PARIS LETTER
69
running and to take the chill out of living quarters, during the worst
days. But the margin was narrow, narrower, I should think, than at
any time since Villon's, when wolves roamed the Parisian suburbs in
search of food. A transportation break-down in the Ruhr, a wave of
strikes in the U.S., a decrease in hydro-electric power (last year there
were floods, this year there's been an unprecedented drought) -and
th gaping misery of the French economy was revealed. Paris has been
divided into three sectors, each of which is entirely deprived of electric
current during one half of each working day. In addition, the rotating
pannes
strike neighborhood after neighborhood, twenty-four hours a day.
The people who scurried around all summer ·collecting electric heaters
are unable to use them, for such current as there is, is strictly rationed,
and the slightest excess is punished by heavy fines and immediate stop–
page of service. More important, French industry, for whose products
my friends are waiting in such dire need, is reduced to a limping schedule
of two or three days of work per week.
The French put it mildly: it isn't droll. Driving home this evening
through the darkened streets-Montmartre without music and the Con–
corde without light- ! thought with melancholy of the surprisingly gay
Paris of last spring, when Hitler was still striking attitudes in Berlin.
Fortunately, neither politics nor culture are immediately dependent
upon coal or hydro-electric power; so that we've had not penury, in
this period of material misery, of crisis, intrigues, books and concerts.
Early in the afternoon, I looked in at an impressive exhibit of Mas–
son's "American" period-impressive but just short of genial, for rea–
sons I shan't stop here to define (I think that all these oils and most
of the drawings have been shown in New York, in any case) . Shoulder–
ing my way out through crowds of those extremely elegant women whom
the French God seems to have created for the specific purpose of at–
tending
vernissages,
I came upon Albert Camus. He was towering good–
humoredly over the philosopher Jean Wahl, and telling him that there
were many more gaullists in France than "people" thought. Jean Wahl
agreed. I, in all diffidence, didn't. I felt that de Gaulle had been kept
in power chiefly by the political opportunism of those who saw in him
a pretext for avoiding responsibility.
Camus no longer writes the daily leader of
Combat,·
he is busy fin–
ishing a new novel (a passage of which will appear in PR's French
number). But though he lives in relative seclusion, somewhere outside
of Paris, Camus has the sharpest, most honest political insight of any
French journalist I know-precisely because he is so much more, and
less, than a journalist. I tell you all this simply in order to warn you;
few French observers, certainly no partisan of any of the three major
parties, would go along with the following analysis of what occurred
