Books: The Flight of the King

HOLY WEEK (541 pp.)—Louis Aragon —Putnam ($5.75).

France breeds intellectuals the way Australia breeds tennis players—and follows their careers with almost equal attention. “The French tend to think of the Russian Revolution as a step in the intellectual development of André Gide,” cracked British Historian D. W. Brogan recently, “and of the Chinese Revolution as an incident in the literary career of André Malraux.”

By this reckoning, Communism and the Resistance movement were the major episodes in the education of France’s brilliant Poet-Essayist-Novelist Louis Aragon, 63. Aragon was always in revolt; before he became a Communist in 1927, he was one of the daddies of Dadaism and switched later to the surrealist movement. As an underground fighter, he fought with conspicuous gallantry against the Nazis. After the war, Aragon became anchor man on the French Communists’ intellectual first team. Unlike fellow Communist Jean Paul Sartre—who has often strayed off the Red reservation—Aragon has dutifully echoed the party line, served on Stalin Prize committees, edited party papers, written party poems and eaten party crow.

Politically, Aragon is as devoted a party man as ever, but as a novelist, at least, he seems to have taken temporary leave from Communism’s orientation classes; in Holy Week, the familiar Marxist missionizing is mercifully absent.

When the novel appeared in France two years ago, Critic Claude Mauriac, son of Novelist François Mauriac, hailed it as marking “the return of Aragon to the literary fold . . . His non-Communist colleagues—this is to say practically the whole body of French writers—have once again recognized him as one of them—even as a member of the first rank.”

The Flying Eagle. The Holy Week of which Aragon writes is the chaotic, rain-drenched and rumor-filled week between Palm Sunday and Easter in 1815. Napoleon, having just escaped from Elba, was marching up to Paris to begin the historic Hundred Days, which were to end with Waterloo. And as Napoleon approached—”the Eagle flying from steeple to steeple,” rallying to his standard the regiments sent against him—King Louis XVIII, fat and fatuous, was fleeing north toward the Belgian border amid a confusion of loyal musketeers and grenadiers.

Aragon’s story follows the fleeing King, and it often bogs down in its crowd of characters like one of the King’s overladen carriages, choked with anxious courtiers. Not even Aragon’s hero, a musketeer who dotes on his horse and his fancy uniform, matters much. The scenes are the thing—scenes of moiling confusion and moral disintegration, observed with the sharp eye and tongue of a poet who was a soldier at Dunkirk and returned from England to fight until he was captured on the day before the fall of France.

Insistent Drum. Frenchmen can read more than history in Holy Week. They can read of a France beset far more sorely than she is today—bled white and depopulated by Napoleon’s wars, split by divided loyalties and false dreams—and find consolation for today’s troubles in the knowledge that within two generations, France was to rise again to lead the Continent. In one of the disconcerting asides to the reader with which he interrupts his narrative, Aragon writes: “Perhaps this book falsely, only apparently, turned toward the past, is only a great quest of the future on my part; perhaps it is only that last view of the world in which I merely need to burst my everyday clothes, the clothes of all my days. And perhaps that is why, as I progress from Palm Sunday toward Easter, one word is heard more and more often in my prose—a distant sound at first, like a striking of the ground transmitted by the earth, barely audible, a word ceaselessly repeated, which beats like an insistent drum, now muffled, now unmuffled—the future.”