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By Root 872 0

for social failure, what was my father doing—socially speaking, I mean? Well, not much either. As an independent ski instructor, he could hardly fraternize with ordinary ski instructors—they barely nodded to one another when they met by the cable cars. A qualified mountain guide and a mountaineer, he was, it goes without saying, respected by his peers. (They too were mountain guides, of course, but did not necessarily have the same achievements as mountaineers, while he had taken part in expeditions in the Andes and the Himalayas.) He was respected by them without ever really being liked, because in their minds he would always be a Parisian, not a true man of the mountains. (Actually, he was from Clamart, as I mentioned earlier; to him that made a great difference, but not to them.) He strove to keep in touch with the other members of his family, in spite of difficulties that grew greater as the years passed. It is not without a certain embarrassment that I remember the visits—about once a year—he made to his sisters. Both had married working-class men, men of their own kind; they had married within their own world and had each bought houses in Gagny (Seine-Saint-Denis). I can picture my father, clearly a visitor, in the dining room of the house that represented the culmination of their dreams. He would be talking about politics, about General de Gaulle, subjects like that, harmless in themselves; then he would leave, visibly relieved (although he loved his sisters in spite of everything and somehow managed to force himself to go on making these yearly visits).

Did he socialize with his rich clients? Not really. There were Sylvie’s parents, whom I’ve mentioned. (To be honest, I only really remember Sylvie, but they must have had some sort of relationship, otherwise they would hardly have entrusted their daughter to his care.) Overall, there wasn’t much, I think. I remember seeing my father with dubious characters, local property developers and the like, for meetings that never really went anywhere, but mostly I remember seeing him on his own.

Like me, he played chess.

He regularly beat me at chess, so regularly that it put me off the game.

And he made plans, and indeed carried them out, only to lose interest in them afterward. He must have had bosses early on in his life (although he managed to work on building sites and only for short periods). Later he had employees (not for long, just until he sold his share of the business). He was probably equally uncomfortable in both roles.

Here was a man who sacrificed everything in life, absolutely everything, to a single imperative: not being dependent on anyone. An absurd imperative, when you think about it, which leads one to reject the very principle of a social life. I can still see him cursing the monopoly of the French electricity board; the problems he had trying to get permission to have a generator installed on his own property. People like that may still have a place in Argentina or Montana, but not in western Europe. When I think about my father’s political opinions, I think of something like libertarian,* though the term didn’t exist in French back then; something American-sounding.

What strikes me, over and above our fathers’ differences and the similarities, is the curious nature of the times when they were young men; the France of the Trentes Glorieuses, say from 1946 or ’47 (the point at which industrial production truly gets going again) and 1973 (the first oil crisis): more than twenty-five years of uninterrupted growth and optimism. It was also the France of the baby boom, which ends earlier, curiously, for no apparent reason, in 1964. Were I to try to come up with a reason, I would say something like: the passage from consumer capitalism to a more hedonistic phase—the passage from the washing machine to the transistor radio, if you like.

To get back to the heart of the mystery: the France of the 1950s, its optimism, its energy, its faith in the future and the slight stupidity that that entailed. It seems more distant to me now than the France of the