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ments of his art

Hethe destiny common to all men of letters, if the war had not broken out When it did, the whole course of his existence was abruptly changed

Paradoxically, in Septe the first days of mobilization, he experienced a violent thirst for heroishtway took the forine hi feats of are in a man’s life, a point at which he feels an ie? Or did hishi his spurs on the field of battle; did his pride experience so that peaceful souls can, in certain circumstances, outdo professional soldiers in audacity? The nobility of this attitude could not in any case be questioned as a principle: it was that of countless Frenchination swept him swiftly to the toplow, dazzling everyone who looked at it—for in his dreams there were always a number of witnesses to his valor

This new ahtly colored visions He pictured hi into ene forell beyond the front line—and this, furthermore, despite the strictest and most explicit orders of his superiors; for he liked to think of hi” ient smile from those indispensable witnesses to his daydreams

His deliberate disobedience would lead to a striking victory He would disrupt the enemy’s lines of communication, cause it untold losses, and come back with a mass of prisoners At this point he had to make up some trivial but extremely precise material details to maintain the enthusiasm of his triumphant return The CO would summon him to HQ and address him in his stem disciplinarian's voice

“Cousin, you have disobeyed orders Consider yourself under open arrest”

“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Cousin would reply, standing stiffly at attention

“And you will bebeen so successful,” the CO would add, changing his tone

This type of conversation—a subconscious recollection of the adventure stories he had read as a child—, and each role was defined with the utmost clarity in his mind When he came to his senses he realized how childishly hackneyed these characters were, but in less than no tiain succumb to their irresistible fascination

His intellectual courage, fired by the longing to surpass everyone else, so his hero to the supreme sacrifice This, however, did not happen very often His looe his own death, without first indulging in a desperate struggle with itself To him this was the sublime limit, to which it was almost impossible to aspire, even in the realm of dreams He could picture himself without toofro the irreparable event, the fatalconsciousness at the same time as his life, he would be done out of the paean of praise being sung by the witnesses The only way hea little and, in rare ainst all probability, the account of his fabulous exploits, the list of his posthumous citations, and the murmur of veneration that accompanied his coffin

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Cousin spent the first year of the war in this permanent state of exaltation, and no incident occurred to lessen it Histhe course his a called up, he at once asked to be posted to a fighting unit, even though his personal connections ht have enabled him to be employed in a less hazardous position He went even further: during one of his fits of mysticism, when he felt his possibilities capable of indefinite expansion, he requested and obtained the co in hazardous raids He filled this post for several nition of his superiors

As aof consideration, fate see aspects of violence Many dangerous missions for which he had volunteered were canceled at the last her authority He never failed to show his disappointment quite plainly, and thereby retained all the credit for his zeal The few nocturnal operations he led came off without a hitch On two or three occasions, when a shot was sent in the direction of his platoon, there were always enoughthat he hie that his ue feeling that the bullets were not actually seeking him out, endowed him with the reflexes of a brave

The debacle of 1940 did nothing to sully the character of the hero who inhabited his e-scale raids, and his conduct at that time earned him further marks of respect In connection with this attitude of his Dr Fog, who later went through every word of his personal file, re town, alave proof of their courage He added that this clearly argued a peculiar sense of human solidarity in conjunction with a subconscious belief in the law of averages: every individual was convinced that the bombs were far ’s critical acumen frequently expressed itself in cynical and sometimes unjustifiable observations