At his call she would come up to him and give him a quick kiss with wide-open eyes, while he held her upright like a ladder, his hands on her two arms, as though she were a thing without equilibrium, and would, once he relinquished hold, fall stiffly backward to the floor. This is the kiss that comes in with the second year of marriage, succeeding the bridegroom kiss (which is rather stagey at best, say those who know about such things, and apt to be copied from passionate movies).
Then came supper, and after that they went out for a walk, up two blocks and through Central Park, or sometimes to a moving picture, which taught them patiently that they were the sort of people for whom life was ordered, and that something very grand and brave and beautiful would soon happen to them if they were docile and obedient to their rightful superiors and kept away from pleasure.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “O Russet Witch”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Jelly Bean”
Editorial of the first issue of Résistance, December 15, 1940
Resist! In our anguish at the disastrous fate that has befallen our nation, this is our heartfelt cry. This is the cry of every one of you who is not prepared to accept this catastrophe, of every one of you who wants to do their duty.
But amid your feelings of isolation and helplessness, amid the current turmoil of ideas and approaches, you wonder where your duty lies. First and foremost, to resist is to keep heart and head. But above all it is to do something, to take actions that will be positive in their efforts, that are considered and purposeful. Many people have tried, but have been discouraged by their apparent impotence. Others have formed groups, but also these groups have also felt isolated and powerless.
Patiently, doggedly, we have sought these groups and brought them together. Dedicated and determined, they are already many in number (more than an army in Paris alone), and they have understood the importance of organization, working out a modus operandi, of adopting discipline and leaders.
The modus operandi? Get together at home with people you know. Choose your leaders. Your leaders will find men of experience who will guide their activities, and who will report back to us at different levels. In order to coordinate your endeavours with those of unoccupied France and all who are fighting alongside our Allies, this Committee will take command. Your immediate task is to organize yourselves, so that when you receive order, you will be ready to resume the struggle. Recruit men of determination, choose them with care, and surround them with the best and finest. Give heart and resolve to those beset by doubt and those who can no longer dare to hope. Track down and watch those who have disowned their country and who betray her. Meet up every day to pass information and observations that may be useful to your leaders. Be ruled by iron discipline, constant vigilance and absolute discretion. Beware of those who are reckless or feckless, loose-tongued or treacherous. Be neither boastful nor too trusting. Make every effort to supply your own needs. We are working to muster the means of action that we will later pass on to you.
In becoming your leaders we have sworn to sacrifice all — pitilessly and relentlessly — to this mission.
Unknown to each other yesterday, strangers to the political infighting of assemblies and governments, independent French men and women above all, chosen for the action to which we are sworn, we are united in a single ambition, a single passion, a single desire: to bring about the rebirth of a pure and free France.
Germaine Tillion, Sisters in Resistance
Agnès Humbert, Résistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France
Agnès Humbert, Résistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France
Agnès Humbert, Résistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France
Résistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France
‘Dear Agnès,’ he retorted with a chuckle, ‘we’re all going to end up in prison, as you well know.’
He thought the photograph of Pétain that graces my room was terribly funny.
‘It’s for the benefit of the Gestapo,’ I explain, and we giggle like idiots. It’s our very own version of the crucifixes that sixteenth-century Huguenots used to hang on their walls to put the Holy League off the scent.
Agnès Humbert, Résistance: Memoirs Of Occupied France
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night
Tender Is The Night
“Your wife does not love you,” said Tommy suddenly. “She loves me.”
The two men regarded each other with a curious impotence of expression. There can be little communication between men in that position, for their relation is indirect, and consists of how much each of them has possessed or will possess of the woman in question, so that their emotions pass through her divided self as through a bad telephone connection.
Tender Is The Night
She went up putting her arm around his shoulder and touching their heads together said: “Don’t be sad.”
He looked at her coldly.
“Don’t touch me!” he said.
Confused she moved a few feet away.
“Excuse me,” he continued abstractedly. “I was just thinking of what I thought of you — “
“Why not add the new classification to your book?”
“I have thought of it — ‘Furthermore and beyond the psychoses and the neuroses — ‘”
“I didn’t come over here to be disagreeable.”
“Then why did you come, Nicole? I can’t do anything for you any more. I’m trying to save myself.”
“From my contamination?”
“Profession throws me in contact with questionable company sometimes.”
She wept with anger at the abuse.
“You’re a coward! You’ve made a failure of your life, and you want to blame it on me.”
While he did not answer she began to feel the old hypnotism of his intelligence, sometimes exercised without power but always with a substrate of truth under truth which she could not break or even crack. Again she struggled with it, fighting him with her small, fine eyes, with the plush arrogance of a top dog, with her nascent transference to another man, with the accumulated resentment of years; she fought him with her money and her faith that her sister disliked him and was behind her now; with the thought of the new enemies he was making with his bitterness, her health and beauty against his physical deterioration, her unscrupulousness against his moralities — for this inner battle she used even her weaknesses — fighting bravely and courageously with the old cans and crockery and bottles, empty receptacles of her expiated sins, outrages, mistakes. And suddenly, in the space of two minutes, she achieved her victory and justified herself to herself without lie or subterfuge, cut the cord forever. Then she walked, weak in the legs, and sobbing coolly, toward the household that was hers at last.
Dick waited until she was out of sight. Then he leaned his head forward on the parapet. The case was finished. Doctor Diver was at liberty.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is The Night
