Read Online The Conspiracy by Paul Nizan - Free Book Online

thought. Rosenthal would no doubt have been content with talking about anger or the depreciation of values, or the ruses of bourgeois Reason, if such arguments had provoked legal actions – but with this absurd freedom of the press, the Public Prosecutor was still making no move. It was impossible to view the exercise of philosophy as an act.
    Spring was about to arrive. People had been through hard months, but the ice was melting, winter was dying in showers of rain, one felt like rising early, the days were lengthening like the plants you see tremulously growing and unfolding on the cinema screen. In Rue de la Paix, the shop-girls came out in droves and crossed Place Vendôme and Rue de Rivoli arm in arm. From time to time the weather would be fine, as though summer, autumn or late-spring days that had not made their appearance months earlier – stifled by rain or a storm – were now dispensing their warmth upon still-numbed hands and still-chapped lips. There were still hoarfrosts on the lawns of the Luxembourg, but between two spring showers the sky would come back into view.
    Apart from this oncoming spring, it was a bad time for impatient young men. Things seemed generally to be calming down, in economics and politics alike. There was a moment when the history of Europe appeared as slack as a neap-time sea, when people forgot war and peace, the Ruhr, Morocco and China. The season at Deauville had never been as brilliant as that year – indeed people would still be speaking of it during the summer of ’37, not such a bad summer itself in terms of race-meetings and casinos. At Rosenthal’s parents’ house, ladies who had had their belle époque during the period of Mobilization-is-not-war would say:
    â€” Don’t you think, my dear, this spring has a little whiff, as it were, of pre-war days?
    There really was not much happening. People were on the whole amused by the Gazette du Franc affair, Prime Minister Poincaré had hundred-vote majorities, the Briand–Kellogg Pact was perhaps going to make people feel a bit safer. There were a few strikes, of course, but Halluin and the textile industry of the Nord were far away, and the taxi strike was really quite pleasant for the private cars, which could at last drive about in Paris. People might perhaps have been moved by the thirty deaths in the Rhine Army during the month of March: how dreadful those epidemics are, mowing down young soldiers in faraway countries during the showery season – not so far away as Indochina or Madagascar, but all the same a long way from their mothers! Thereupon Marshal Foch had died, in the same month as the Rhine Army soldiers, to whom people had given rather less thought. What an opportunity to go and queue up at the end of Rue de Grenelle – in the heart of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, with Englishmen, nannies from the Champ-de-Mars, old ladies and priests – to see what the funerals of illustrious families are like, and how old victorious marshals settle into death wearing their chinstraps! But in April, when soldiers fraternized in the Gard with the striking miners they were actually supposed to evict from the pits, people were fed up with all these stories about servicemen whereas only marshals – at most – were really tolerable. Eventually, however, the ladies felt easier in their minds. They were the same ones who, a few years later, would talk about pre-crash days as in ’28 they had talked of pre-war days, and who could be heard in drawing-rooms saying that in the last war their sons had been taken, which for France’s sake they could accept, but that in the next war their money would be taken too. Their minds had to be set at rest. Luckily, that year Prefect Chiappe showed that with him public order was in no danger: after 1 May and 1 August, people told themselves it would be a long while before the communists had bandaged all their wounds.
    It was indeed a