SOURCE: "Some Political Implications of The Madwoman of Chaillot," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 9, No. 2, Spring, 1968, pp. 2210-22.

[In the following essay, Cohen finds that, despite its "whimsical" surface, Hyppolyte-Jean Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot is an existential drama concerning the political nightmare of World War II.]

It may seem overly narrow to speak of The Madwoman of Chaillot as a political play concerning France in the Second World War. The play is full of fancy, a superbly whimsical collection of farce, fantasy, and flippancy which has achieved as great a popular success as any of Giraudoux's plays. Social seriousness, which continually peeks from the interior of Siegfried and The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, and is mixed with bothersome intellectual discursions in Electra, seems at first totally missing from The Madwoman. One American textbook edition even bases its approval of the work on its total removal from the current scene: "For some theatregoers . . . the play seemed too remote from the harsh facts of contemporary history, and many wondered how Giraudoux could write so spirited a comedy during a period of national suffering and despair. Plainly, none of the anguish of the existential drama of the French Occupation is present in Giraudoux's extravaganza. . . . The remoteness of the mood and characters from the dark reality of the day is itself part of the play's charm."¹ Yet I don't think this is "plain" at all, and while the "anguish of existential drama" may not be readily apparent to the theatergoer, it can be found at the very bones of the play.

The play, which was completed in 1942 and first produced after the war, divides society into two races, one of eccentrics and the other of pimps. The former is the carry-over from the army of beggars in Electra, and one of their leaders, the Ragpicker, is the more earthly variant of Electra's Beggar, both roles having been first performed by Louis Jouvet. The true leader of this army, however, is the Madwoman Aurélie herself, "A grande dame. Silk skirt leading to a train, but gathered up by a metal clothespin. Louis XIII slippers. Marie-Antoinette chapeau. A lorgnette hanging on a chain. A cameo. A basket... a dinner bell in the bosom of her dress" (stage direction, p. 102).² Supporting the mad fantastical mélange are three more madwomen: Constance, the Madwoman of Passy; Josephine, the Madwoman of la Concorde; and Gabrielle, the Madwoman of Saint-Sulpice; plus a flower girl, a street-singer, a deaf-mute, a lace merchant, a pair of lovers, a sewer king, some historical anti-vivisectionists, and "the friends of vegetables." The enemy army is the one of mecs (pimps), a nameless, faceless assortment of presidents, prospectors, barons, brokers, secretaries general, and petroleum lobbyists. Between these two armies, a comic war is waged, but it must not be forgotten that this war, like its contemporary, is a war to the death.

The setting is the Café de l'Alma in the Chaillot district of Paris, and the café represents all which history and culture have deposited in the French capital. "At this same place Molière, Racine and La Fontaine used to come to drink their wine," says the Prospector (p. 101), and it had also been the scene of Giraudoux's meetings with Jouvet. The Madwoman and her friends are long-time residents of the area; the pimps, we see immediately, are newcomers. And they control everything. They corrupt everything. Their goal is to destroy Paris and retrieve the oil which they have found under the city's innards. As the play begins, the Prospector has laid a bomb which he expects will blow up Chaillot. The Ragpicker explains, "There's been an invasion, Countess. The world is no longer beautiful, no longer happy, because of the invasion" (p. 123). The action of the play is simple: it consists of the Madwoman learning of the nature of these "invaders," condemning them in absentia in a mock trial, and gloriously ridding the world of them by luring them down into a bottomless pit.

There are three levels of social analogy which are drawn in this colorful adventure, each simultaneously existing as a satiric analysis of the current political scene. On the first, most obvious level, The Madwoman parodies capitalism, especially the extreme financial jugglings of those who deal with money as opposed to goods. The mecs are the property pimps of Parisian commerce: the "mackerel pimp" and the "white wine pimp," who attach themselves to various objects of man's needs and desires, and work themselves in for a cut on the exchange. The abuses of capitalism had greatly increased during the Occupation, with the black market substituting for more civil methods of exchange; and the President and his friends sitting around the Café de l'Alma in Giraudoux's play resemble nothing quite as specifically as these black marketeers, described in this 1942 article from the Parisian France-Europe:

M. Nénesse enters a small bar near the Opera. He walks heavily and carelessly on thick, creaking leather soles to his reserved table. The waiters bustle around him. [He adjusts] his gold watch and takes a Chesterfield from his gold cigarette case, weighing at least 300 grams. . . . Out of a bicycle taxi steps either an important colleague or a client of this 1943 tycoon. The new arrival is of indeterminate age. .. . In the abrupt tones that you used to hear in the underworld, the two men converse. The newcomer tears a corner off the paper tablecloth and writes some mysterious figures on it. It all has to do with "boîtes bleues, " "paquets verts, " and "douze tonnes de purée. " Finally, the fat man pulls a thick wad of 5,000 franc notes out of his inside pocket, and M. Nénesse stuffs them away without batting an eyelid. The phone rings. It's for M. Nénesse. He doesn't bother to go up to the phone booth; he takes the longdistance call downstairs.

