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Paris: The Novel

Paris: The Novel

Titel: Paris: The Novel Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Edward Rutherfurd
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right. All over France, from plant to plant, strikes started breaking out as workers, bolstered by the thought of having a socialist government, began demanding all rights: a forty-hour week, paid holidays, wage increases. As Jacques had also predicted, the key was Paris, and by late May he could point out triumphantly: “Thirty-two thousand workers have occupied the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt. Every big engineering works around Paris is out on strike now. That’s another hundred thousand men. The workers of the Bloch aircraft factory out at Courbevoie are with us.”
    A few days ago, there were two million Frenchmen out on twelve thousand separate strikes.

    The part of the Champs-Élysées where they were standing lay less than halfway down from the Arc de Triomphe, just above the Art Nouveau glass houses of the Grand and Petit Palais. The triangle of streets that lay between this section and the River Seine was becoming known as the Golden Triangle, the Triangle d’Or, for as well as the American Cathedral church and the recently built Hotel George V, it was home to some of the richest people and most elegant enterprises in the city.
    It wasn’t an area that Jacques Le Sourd would normally care to visit. But today he had come there, for the satisfaction of seeing it all shut down.
    They crossed the Champs-Élysées. As they walked between the trees on the avenue’s northern side, Jacques glanced at his son with affection.
    If he’d taken a long time to find a wife, his marriage was a happy one. He’d met Anne-Marie when he was forty and she was twenty-five, when she had come to work for the Socialist Party. He hadn’t thought of her as anything but a young colleague at first. But as he’d come to know her a little better, he’d been astonished by her direct and uncompromising mind. He’d never known any woman like her.
    She was southern, with straight black hair and pale skin. Her father was a worker from Marseille, her mother a devout Catholic from the countryside of Provence, and she spoke with a Provençal accent. But everything else in her life she’d decided for herself. When he asked her if she wasreligious, she replied simply: “No one has ever given me any useful proof that God exists, so obviously I can’t believe in Him.” The idea of faith without proof didn’t make any sense to her.
    In the same way, socialism wasn’t a passion or a religion with her—as it was for so many in the movement. She’d just decided that capitalism was unjust, and socialism was more logical. After that, she couldn’t see the point of arguing about it.
    He had been fascinated by this strange girl from Provence. He found himself spending more and more time in her company. After a year had passed, they had become inseparable. “We may as well live together,” she’d remarked one day, “since we’re never apart.” When she became pregnant with Max, they’d married.
    Max looked very like his father, but he was not quite so tall, and his face was finer, more Mediterranean. And though he had his mother’s talent for logic, his reactions to life were those of his father. They shared jokes, and even when they argued, they would often finish the other one’s sentences. Jacques was never more comfortable than when he was in his son’s company.
    For some years now, Max had written for the communist paper
L’Humanité
, which was read across the nation. And he’d joined the Communist Party.
    They reached the Place de la Concorde and stared across at the Tuileries Gardens and the Louvre.
    “The site of the guillotine,” Jacques remarked wryly to Max. “In the first revolution, we took away the nobles’ lives. The second revolution is kinder. We take away the capitalists’ money.” He shrugged. “It’s more practical.”
    They walked past the Hôtel de Crillon, a short way along the rue de Rivoli and up into the Place Vendôme, where Napoléon’s great column graced the center.
    “In the Commune,” Jacques reminded his son, “we knocked that column over.”
    “Why?”
    “I forget.” He smiled. “Do you see what I see?”
    On their left, the Ritz Hotel had a shuttered look, like someone pretending to be asleep. Around the rest of the square, small groups of men were standing, some with placards, in front of the closed doors of the shops.
    “Mon Dieu,”
said Max, “even the jewelry store workers are on strike.”
    In high good humor the two Le Sourds continued up through the rue

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