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By Root 1563 0

both the first national paid holidays and cheap rail fares. On the strength of the only money I was ever to win in the national lottery, 165 Francs (or about £2–3 at the 1936 rate of exchange) I bought myself a fortnight’s backpacking in the Pyrenees and Languedoc, joining the first beneficiaries of the Loi Lagrange on the night train from the Gare d’Orsay to Luchon. The trip was to bring my first and only direct contact with the weeks-old Spanish Civil War, which is described elsewhere (chapter 20). It also introduced me (through a young Czech I met on the road) to hitchhiking, a practice then still virtually unknown in Europe, except to a minority of young footloose central European Tippler (hitchhiker). It was therefore very easy, especially after I discovered that middle-class French car drivers could be kept from expressing their detestation of Léon Blum and the communists by well-timed enquiries about what they thought about Napoleon – a subject which kept them talking for up to 200 kilometres. From then on I extended my knowledge of France every year through long backpacking hitchhikes.

By the time the war broke out I, like so many others of my generation, thought I knew Paris pretty well; in some ways better than London. I was probably more at ease between Montparnasse, the Panthéon, the Pont Saint-Michel and the long stretch of the boulevard Raspail and the rue de Rennes than in any equally large chunk of central London. I could speak French sufficiently well to be beyond the stage when Frenchmen politely congratulate one on how well one speaks their language. I knew, or thought I knew, as much about the politics of France as about those of Britain, knew who were supposed to be the ‘in’ theatrical companies (Jouvet, Dullin, the Pitoëffs), had seen Renoir’s La règle du jeu when it first came out, smoked Gauloises at the corner of my mouth like Jean Gabin, and had bought both the works of Saint-Just and the speeches of Robespierre. In fact, we knew and understood very much less than we thought we did, but considering that most of us had no special academic, professional or family interest in French affairs, we felt at home in Paris. We were comfortable in France and with France.

However, there was one curious thing about the relationship with France. French people, the indigenous French rather than immigrants and more or less permanently resident foreigners, were virtually absent from it. For most of the foreigners in the 1930s, the French were physically present mainly as service-providers or extras on the permanent film-set of their country. It was not till the 1950s that my Paris became a city in which I had French friends and habitually spent my time with French people, as well as with the usual cosmopolitan community of visiting foreigners or immigrants.

The French were – indeed they still are – a remarkably formal people and their society a theatre with clearly prescribed roles and procedures. I cannot think of another country in which a notoriously womanizing, admittedly middle-aged philosopher in the 1950s still had as his stock-in-trade falling on his knees and presenting the lady with a rose. Unless officially committed to intimacy, Frenchmen still tend to sign everyday correspondence in the carefully graded flourishes of traditional deference (‘Kindly accept, Monsieur, the expression of my distinguished/ most distinguished/most devoted sentiments’). To be elected to the French Academy or the Collège de France, which still requires the formal declaration of one’s candidature, followed by the candidate’s ritual canvassing visits to all the electors, is a far more ceremonious affair than elsewhere; it is an honour and a recognized social obligation for those who have contributed to the successful academician’s outfit to attend the occasion when they are summoned to admire his ceremonial sword. Even informality is not without its obligations. When intellectuals were on the left, they believed that their status as such committed them to talking to each other in the vocabulary of Belleville. Nevertheless,