"The trucks from Belgium haven't turned up. And the tobacco. . . . "

Everyone can hear, but what does it matter? N. Nénesse is outside the law. . . .

Before the war, plain Nénesse was in the white slave trade. After the defeat, Monsieur Nénesse traded in meat, poultry and butter. . . . Every day this honest tradesman sells 300,000 francs' worth of goods and collects a cool fifty percent rake-off.³

Nénesse, formerly a real pimp and now a vegetable pimp, exactly resembles the Giraudoux mecs, who also sport expensive cigarette lighters (with private stock cigarettes), arrogant titles, disrespect for authority, distaste for the human beings about them, and a private code language of financial doubletalk. The president and his friends, like M. Nénesse, exhibit complete freedom from legal prosecution because they control the law; their word is law. "Hundred franc notes belong to the rich, not the poor," the President tells the Ragpicker (p. 89) as he takes the note away. Money belongs to the pimps; it is their language, and the Ragpicker says of them as it was said of M. Nénesse: "When they meet they whisper and pass each other fifty-thousand franc notes" (p. 124).

The attack on capitalism as pimpery was especially meaningful in France, where not only the black market but an outrageously political system of economic policies had hamstrung the country since the First World War. Giraudoux had complained for many years of the system where money had more and more become disassociated with goods, and where the agent of a product became more necessary than its producer. In his last political testament, Sans Pouvoirs, he wrote, "Our financial policy has become a money game. .. . It has detached money from its real values; and has allowed our great national resources to go to waste, by detaching money from work, from function, and even from gold itself."⁴ It is this aspect of capitalism which, Giraudoux felt, is unnatural and pernicious; the substitution of a seemingly synthetic system of trade for a natural bartering of intrinsic worths. As an economic grievance, however, this may be merely nostalgic, since Giraudoux did not nor could not suggest alternative systems of commerce. The satire against capitalism and economic pimpery is a hollow one. Far from being the principal subject of Giraudoux's interest, it is actually only a sidelight.

More crucial to the play's structure is the analogical relationship of the story to the French-German theme from earlier plays; a theme more deeply buried in the theatrical froth than the other, perhaps, but far more vital. For by this analogy Giraudoux paints his story of the German Occupation of his city: the Madwoman and her cafe friends represent the citizens of Paris (and of France), and the army of pimps represents the German Occupying Forces. Considerable evidence warrants this comparison, admittedly a surprising one considering the play's tone.

The imagery of the script is entirely that of a nation at war. The pimps are "invaders"; their take-over of Paris has been an "invasion"; they are of "another race" and they have arrived in their positions as a result of a series of murders:

Ten years ago, one day, my heart jumped. Among the passersby I saw a man with nothing in common with anyone else; stocky, stout, his right eye rakish, his left anxious, another race. He swaggered, but in a funny way, somewhat menacing and uneasy, as if he had killed one of my friends to take his place. He had killed him. It was just the first. The invasion had begun. Since then not a day has passed without one of my friends disappearing and one of the new ones replacing him. (p. 124)

They take the place of murdered Parisians as the German forces took the places of men killed in the hapless attempt to hold back the Wehrmacht. They are the uniform and uniformed army: faceless, nameless, "locked to one another like alpinists on a chain" (p. 126). When they appear in the final scene, it is in groups of identical robots who follow each other down the bottomless pit, as armies follow each other into war.

They have completely taken over the administration of Paris. "They run everything. They corrupt everything," says the Ragpicker. "The slave era has arrived. We are the last free people" (p. 125). They have appropriated for themselves the grand chateaux in the Loire Valley for their personal residences, and have decorated them with ballet girls from the Opera (p. 160). They are not only above the law, they make it into a rapacious and humiliating weapon. They respect neither tradition, culture, nor personal decency; they "bathe naked, if they choose, in the fountains of the Place de la Concorde. . . . they can turn to you their derrières, my dear ladies, and you will smile at them and kiss them as you would their faces. You will kiss . . ." (p. 163). The cruelty of the mecs is far more than the cruelty of ordinary capitalists; it is the behavior of a spiteful Nazi empire.

