• MARGINAL COMMENT By HAROLD NICOLSON W E are always assured
that Paris is at her loveliest when the chestnuts are in flower and the weeping willows planted below the quays stretch their tendrils towards the passing Seine. The month of May does certainly emphasise and embellish the panoramic aspect of the great city, but not its intimacy. I prefer the early winter evenings when the sky is red behind what was once the Trocadero and the windows of the cafés glimmer through a haze of steam. For me the smell of chestnuts roasting evokes more private memories than any aroused by the candelabra of spring. Yet Paris in the rain, as I last saw it, is in truth a saddening sight. The pavements seem to become and to remain wetter than in any other city, with the possible exception of Oxford; the awnings drip terribly; and the long perspectives of street lamps, each reflected in its own splashed puddle, seem all directed to a glum and aqueous end. " It rains in my heart," as Verlaine observed, " as it rains on the town." On a night last month, as I motored out of Paris into the rain-soaked Ile de France, my eye was caught by a single yellow leaf sticking among the rain-drops to the glass. The screen-wiper hummed backwards and forwards with the regularity of a metronome, but the leaf was thin enough, adhesive enough, to permit the rubber to pass over it; the rain-drops disappeared and then appeared again; the leaf was always there. Depressed as I was by the wet streets and awnings, depressed by the water which descended from above or splashed below, I found myself regarding that leaf as a symbol or portent of decay. It seemed so irremovable; it adhered. Could it be true, I asked myself, that the French, with their passion for living rapidly, had exhausted their vitality, that the amazing resilience which had marked their history had at last lost its sap, and that they had even forsaken that gaiety " qui faisait croire a leur genie"?
On the next day I went to Vezelay. The skies had cleared and the sun was hot again upon the pavements. In the little square in front of the Church of the Madeleine an itinerant band was playing. They wore white trousers and blue coats with belts; their conductor did not possess a baton, but kept time with a small yellow card held firmly 'between his thumb and first finger. The citizens of Vezelay stood round the square grinning at the spectacle, their eyes narrowed in the glare of the sunshine. From time to time one of their number would call out to the conductor asking him to play some favourite tune. They did not, as I had expected, invite him to play the Red Flag. They asked for the older tunes, associated with the adventures, glories or ordeals of the past. They asked for "Partant tour la Syrie," for "Sambre et Meuse," even for Madelon. The last tune took me straight back to 1918. I was back in December of that year, seated beside a brazier on the terrace of some café and drinking Ameri- , can grog. An old woman in a black knitted shawl was singing Madelon in a cracked falsetto voice; she had added a little line of her own to bring the song up to date, and in the final verse she had substituted for the words " Madelon, Madelon, Made- Ion," the words " Foch, Joffre et- Clemenceau." I was pleased by this interpolation and gave her money. " On les aura," she mumbled mechanically and then she corrected herself. "On les a eu," she leered. How little did she, or I, foresee in that triumphant and expectant month the disillusion and terror of the years to come. I walked out that morning at Vezelay, three weeks ago, upon the high bastion which looks down upon the valley of the Yonne. It was here that, eight hundred years before, St. Bernard had preached the second crusade to Louis VII. Would France be willing, could we even expect her, to embark upon yet another crusade? In the square in front of the church the band was still playing "Sambre et Meuse." • In talking to my French friends I experience a certain delicacy (or it may be just fear of the answers they may give) in asking them what France will do if a third world war should come. One has the impression of addressing an old acquaintance whose left arm has been paralysed since last we met. He puts a bold face on his deformity; he can still play a good game of bowls; he tucks his left hand into his coat-pocket, hoping thereby to give a natural appearance to the limb; but the appearance is by no means natural, and one averts the eyes in pain. When one considers what France, as the inheritor of Greece and Rome, has done for western civilisation, one can only contemplate the huge fresco of her history with awed respect. When one recalls even the ordeals and dangers endured and surmounted by the Third Republic, one cannot but be convinced that the nation possesses a vitality such a the State does not display. The catas- trophe of 1870, the Comnlune, the Panama scandal, Boulangism, the Dreyfus Case, the Morocco crisis, the appalling losses of the first war, the defeat of 1940, the humiliation of Vichy, the present menace of Commudism—all these and even each one of these would have shaken the. political fabric of any other country. The military situation in Indo-China represents a strain greater than any that we ourselves have had to envisage in these post- war years. Yet it is an error to judge France, as we are often apt to judge her, in terms of her own politics; behind it all is that mysterious, even mystic, entity which the French sometimes refer to as " the nation " and which we foreigners find so difficult to recognise or understand.
Some Frenchmen, with somewhat bitter defiance, will venture on the ground that we, with respectable sensibility, fear to tread. " I hope," an old friend said to me, " that none of you English imagine that the French people will stand a third war. We shall remain neutral, even if that means accepting Communist domiha- tion. If we find their rule intolerable, we shall organise a resistance movement and await the hour of liberation." When I replied that in such circumstances there would be nothing or nobody left to liberate, he merely shrugged his shoulders. " Who knows? " he answered. Others among my French friends have taken a different point of view. They have sought to convince me that Communism is on the decline in France; that the firm and successful action taken by the United States in Korea has heartened many of the doubters; that the patriotism of the French is by no means dead and not even dormant; and that a religious revival may also be on its way. The actual prosperity, such optimists argue, of the French farmer and peasant, even of the French artisan, is the most potent of all antidotes to Communism; and the younger generation, always in ardent search of the unfamiliar, are becoming bored by the mechanical formulas of Communism and seeking for some fresher revelation. Time, such people argue, is on our side. If we can gain but a few years. then the present lethargy and paralysis will pass away. We foreigners underestimate the resilience of the French national character: " France always recovers." To me, whose admiration for France is not sentimental but I -hope realistic, such words are balm. Even if, when the rain pours down and the yellow leaves flutter, one cannot resist moments of pessimism, it is heartening when others, who know so much better, express deliberate form's of belief. The French, for all their anti- militarism, are natural Warriors; defeatism can never become a permanent component of their nature. It may be that their experiences during the second war have shaken their self- confidence and induced a mood of scepticism. But a new St. Bernard may well arise to stimulate their pride.
Previous page
