33 Days Read Online Free Page A

nothing I know. Near me someone says: “It’s the Canebière.” † But here one feels a mute anger, an accumulated impatience in the crowd.
    In the street a group is gathered in front of a half-open window listening to the radio. I approach. I couldn’t possibly remember what news the circumlocutions of Radio-Journal were communicating. It had hardly concealed the German advance. I believe that morning I heard a strange “behind Paris,” which reminded me of earlier reports of “fighting west of Brussels” that had not yet announced the capture of Brussels. Nonetheless, for the nomads that we had become, the German advance was still only newspaper headlines. They advance, they cross the Somme, the Oise. Even if they cross the Seine, all is not lost. They will be fought on the Loire. We do not lack rivers, and strategy is the science of rivers.
    Meanwhile, a captain, a tall young man with the face of a Bedouin, addresses the crowd, urging it to be hopeful and pointing out that our temporary retreat is the fault of the political half of France, of which he is not part.
    I enter a café. Refugees, like flies around a packet of sugar, crowd around the proprietor, who half fills the glasses they hold out to him with pale coffee. For the first time I hear the words, uttered by a drowsy woman with a sullen face: “France is betrayed.”
    We leave the beet field. In the neighboring car an elderly woman meticulously does her blond hair. We try in vain to take the Château-Landon road to reach Auxerre and the Paris-Lyon highway. We are directed toward Montargis. I hear that at Beaumont we can find gasoline. But news about gasoline is like news about the war. Myths circulate, coming from who knows where.
    A platoon of infantrymen is resting in an empty space between two houses. Some are lying down, asleep. Others, standing, indifferently contemplate the caravan disaggregating in the village. I approach. They were at the Somme. I’m expecting some clarity from them, some hope. But before me are only cryptic, resigned soldiers. In them, I am searching for spirit, depth, volition, desire. They’re not handing over their secret. They speak like soldiers. They’re tired. From them I get only, “Don’t worry …”
    The invisible authority that is worried about neither traffic jams nor bread nor gasoline vigilantly watches over our itinerary. It redirects us toward Corbeil-en-Gâtinais and Lorcy by way of winding local roads. At nightfall, we arrive in the town of Ladon. We’ve gone about twenty-five kilometers during the day, at one or two kilometers an hour. We can’t bear this anymore. I see a signpost at a crossroads: Chapelon, four kilometers. The road is empty. In my memory it appears dark and rural. I abandon, I extricate myself from this caravan that advances in fits and starts. I take the Chapelon road, where at least we’ll find some silence and fresh grass to sleep on.
    Why confess this search for refuge in the countryside and this concern for comfort? It’s anecdotal and uninteresting. But had we not decided on this detour through the hamlet of Chapelon, we would not have encountered the same circumstances or the same people. We would have run fewer risks, or more. We would not have known some things that I’d dare say put us in touch with historical secrets, that revealed to us a few junctures between history and man.
    Four kilometers of empty road, of driving at full speed, of being the brain of the car, of feeling it as one feels one’s own body, of feeling the car’s chassis as an extension of one’s own body, of gliding.
    In the village square a group of peasants form a tight circle, posed as if for a commemorative monument. I approach. No sign of suspicion, but they are assessing me, judging me. I’ve tumbled from the moon into a circle of country notables. Everyone looks at me. I must look very Parisian. I’m not rejected; they don’t walk away. I’m being sized up. An old man looks at me as