Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

did not act as Malraux thought he should) he would feel he had betrayed the working class and there would be nothing left for him but to
se faire sauter la cervelle
. When K. said “What about the General’s entourage?” Malraux replied “
L’entourage du Général, c’est moi
.” We thought this rather silly, but were later told that Malraux is in fact the only man who dares to give de Gaulle advice, who sees his speeches before he makes them, etc.’
    Exactly a week later, Albert Camus and his wife, Francine, gave apicnic dinner for Koestler and Mamaine. Everyone brought food and drink. Koestler, with his compulsive generosity, which could seem ostentatious, brought a cold roast chicken, a lobster and champagne for the others, and shrimps and clams for himself and Mamaine. They were accompanied by Mamaine’s twin sister, Celia, and the American journalist Harold Kaplan. The other guests were Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
    Koestler, who had seen little of Sartre since the attack on his book in
Les Temps modernes
the previous autumn, could not resist another skirmish. When Harold Kaplan left, Sartre attacked the American as ‘anti-semitic and anti-negro and anti-liberty’. Koestler was so furious ‘that he let fly at Sartre and said who are you to talk about liberty, when for years you’ve run a magazine which was
communisant,
and thus condoned the deportation of millions of people from the Baltic states?’ According to Mamaine Paget, ‘Sartre was a bit taken aback by this, and as the atmosphere had anyway become intolerable we left.’
    Koestler wrote a letter of apology to Sartre the next morning. He ‘received in return a long letter in his small, neat hand, which was both endearing and characteristic’. Yet as events soon showed, Sartre’s friendships, partly as a result of Simone de Beauvoir’s influence, could not transcend politics.
    Koestler’s dislike for Simone de Beauvoir became intense: ‘At times she reminded me of the
tricoteuses
.’ On his return to Wales, he decided to write an article on Parisian intellectuals ‘in which Le Petit Vieux Ivan Pavelitch, leader of the Existenchiks, and Simona Castorovna and other friends play their parts’.
    Yet Sartre himself still stood out against the Communists. In the July issue of
Les Temps modernes
he had written: ‘Stalinist policy is incompatible with an honest approach to the literary profession.’ The Communist attacks on him even encouraged Ramadier’s government to offer the editorial board of
Les Temps modernes
a weekly programme on the radio. But a scathing satire on the Gaullists after the RPF enjoyed a sensational victory in October at the municipal elections caused a bitter row. Some suggested that Sartre should be imprisoned, but de Gaulle, who had a French respect for ideas, replied, ‘
On n’embastille pas Voltaire
.’ The most angry of all the General’s entourage was André Malraux: he was determined to take revenge.
    *
    De Gaulle did not hide his disdain for Ramadier’s coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats, which became known as the Third Force because it stood between Gaullism on the right and Communism on the left. He rather hoped for a general strike, which he was certain would cause the collapse needed to persuade the country to call him back to power. His ‘
égocentrisme vertigineux
’, as Claude Mauriac described it, seemed to be reinforced by the success his Rassemblement was enjoying. His speech at an RPF rally at Vincennes on 5 October, an attack on Soviet dictatorship, was reported back to Washington as ‘a spectacular success’ – an opinion widely shared.
    Other RPF meetings were less decorous, especially when held in working-class areas. Gaston Palewski had ‘a wonderful new tease for the Communists,’ Nancy Mitford wrote to her sister Diana Mosley. ‘He makes the chief agitator come on to the platform and then says now I only want to ask one question –
si les blindés russes envahissaient la France
[if Russian tanks were to invade France] would you fight to defend
le territoire
? So the poor
type
doesn’t know what to reply and it always ends up in a free fight!’ On 17 October, when a Socialist yelled at Thorez that he was a deserter, the burly ex-miner punched him hard in the face and then left his bodyguards to continue the thrashing.
    The greatest triumph for the RPF came with the results of the municipal elections on Sunday, 19 October. Rassemblement candidates won 38 per