Paris: The Novel

best time to sell fashion goods. Money’s tight.”
    “We still made sales. Dropped our prices, changed the merchandise, operated only part of the store. But it seems we lost money. Why didn’t he tell me?”
    “It was the price he thought he needed to pay to keep you in the business. Thank God he did. We need you there now.”
    “I don’t know what to do.”
    “Yes you do. Sell it or close it.”
    “But that’s terrible. Think of Father. It would break his heart.”
    “He’s a businessman. He’ll understand. All he wants to do now is enjoy his old age in Fontainebleau.”
    “But I can’t run a wholesale business.”
    “You must. Gérard has two daughters and a son, who will be conscripted any minute. You must do it for them. It’s your duty.”
    “But my talents …”
    “Will have to wait. I love you, Marc, but you must continue to be unselfish. Your family has given you all the good fortune you have. You said you wanted to pay your country back for Gérard’s theft. Good. And you must pay the family back for your good fortune.”
    “I don’t particularly like Gérard’s children.”
    “I couldn’t care less. Marc, when I depart, I have always intended that you should be my heir. Who else would I leave all these paintings to? But if you won’t do what you should, then you are no better than your brother, and I shall leave everything to a museum.”
    “I thought you were more spiritual.”
    “I am very spiritual. Others are dying at the front. Be grateful that your duty is, by comparison, so easy.”
    Marc sighed.
    “I was afraid you’d say something like that,” he said.

    Le Sourd had no doubt about his fate. He was going to be shot. He’d written two letters to his son. One which the censors might see. The second, of which he made three copies, was given to three men in the regiment that he trusted.
    The letter explained what he believed in and why he had acted as he did, but it did not enjoin his son to follow in his footsteps. It told him to make up his own mind what course to follow when he became a man, and to think only of his mother and her welfare until then.
    He’d never made any secret of the fact that he was a socialist. There had been no need. There were plenty of good trade union men in the army, and most of them had socialist leanings, at the least.
    “We need to fight the German Empire,” he would tell his comrades, “but it was the capitalist class that got us into this mess, and when the workers sweep them away, the need for wars will end.”
    Since he was older than the other men, they began to call him Papa. Even the sergeants called him that sometimes. His job in the printer’s and his reading had left him more literate than most. If a young fellow was struggling with a letter home, he’d often come to Le Sourd to help him straighten it out grammatically, or provide the words he was searching for. Sometimes, he would do more. When young Pierre Gascon was killed at Verdun, along with his lieutenant and captain, it was Le Sourd who wrote a letter to his parents about the young man’s valor and his other good qualities.
    But he never lost sight of his ultimate goal, and he watched for opportunities. Indeed, the war itself, with its massive casualties, was an opportunity. If this senseless carnage and destruction were the result of the present world order, didn’t that show that it was time for a change? Wasn’tthe capitalist world demonstrating that it was a heartless consumer of lives, whose inherent contradictions would lead it to destroy itself? He had brought quite a number of the men around to his point of view.
    He suspected that he’d even got through to an officer once. “Well, Papa Le Sourd,” the captain had remarked to him in a friendly way, “you think the workers of the world could organize this war better?”
    “The question,
mon capitaine
,” he’d replied, “is whether they could do worse.”
    The officer had laughed, and said nothing more. But Le Sourd suspected that, in secret, the captain didn’t disagree.
    By 1916 he’d been promoted to corporal. His captain had once asked him if he’d like to be a sergeant, but he’d said no. That would be yielding to the system too much.
    Meanwhile, he’d been receiving literature regularly from Paris. Some were permitted newspapers, others were more private communications.
    And then, in 1917, had come the electrifying news from Russia. The army had mutinied. It was a revolution.
    The