Sunday 12 August 2018

Cloudless May by Storm Jameson


When I wrote that Cloudless May is the story of the machinations, plots, and stratagems of various personages in Seuilly a fictitious town on the Loire I meant that the dramatis personae are all highly ranked citizens. As leaders in their community they might be expected to defend the honour of France in her hour of need. The time is May 1940 and the panzer divisions are about to move rapidly in their direction. The town is the location of the prefecture in the French system of local government. We are first introduced to a Colonel Rienne of the local garrison. As an old war hand, wounded in the First, he senses that this is perfect invasion weather:

It was the 5th of May 1940. Seuilly was crammed with troops ; these included a regiment of Colonials and two armoured regiments : and with munitions, these included the newest tanks. The war in the meantime was only active in Norway ; west of the Vosges and in the Saar patrols of both sides played a risky game of Red Indians. Yesterday Johann was killed, tonight it may be Jean. It was not war. Rienne, like many middle-aged soldiers, felt uneasy ; his instinct warned him that these hot cloudless days, perfect for war, were peaceful for some bad reason.

The prefect Emile Bergeot is his closest friend and the same age 48 fostered with Rienne’s family after Emile’s mother died in childbirth. He can call in to the prefecture at any time:

The Prefecture was a fifteenth-century chiteau, built by the second Due de Seuilly on the cliff looking down on the Loire. The steep road climbing to it from the town had stiH an odd dozen houses built in the same century, under the surrounding wall. Their heavy doors arid the worn ends of beams supported too much ; it was easy to imagine people dying in these rooms, as low and dark as vaults, and hard to believe that anyone could be born there and receive a first glimpse of light from these crushing and dilapidated walls. Halfway up this dark lane the carriage road to the Prefecture turned off, and climbed further to a wide courtyard with superb chestnuts.

On his way to the office of the Prefect he meets the Comtess de Freppel:

The Comtesse de Freppel had been Bergeot’s mistress for nearly four years ; she was not discreet, but she had not outraged opinion more than a little : sober and stiff-minded persons, with a touch of the hypocrisy inherited from Protestant ancestors turned Catholic in 1685 to avoid being expelled, could pretend to know nothing about it, while making good and sly use of her influence.

As the novel progresses we learn just how much she cashes out her influence. She is avaricious and fearful of falling back into poverty. From being a dancer in cheap dives she managed to snag the Comte de Freppel who believes that she is the daughter of a rich shopkeeper. He refuses to give her a divorce. Only her friend in the town who shared her adventures knows who she really is. This friend is a procuress whose son is a thief and a spy in the pay of the Italians.

Next we are introduced to M. de Thieviers a banker and an aircraft manufacturer. Five aircraft a month are being produced by his factory, shambolic really. The French it appears are hoping to fold gracefully unless of course Joan of Arc turns up. Morally speaking they are prepared to lose the war. Why destroy the town needlessly? The generals who figure in the novel hold this view, Petain is their man.

Thieviers is a patron of Bergeot supporting him financially: hospitality and good suits don’t come cheap. He wants Louis Mathieu fixed.

Thiviers had come to complain about the Journal and its editor. Mathieu had published an attack on him, so injurious that even a convinced liberal, a man to whom the suppression of newspapers was a lay blasphemy, could not rest under it.
“What do you want me to do ?” Bergeot said in a lively voice.

“Suppress the paper and arrest Mathieu. We are fighting for our lives, we can’t afford weakness.”

Nearly everybody is fighting for their lives using the very best method - don’t put oneself in any danger to begin with. The importance of influence, of getting everybody behind an ‘honourable’ settlement without unnecessary heroics is the ruling thought of the elite of the town. Some of them have links with the Nazis and admire the way they have rescued Germany. The intermingling of the personal and political is very well described along with the texture of everyday life, feasting, enjoying a glass of plain wine, and waiting for direction from ‘our masters’. Somnambulistic dithering and a slow march into shame pervades this cloudless May. An excellent novel. (find it on archive.org)




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