#i really want to watch her as julien sorel now

[algernoninwonderland]

I'm rewatching the Star Troupe's Mozart, the Rock Opera and I had forgotten just how chaotic Coto was in this one

Absolutely perfect performance

[the-syndic4te]

It was actually Rebatet I ran into at Je Suis Partout. “Will you look at that! A revenant.”—“As you see,” I retorted. “Apparently you’re famous, now.” He spread his arms and made a face: “I don’t understand it at all. I even racked my brains to be sure I wasn’t forgetting anyone in my invectives. And in the beginning it worked: Grasset rejected my book because I insulted too many friends of the house, as they said, and Gallimard wanted to make some major cuts. Finally it was that Belgian who took me on, you remember him, the one who printed Céline? Result: he’s raking it in and I am too. At the Rive Gauche,’ when I went there to sign books, you’d have thought I was a movie star. In fact, the only ones who didn’t like it were the Germans.” He looked at me suspiciously: “Have you read it?”—“Not yet, I’m waiting for you to give me a copy. Why? Do you insult me too?” He laughed: “Not as much as you deserve, you filthy Kraut. Anyway, everyone thought you had died on the field of honor. Shall we go out for a drink?” Rebatet had an appointment a little later on, near Saint-Germain, and he took me to the Café Flore. “I always like to go stare at the dirty mugs of our official antifascists, especially the faces they make when they see me.” When he went in, in fact, people shot him black looks; but several persons also got up to greet him. Lucien, obviously, was enjoying his success. He wore a pale, well-cut suit and a slightly skewed polka-dot bow tie; a crest of disheveled hair crowned his narrow, mobile face. He chose a table to the right, under the windows, a little apart, and I ordered some white wine. When he began to roll a cigarette, I offered him a Dutch one, which he gladly accepted. But even when he smiled, his eyes remained worried. “So, tell me everything,” he said. We hadn’t seen each other since 1939, he just knew I was in the SS: I told him rapidly about the Russian campaign, without going into details. He opened his eyes wide: “You were in Stalingrad, then? Well, damn.” He had a strange look, a mixture of fear and desire perhaps. “You were wounded? Show me.” I showed him the hole, and he let out a long whistle: “You’ve got some luck, don’t you.” I didn’t say anything. “Robert’s going to Russia soon,” he went on. “With Jeantet. But it’s not the same thing.”—“What are they going to do there?”—“It’s an official trip. They’re accompanying Doriot and Brinon, they’re going to inspect the Legion of French Volunteers, near Smolensk I think.”—“And how is Robert doing?”—“Actually, we’ve sort of fallen out, these days. He’s become an out-and-out Pétainist. If he goes on like that, we’ll kick him out of JSP.”—“Has it come to that?” He ordered two more drinks; I gave him another cigarette. “Listen,” he spat out aggressively, “it’s been a while since you were in France: believe me, things have changed. They’re all like starving dogs, fighting over the scraps of the corpse of the republic. Pétain is senile, Laval is behaving worse than a Jew, Déat wants Social Fascism, Doriot National Bolshevism. A bitch wouldn’t be able to find her pups among them all. What we’ve lacked is a Hitler. That’s the tragedy.”—“And Maurras?” Rebatet made a disgusted face: “Maurras? Action marrane, they should call it. I gave him a rough time, in my book; apparently he was livid. And I’ll tell you something else: ever since Stalingrad, everyone’s bolting. The rats are jumping ship. You’ve seen the graffiti? Not one Vichyist who doesn’t keep a Resistant or a Jew in his house, as life insurance.”—“It’s not over yet, though.”—“Oh, I know. But what do you expect? It’s a world of cowards. I made my choice, and I won’t go back on it. If the boat sinks, I’ll sink with it.”—“In Stalingrad, I interrogated a Commissar who quoted Mathilde de la Mole, you remember, in The Red and the Black, near the end?” I repeated the sentence to him and he let out a guffaw: “Oh, that’s unbelievable. He got that out in French?”—“No, German. He was an old Bolshevik, a militant, a real tough guy. You’d have liked him.”—“What did you do with him?” I shrugged my shoulders. “Sorry,” he said. “Stupid question. But he was right. I admire the Bolsheviks, you know. None of this trained cockroach show with them. It’s a system of order. You submit or you croak. Stalin is an extraordinary man. If there were no Hitler, I might have been a Communist, who knows?” We drank a little and I watched the people coming and going. At that moment, Brasillach came in. Rebatet called out to him: “Hey, Robert! Look who’s here!” Brasillach examined us through his thick round glasses, made a little sign to us with his hand, and went to another table to sit down. “He’s really becoming unbearable,” Rebatet muttered. “He doesn’t even want to be seen with a Kraut anymore. You’re not even in uniform, so far as I can tell.” But that wasn’t quite the reason, and I knew it. “We got into an argument, the last time I was in Paris,” I said to placate Rebatet. One night, after a small party where he had drunk a little more than usual, Brasillach had found the courage to invite me back to his place, and I had followed him. But he was the kind of shameful invert who doesn’t like anything so much as jacking off listlessly while languorously gazing at his eromenos; I found that boring and even slightly repugnant, and had curtly cut his excitement short. That said, I thought we had remained friends. Probably I had wounded him without realizing it, and in one of his most vulnerable spots: Robert had never been able to face the sordid, bitter reality of desire; and he had remained, in his way, the great boy scout of fascism. Poor Brasillach! So casually and summarily shot, once it was all over, just so that so many good folk, their conscience at peace, could return to the fold. I have often wondered, too, if his leanings had worked against him: collaboration, after all, remained within the family, whereas pederasty was something else entirely, for De Gaulle as well as for the good workers on the jury. Whatever the case, Brasillach would certainly rather have died for his ideas than for his tastes. But wasn’t he the one who described collaboration with this memorable phrase We have slept with Germany, and the memory will remain sweet to us? Rebatet, on the other hand, despite his admiration for Julien Sorel, was cleverer: he got his death sentence, and his pardon with it; he did not become a Communist; and he found time after all that to write a fine History of Music, and to let himself be forgotten.

Jonathan Littell “Les Bienveillantes”