28
PARTISAN REVIEW
happened: Beaucaire, Tarascon, Avignon, white towers above the
RhOne. The science of earthquake-detection had not yet reached
this far. Tartarin of Tarascon would begin to comprehend only
when he got thinner. We arrived at Marseilles three weeks too
late; every place on the "life boats" had been taken-by the first
arrivals, naturally. And besides, in making up the lists of requests
for visas, the old socialist emigres seemed to have decided not to
put down any of the militants of the extreme left whose mere names
would have been compromising. Every one was escaping in fam–
ilies, each with his own party or his own group--which were no
longer good for anything else except escaping. It was unlucky for
any one outside a party or a group, for any one who took the lib–
erty of
thinking for himself
about the great cause of socialism. ·I
met old comrade-opponents whom I had once known in Moscow,
Berlin, Vienna or Paris. They shook your hand, but kept to them–
selves the name of the American who was looking after their visas.
That was only for themselves and their own people.
Marseilles, a city swarming and unconcerned, was nominally
a Red town, but it was an artificial shade of red-a business of
little deals that were not always quite on the level. The man in the
street understood things rather well: "Nothing can be done as long
as there's the occupation. Afterwards there'll be fun, but not for
the
salauds."
None of the old workers' organizations in Marseilles
took even the slightest interest in the foreign political refugees.
If
it had not been for the American relief committee, many of the lat–
ter, and many of the intellectuals too, would have had no other
reasonable way out than to jump into the harbor from the top of
the cable-ferry.... We sometimes told ourselves that if 5% of
these exhausted, defeated people managed to regain their
will
to
fight on the other side of the Atlantic it would be wonderful. Those
who bore the most scars were standing up best: young workers or
semi-intellectuals who had' been through concentration camps,
prisons, splits in little parties, and the ordeal of Spain. They were
difficult to rescue because the big conformist political parties felt
no sympathy whatever for them, because the governments of the
Western hemisphere were afraid of them as subversive characters,
because most of them were obscure, without names as "intellec–
tuals" or scholars, and because the threat of the concentration camp
dogged their heels continually. (I know of several courageous
