Memory of France: April 1944

In a few months it will be five years since I left France. September 1, 1939, and now April, 1944. Not a day has passed that I haven’t thought of her as the prostrate and silent nation whom the powers of the world have temporarily abandoned to her age-long enemy. Not a day has passed that this thought has not appeared to me impossible to hold and realize and accept. In my mind it daily undergoes a change and a blotting out. Memories of what I knew and loved efface realities which I am unable to comprehend and contain within me.

There is a regular procedure in this resurgence of my memory which involuntarily replaces the present anguish of France described by the newspapers and books and exiles. It begins with a flash of sunlight, so strong that it dispels the picture of bombings and enslavement. Often it is light refracted against the walls of a building, and always it is southern France I see, which is the real kingdom where the sunlight marries the stone of edifices like the castle at Aiguesmortes and the palace of the popes at Avignon. I often see the blaze of yellow into which the sun converts the walls of Aiguesmortes as if it were eternally celebrating the departure of Saint Louis to deliver the Holy Land. And I often see the more subtle pink sunlight on the walls at Avignon which rise up from the city as if to herald the skies themselves. But more persistently still do I see the flat white sunlight on the villas at Argelès-Gazost in the Pyrénées, and even the white dust of the path I used to climb in order to get to the top of a small mountain called Balandraou. The very name itself, Balandraou, is so filled with sunlight for me that the writing of the word causes a remembered sun on dust and a green mountain top to burst into a thousand natural fires.