Taki Taki

High life | 25 August 2012

With the exception of the French Academy immortals Michel Déon and Jean d’Ormesson, two wonderful writers and both the epitome of charm and graciousness, the French can be a pretty silly lot. They weren’t always. They got that way sometime between the two great wars, and turned even sillier during the German occupation and following their liberation by Eisenhower and co. Humiliated by Prussia in 1871, saved by America in 1917, done in for good by Germany in 1940, there were two more débâcles in store, Indochina and Algeria, but I’m jumping ahead.

I’ve just finished two books on Paris during the occupation and the liberation, one by Alan Riding about the cultural life in the capital, the other, a real gem, Paris After the Liberation, by Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, published 18 years ago. (There is also the Charles Glass book on Americans in Paris during that period.) Riding was a New York Times correspondent, which gave me bad vibes, but his book was fun to read, probably the only interesting thing I’ve read from someone employed by that temple of boring political correctness, predictability and necrosis. (John Burns excluded.) Beevor and Cooper, needless to say, write beautifully and from the inside. They are husband and wife and her grandparents were Duff and Diana Cooper, he the British ambassador to the City of Light when there was very little of it after Jerry had left. (There was even less heat and food.)

A very silly Englishman — I think Cottrell was his name — once asked me whether deep in my heart I wished to be English. I laughed out loud. If I could have been someone other than who I am, I told him, I would have chosen to have been an officer of Rommel’s 25th Panzer Regiment of 7th Panzer Division, the greatest fighting unit ever, and one that beat the frogs cleanly and honorably.

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