nothing about anything. As yet, he has access only to that desert of solitude and bitterness through which a young man shapes his course towards love; of pleasure itself, he knows only a kind of organic wrench. He has never met a woman who has said to him dreamily after lovemaking:
— How painful it must be for you too!
He hopes to discover that love is a suspension of hostilities when, for a split second, a man and a woman escape from hatred and from themselves; when they forget themselves like two wartime soldiers fraternizing between the lines around a well or the burial of the dead.
‘When I know that,’ he said to himself, ‘will it be much more fun?’
IV
Half-way through November and with the interminable family holidays now over, Civil War made its appearance, with Pluvinage’s machine-gun, which they had finally adopted, in black on the blue cover. They were all rather proud of themselves because of their names in capitals on the contents page and Serge’s machine-gun.
People took out subscriptions. At the editorial offices they had established in a damp and gloomy little shop in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, where the electric lamps were on all day, they received enthusiastic letters written by students from Dijon and Caen or Aix-en-Provence – people are so bored in the provinces that the faintest cry uttered in Paris will always find echoes there – or by country schoolteachers, sentimental and critical; by women; by lunatics, who would send them plans for perpetual Peace, suppressed inventions, symbolic fates, the imaginary documents and the defence speeches of never-ending trials, or heartrending appeals to Justice: their unknown friends consisted above all of defeated people. There also arrived abusive letters, and letters along the lines of Aren’t-you-ashamed-of-yourself-young-man, because Civil War expressed rather well a natural state of fury, and its editors used to attack, by name, living and genuinely respectable individuals. The reasons they used to give for these indictments, though based on a great display of philosophy, were not all rigorous or valid; but when you think that France at that time, by way of great men, had Prime Minister Poincaré, M. Tardieu and M. Maginot, it must be admitted that their instinct ran no risk of leading them far astray.
The team’s first political memory went back to nineteen hundred and twenty-four. That was a year which had begun with deaths, with the disappearance of the most considerable symbols or actors of the first years of the Peace: Lenin had died in January, Wilson in February, Hugo Stinnes in April. In May, elections full of poetic enthusiasm had brought the Left Cartel to power: having just got rid of the Horizon-Blue Chamber, people thought war was over and done with for good and they were going quietly to recommence the little regular shift to the left in which serious historians see the Republic’s secret, finding that this providential inevitability solves many things and allows everyone to sleep like a log. In November, to please a country which in five months had not stopped hoping, it was decided to transfer the body of Jean Jaurès to the Panthéon, where the man who died in July ’14 was awaited by the grateful Fatherland and the mortal remains of the Great Men – La Tour-d’Auvergne, Sadi Carnot, Berthelot, Comte Timoléon de Cossé-Brissac and Comte Paigne-Dorsenne.
That year Laforgue, Rosenthal and Bloyé were at Louis-le-Grand, preparing for the Ecole Normale. The lycée was a kind of great barracks of pale brick with sundials bearing gilded inscriptions, where boys of nineteen could not learn much about the world on account of having to live among the Greeks, the Romans, the idealist philosophers and the Doctrinaires of the July Monarchy: they were, however, as people say ‘on the Left’. With what was going on in the world, even on their free days, they would have had to be blind . . .
A normalien of Rosenthal’s acquaintance procured them invitations on 24 November to the lying in state. It was to take place at the Palais-Bourbon, in the Salle Mirabeau, which had that very morning ceased to be called the Salle Casimir-Périer: at the last moment people had judged the latter to be impossible, because of the memories that hyphenated name evoked. Echoes of the Lyon risings crushed in eighteen hundred and thirty-one by the Interior Minister grandfather would, after all, have jarred; nor could any great connection be discerned between Jaurès and the President of the Republic grandson. Mirabeau could be accommodated, by stressing his speeches and his historic sallies in the Summoned-here-by-the-will-of-bayonets style, while casting a veil over his intrigues with the Court. Since there was in any case no question of Robespierre, Saint-Just, or Babeuf . . .
Violet gauze hangings draped the stone walls, which recalled the Expiatory Chapel in Boulevard Haussmann and also, already, the cellars and subterranean glory of the Panthéon; they shrouded the chandeliers and diffused a gloomy mauve light, just right for half-mourning, over a fragile scaffolding that awaited the coffin and a black cloth with silver stars that had done sterling duty. The women seated at the foot of the walls were saying to themselves that this mauve lighting must give them an odd complexion, but that they would not solve the problem by putting on more powder. The guests all consisted of figures from a house of bereavement: little groups of individuals were chatting quietly in corners; deputies were shaking hands, with a mien and bowed shoulders imbued with grief-stricken familiarity; every now and then, the husky tones would be heard of someone who could not manage to keep his voice down. The ushers, who carried their little cocked hats with the tricolour cockades under one arm, marched in double slow time like Swiss Guards, in well-broken shoes that did not squeak; they kept a passage open between the catafalque and the door, through the crowd that had grown denser as though Jaurès had really had quantities of brothers, relatives and inconsolable friends. Everyone kept glancing towards the door. People were thinking about that great man, dead ten years and five months, who was still not arriving. They were vaguely uneasy: the news spread that the Albi train had had an accident at Les Aubrais. Someone said in the vicinity of Laforgue and Rosenthal:
— It’s really rotten luck.
Bernard sniggered.
Then they recognized Lucien Herr, who was chatting to Lévy-Bruhl and whom they respected, since being told that Herr still talked to young men about the will not to succeed. Lucien Herr, who already bore – along with the invisible weight of the great books he had not written – the burden of his imminent death, came up to them. They greeted him. Herr said to their companion from Rue d’Ulm:
— Don’t go too far away now. I want to introduce you to Blum.
Herr moved off and returned with Léon Blum, who proffered them a long hand, which they found soft and burning, and said nothing to them. He did not seem to take much interest in these young men; after turning his head this way and that, like a large bird on the lookout, he moved away with a strange stiff, jerky gait.
At a quarter to eleven, the two leaves of the door at last slowly opened as if upon a scene at the Opera; everyone thronged forward, the crowd made the same noise as a theatre audience does when the curtain goes up. Outside there was a milky darkness astonishingly luminous for the end of November, as though somewhere behind the sky there had been a moon of frost or spring; those sparkling mists on the black courtyard of the Palais-Bourbon caused the insipid violet twilight of the Salle Mirabeau to grow pale; people felt cold and anxious to leave that long cavern to walk beneath the trees; the women shivered.
The bearers deposited the coffin on the bottommost tread of the stairway; their steps resounded heavily in the murmurous silence. Miners lined the way. An outburst of shouts exploded brutally like a great nocturnal bubble above the crowd that was surging against the gates of the Cour de Bourgogne and that had just rushed through the sleeping streets behind the hearse, after its departure from the Gare d’Orsay. But the coffin entered, the double doors fell shut again and the shouts were stifled. The Carmaux miners, who were wearing their black pit overalls and their leather caps, lined up clumsily around the catafalque where the ushers and undertaker’s men were piling the withered wreaths which had just made the journey in the icy gloom of the goods van.
No
