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captured,
some of the details of the fictional layout of the hotel where
Jupien provided the Baron de Charlus with the none-too-willing
young male prostitute, who was expected to chastize Charlus so ex–
quisitely and to confess to having committed crimes, such as the
knifing of a concierge, that he would have been ashamed, as a
modest working-class boy, ever to attempt.
This expedition proved to be my last meeting with Benjamin,
who may have considered me too frivolous or still too intellectually
immature for further and less factually informative discussions . I
found him, in any case, rather reticent, and I must admit that I re–
mained for many years unaware of his significance as a major con–
temporary thinker, perhaps because, in both our Berlin and our
Paris conversations, he limited himself to questioning me, without
making any statements that might have suggested to me that he was
more than a meticulously exact literary critic and social historian. As
a refugee in Paris, he appears moreover to have failed to develop any
close friendships in French literary circles. Even Leon Pierre-Quint,
as far as I know, never saw him again. Many years later, when I was
helping Leon's sister, after his death, to file and catalogue his archives
(which were ultimately donated to the Bibliotheque Nationale), we
found only one short letter from Benjamin, asking Leon for an ap–
pointment that may then have occasioned our two Paris meetings.
Only after World War II did I learn from Theodor Adorno in
Frankfurt-am-Main how Benjamin failed in 1940 to escape to Spain
from German-occupied France, where he feared that he was in any
case doomed, so that he preferred to commit suicide at the Spanish
frontier. Others, who were perhaps more resourceful or less prone to
despair, chose to face the risks of a refugee's life in Marshall Petain's
France, and some of them even managed to survive with the help of
the Resistance, or else by obtaining false identity papers and disap–
pearing in the underground. But Benjamin, it seems, was too much
of a pessimist to take such chances .
