11 FEBRUARY 1944, Page 10

MARGINAL COMMENT

By HAROLD NICOLSON T SELDOM listen to Radin,Paris, since of all enemy transmissions I it is the one which fills me with the deepest disgust. It is intoler- able that the French language, which for two thousand years has been fashioned as the vehicle of reasonable truth, should be used by Laval as an exhaust-pipe for his noxious gases. The voices of the announcers, persuasive and modulated as are our own, use the lan- guage of Racine to utter mean reptilian thoughts and the language of Renan to tell lies. Yet at times I turn the thing on, curious to hear how they deal with the disasters which their friends are ex- periencing on the eastern front, curious to learn whether or no they will even mention the prowess of General Juin's forces in the area of Cassino. Always I turn the knob off again in sadness and anger. But the other night, waiting for some belated visitor, I again allowed Radio Paris to defile my room, and was at once arrested by a change of tone. They were talking quite seriously, quite sin- cerely, about someone who was dead. They were giving the obituary of Jean Giraudoux. The placid voice went on reciting the names of books which, in the days when Europe was still Europe, had given me such pleasure ; recalling plays which, in the happy winter of 1938, had been produced at the Theatre francais. The French have always been adept at funeral orations, and this obituary of a good man and a gifted artist was sympathetic and well framed. But as I listened the speaker passed on to more recent years and spoke of Giraudoux's loyalty to the Marshal and to the Vichy system. How strange that such a thing should have hap- pened to Jean Giraudoux! How strange that this sensitive and impassioned patriot should be proclaimed by Radio Paris as one of its staunchest friends!

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Giraudoux was the type of man who is convinced that the desir- able must be an illusion and that reality must always be disagree- able. He was a romantic pessimist, and would wake from the most opalescent dreams—and "opalescent" was in fact one of his favourite words—to find that a piece of coal had fallen from the fire and burnt an ugly hole upon the Aubusson. He would describe the most generous emotions and the loveliest vegetation, but in the end his heroines would slip the diamonds back into their reti- cules, and his orchids, when examined, would disclose a viscous fluid stinking with putrefaction. The most characteristic of his many books is perhaps Suzanne et le Pacifique. A French school- girl wins a competition set by an Australian newspaper. Her reward is a first-class ticket to the Antipodes. The ship strikes a coral reef, and Suzanne upon her little raft is cast up upon a desert island, where she remains three years. She becomes one with Nature; the parrots perch upon her shoulders and a penguin trots beside her as she walks naked along the beach. She is not conscious of any need for human companionship, she is conscious only of some deep desire which gnaws like hunger at her heart. Then suddenly one night there is a terrific cannonade, and the parrots of her island wake from their sleep and circle screaming among the stars. Next morning the dead body of a sailor is washed up upon the beach ; Suzanne tends him lovingly, covering his huge frame with parrot feathers and red flowers. More bodies are washed up, English and German ; in the pocket of one sailor is a newspaper, and she reads names which are unfamiliar to her—the Marne, Joffre, French, Foch. She realises that Europe is at war. Finally, she is rescued by an English yacht ; she faints with enthusiasm as their hands touch her ; she opens her eyes. "Please lend me a handkerchief" are the first words she utters, after a silence of three years.

* * * * Giraudoux was typically French in that his intelligence was always at war with his imagination. He would curb his own sentimentality, either by laughing at it or else by describing it in the crudest terms. His passion for the incongruous was stir-realistic. A boy in Paris falls in love with a girl ; he starts to follow her about ; she is delighted by this episode and describes it with relish. "Every

morning he would wait for me outside my hotel. He would take his stand outside a shop in the window of which anatomical models were displayed. There were varnished models of lungs, wax models of livers, heads cut in half which smelt of fresh bread, since there was a baker's oven in the basement. If one looked down through the skeletons one could see the baker below, white and well-nourished, a plump phantom. Once I had passed the shop the young man would follow me at a distance, no longer interested in the human frame, in eyeballs, or knee-caps, but stroking cats as he went along, stroking dogs, and invariably at the door of one café a huge New- foundland, who was so affectionate that he would collapse sideways on to the hand which patted him." It is in- such fantastic terms that Giraudoux always tends to describe things which affect his sentimentality : Paris, the memories of his own childhood,, a spring morning and young people who are falling in love. When dealing with the intrigues and legends of the gods and goddesses, as in Amphitryon 38, this method is highly entertaining ; but in giving a mythological twist to contemporary events, GiraudOux obscured, more than he illumined, reality.

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He came from the Limousin, and would always claim that this area of France gives to its children a special gift of perspicacity. He would assert that those born in the Limousin were from their childhood able, not only to see things, but to see through them. This habit of intellectual penetration was not diminished by the Ecole Normale, which teaches its pupils that nothing can be valid unless verified by the stark processes of reason. He studied German carefully and remained all his life, as he confesses in Siegfried a le Limousin, at once horrified and fascinated by the violent neurosis of the German mind. He entered the French diplomatic service and after some years in Scandinavian Legations became director of the department at the Quai d'Orsay which deals with the "service des oeuvres a retranger," corresponding more or less to our own British Council. The French Foreign Office welcomes and retains those of its members who acquire a literary reputation. As an official and as a writer Giraudoux was doubly esteemed. And then an unfortunate thing happened. With the outbreak of war he was appointed a director of the French M. of I. It had not at that date been discovered that men of literary temperament are wholly unsuited for such a position, and within a few weeks the unfortunate Jean Giraudoux found himself the centre of a typhoon of vituperation. Within a few months he was replaced by a man better acquainted with the needs and sensibilities of the Press. And then came the break-through of Sedan and the capitulation of Bordeaux. Giraudoux decided to remain in France and to support the Marshal.

His pessimism, at the crucial moment, got the better of his romanticism ; his perspicacity conquered his illusions ; his reason triumphed over his hopes. Giraudoux was never able to believe the things which his heart ached to believe ; even when talking to him one would observe at the back of his eye a little spark kindled by the Ecok Nonnale which was a spark of doubt. No man has ever loved France so passionately or so delicately as Giraudoux loved her ; no man can have desired more deeply than he desired to believe that the fact of German victory was a nightmare and the dream of British victory something more than an illusion. But he had trained his mind to act logically and to curb the fantasies of his imagination. Even when his son, Jean Pierre Giraudoux, joined the Fighting French the father remained behind suffering excruciating doubts. Had he been a little less sensitive he would have been less of a martyr ; had he been a little less intelligent he might have proved more of a hero. He reminds us that not all who served Vichy were treacherous, unpatriotic, or self-seeking men. His books survive him ; lovely petals from a tree that was sterile of all lasting fruit.