24
PARTISAN REVIEW
to my wife, the bathroom window won't close and the carpet in the front
hall is a danger to life and limb. Not even to
mention
my deathless prose.
Marcelle cannot forgive herself for having voted for Mitterrand, not once
but twice; and cannot believe that the country can feel anything but relief
at seeing the last of him. As for my own fascination with all this, there's
an element of voyeurism in it, pure and simple. Like other visitors we've
had this week - with the notable exception of her old friend Evelyne
Baylet, President of the regional daily,
La
Depeche,
whom I saw on televi–
sion, confessing (with an inimitable little smile) that she found the man
attractive,
et pourquoi ne pas Ie dire?
-
Marcelle insists that all the to-do
about Mitterrand has been cooked up by the media and corresponds to
nothing real. It's just the so-called political class, doing its thing. And the
literary intellectuals, contemplating their navels, as usual, at so much per
word, the scoundrels.
Pauvre France!
Well, maybe so. The world, meanwhile, was otherwise engaged - with
fragile cease-fires in Bosnia and Ulster, and the Beijing regime making
threatening moves in the straits of Taiwan, not to forget Ngeria, the econ–
omy, the incredible growth of new communications systems, and (but
what an afterthought) a fateful presidential campaign beginning in the
United States. Agreed. It may well be that what happens over here these
days will be little noted nor long remembered. But the fact remains that
this is not just
pauvre
France but France period and if you can't see that
the import of this country is greater than its importance, i.e., than the sum
of its parts, then forget it, forget my famous (and probably posthumous)
memoir, and leave me to my dotage.
February
18, 1996
Thinking, still, about The Death and Transfiguration of Franc;:ois
Mitterrand, I have to conclude that this business has not been a figment of
my overwrought imagination,
pace
Marcelle and her godchildren. It was
real , it was earnest, and although it seems now to have gone with the wind
and people are going about their lives as if nothing had happened, it will
remain engraved in the history of this country as ... what? As what the hip
journalists call a defining event, albeit a minor one - meaning a collective
experience, one that turns people from their private affairs, however brief1y,
and rivets them on the
res publica
-
like the Battle of Britain, say, or
Stalingrad, or the assassination of John E Kennedy, although these will be
of incomparably greater consequence, no doubt. It is possible to generalize
about such events wherever they occur; indeed, I have just done so. But
there is also, it seems to me, a peculiarly French way of dramatizing the
national experience - one that is hard to describe, yet unmistakable. It is a
rich peculiarity, embedded in French history and culture, and it can't be
