mind. You can detect that hypocritical self-satisfaction of men who are making plans . . .
— Yes, said Laforgue. He’s slyly singing a new song to himself.
Rosenthal dropped hints, he said:
— Do you recall Dostoievsky and what he says about the Idea one must have and in whose power one must believe? There’s no living person to whom I feel closer than I do to Arkady Makarovich Dolgoruky. . .
His friends waited, however. Knowing his taste for mystery and coups de théâtre, they did not question him.
VI
One Saturday, towards evening, they all received an express letter inviting them to assemble next day at two o’clock opposite Saint-Germain-des-Prés: all of them – Laforgue, Bloyé, Jurien and lastly Pluvinage.
No group of young people exists in which hierarchies and distances are not established, as though some of them were credited by all the others with a more far-reaching future. Rosenthal, who was looked on as the leader and enjoyed this position, vaguely mistrusted Pluvinage and had hesitated before inviting him along: he would not have entrusted him with his secrets. Perhaps it was because of his name: nobody calls themself Pluvinage. But the day was not expected to be packed with great mysteries, so Bernard had notified Pluvinage after all.
It was a rainy early-April day, an icy aftermath of those March showers when all hopes placed in the establishment of spring burst as rapidly as the heavens. Because of that black Sunday rain, Paris was empty: umbrellas drifted between wind and water like shining jellyfish; couples made their way to tedious visits and slapped their children; gusts of damp wind closed down the newspaper vendors under the Abbey porch, where three beggars lay in ambush for the faithful at Vespers. Rosenthal was waiting in an old open car, parked between the Clamart tramway and the shop supplying insignia on Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
— You’re a proper swine, said Bloyé, you really could have brought your old hearse up to Rue d’Ulm.
— Climb aboard, said Rosenthal. We’ve quite
