Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

case had collapsed before the truth of the Soviet position. Yet news of the Communist defeat in Paris still reached Solzhenitsyn in the prison camp of Kuibyshev, bringing a glimmer of hope.
    The trial, coming after the Communist Party’s reverses in 1947 and 1948, began to convince France that the Soviet Union was not a workers’ paradise. The debates in the courtroom launched a wave of cynicism and people were no longer frightened of criticizing the Communists openly. On the last day of the month, the anti-Stalinist left held aconference at the Sorbonne on war and dictatorship, an event unthinkable two years before.
    On 20 April, just over two weeks after the end of the trial, the Soviet Union tried a new tactic. The French Communist Party launched the Mouvement de la Paix at a meeting at the Salle Pleyel, presided over by Professor Joliot-Curie. Picasso’s dove, the emblem of the movement, was prominently displayed. A mass meeting followed on the same day and soon propaganda posters with the dove covered walls across the city. It was not long before an anti-Communist group, Paix et Liberté, began to produce counter-propaganda. The dove of peace was portrayed as a Russian bomber – ‘
La colombe qui fait boum!
’ – in a poster campaign designed to challenge the Communists’ virtual monopoly of the walls of Paris.
    At the time of the Kravchenko trial, Koestler and Mamaine moved into a house called Verte Rive on the Seine at Fontainebleau. Just as they were moving, a fresh row exploded, only this time Koestler took Sartre and Beauvoir’s side against André Malraux. Malraux had been outraged by a recent attack on himin
Les Temps modernes,
and Gaston Gallimard had suddenly withdrawn his support for the publication. Sartre and Beauvoir discovered that Malraux had apparently threatened to expose Gallimard’s record during the Occupation if he continued to support
Les Temps modernes
.
    Mamaine Paget recalled the evening of 1 March 1949, when Koestler ‘bearded’ Malraux. ‘At first when K. asked him about this, Malraux made evasive replies, but finally he more or less admitted that it was true… K. feels that his great faith in and friendship with Malraux is at an end – it really was a stinking thing to do… in fact, simply blackmail.’
    The last joint outing of the three couples – Koestler, Sartre, Camus – had a certain air of
déjà vu,
although this time they did not go to the Schéhérazade, but to the Troïka, another smart nightclub run by White Russians.
    A few days later, Sartre, Camus and Simone de Beauvoir discussed the evening. Camus asked: ‘Do you think we can honestly go on drinking like that and work?’ When Sartre and Beauvoir next encountered Koestler outside the Hotel Pont-Royal and he suggested that they shouldall meet up again, Sartre took out his diary as a matter of habit, then stopped himself.
    ‘We’ve nothing more to say to each other.’
    ‘Surely we’re not going to mess everything up for purely political reasons!’ Koestler protested.
    ‘When one has such different opinions,’ Sartre replied, ‘one can’t even see a film together.’
    Koestler, who did not duck his share of the blame for the ending of their friendship, encountered Sartre again in June 1950 at the Gare de l’Est. They were both taking the overnight train to Germany. Koestler and Mamaine, now his wife, were off to Berlin for the Congress of Cultural Freedom, while Sartre was leaving for a conference in Frankfurt. Without the disapproving presence of Simone de Beauvoir, they shared their picnic supper with Sartre, along with two anti-Communist Poles and a police bodyguard assigned to Koestler by the Sûreté after he had received death threats from the Communists.
    Sartre, although looking very ill – according to Mamaine, he was virtually living off a form of amphetamine called Corydrane – made a great effort and they had an amusing time together. But Koestler and Mamaine felt sorry for him. ‘On that evening in the sleeping-car,’ Koestler wrote at the end of his life, ‘Sartre complained that they hardly went out in the evening because there were so few people left with whom they agreed about politics.’
    The year 1949 saw a wave of doubt among many Communist intellectuals. Both Vercors and Jean Cassou, Wurmser’s brother-in-law, resigned from the party, and were attacked by
L’Humanité
on 16 December as ‘traitors’. For
Les Lettres françaises,
however, which was trying to