While the German forces were at first kept to fairly rigid standards of conduct during the Occupation, their presence was felt in every corpuscle of the invalided French body. Grey-suited German soldiers mingled almost imperceptibly with Parisians at Auteuil, at the Opera, and in the corner cafés, but the apparent serenity was merely on the surface. One Frenchwoman wrote, "They pass by, two by two, four by four, rarely alone; stiff, grave, hardly talking . . . without the radiant careless smile of youth, without any of the charming abandon that shows real camaraderie. . . . They no longer are human beings; they are creatures galvanized . . .":⁵ galvanized by fanaticism, to be sure, also by the incredible power which had fallen into their hands. The Germans, like the Madwoman's mecs, had billeted the great chateaux and turned them into military headquarters. They had splashed German highway signs all over Paris, and Parisian nightclubs reverberated to Nazi drinking songs. They were the ones who, in 1942, were buying French girls for their pleasures, swimming nude in the fountains of La Concorde, administering an economy for which they produced nothing, suppressing individual expression and individual belief to the point of committing French citizens to German concentration camps, and in short, running and corrupting Paris without being Parisian. When the pimps disappear at the end of The Madwoman and the flower girl cries out, "The armistice must have been signed" (p. 177), it should be obvious what future armistice Giraudoux had then in mind.

Giraudoux does not mention Germany once in the script, and the names of some of the invaders are Duval, Durand, and Boyer; never Schmidt or Ribbentrop or Biedermann. This could possibly be due to an early thought of Giraudoux to produce the play during the Occupation, or it could simply be a measure to maintain the light tone of whimsical fantasy. But there is one precise linkage between the events of the play and of the contemporary situation which is of considerable importance. This is the figure of Adolphe Bertaut.

Adolphe is the former lover of the Madwoman, and their aborted affair haunts the play. They had courted in the 1890's "when the Tsar entered Paris," but had broken apart years afterward, and Adolphe had married a woman named Georgette whom he never loved. "That's the way men are," the Madwoman explains. "They love you because you are good, spiritual, and transparent, and when they get the chance they leave you for some woman who is ugly, colorless, and opaque" (pp. 166-167). Thirty years after that, but still before the play begins, they met again, but that time Adolphe did not recognize his countess Aurélie, and instead he stole a melon from her. Finally, at the end of the play, "all the Adolphe Bertauts of the world" come to return her melon and demand her hand (p. 178). But now she refuses. This is the story of Adolphe Bertaut, and it is a puzzling one since it seems at first to have so little relationship with the rest of the play.

It could be by no accident that this mysterious character has the same name, Adolphe, or Adolf, as the one man whose name virtually personifies the Second World War. In 1942 "Adolphe" could bring thoughts of only one man. Even a hundred years from that date, no parent or author will be able to use the name "Adolf innocently. Moreover, Adolphe is a very German name in this French play, and he is described as wearing a "cronstadt" (a German stiff hat) and having a suspicion of a harelip (p. 112), which was rumored at the time to be the reason for Hitler's mustache. Through the character of Adolphe Bertaut, Giraudoux shows his own love affair with Germany, his disgust at having been jilted in World War One and having been robbed (the melon) at Alsace-Lorraine, and his final and complete repudiation of the German nation in World War Two. Although Siegfried, speaking for Giraudoux in his 1928 play of that name, refused to dig a "kind of ditch inside myself between France and Germany; when the Madwoman answers the final, post-armistice appeal of the "Adolphe Bertauts of the world," it is with words of total rejection:

I say that when they had the 24th of May, 1880, to declare themselves, the most beautiful Pentecost Monday that had ever been seen in the Varrières woods, or the 5th of September 1887 when they took and grilled a pike for our picnic at Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, or even, if necessary, the 21st of August 1897 when the Tsar entered Paris, and when they let all these days pass without saying anything to you, then it is too late! (pp. 178-179)

The cultural bond had never been tied; Germany and France had remained enemies through all opportunities, and had remained unreconciled within the human framework. Speaking from the 1942 vantage, Giraudoux could say nothing else.

Adolphe's story is never told except in sketchy references, and he only appears at the very end of the play. But it is the climactic moment, and the rejection of the Adolphe Bertauts leads directly to the play's concluding statement: "If two beings who love one another let one single minute get between them, it becomes months, years, centuries" (p. 179). Reconciliation in 1942 was beyond hope, the world would have to turn its efforts to the conflicts of the future. The future would learn from the present, and, as in Electra, Giraudoux sees beyond the war to the era which will follow. The Madwoman turns to the hesitating young lovers and cries to her friends: "Make them kiss each other, the rest of you, or else in an hour she will be the Madwoman of Alma and he will have a white beard. [They kiss.] Bravo! If only that had happened thirty years ago. I wouldn't be here today" (p. 179). If France had embraced Germany in 1919, if Giraudoux and others had succeeded in making Frenchmen realize the necessity of retaking contact with Germany, as he had attempted in Siegfried,⁶ the war would not have taken place. Failing that, the time had already come to begin preventing the wars to follow.

The ending of The Madwoman of Chaillot is a total capitulation to theatricalism and a violent attempt to escape, even momentarily, from the dialectic. The ending is an act of genocide which only an extreme degree of stylization makes palatable. It is as though the oppression of three years of Nazi Occupation had so burdened Giraudoux that in one enormous, irrational shrug he simply disposed of it through fantasy. A lifetime of concern over Franco-German relations has ended with an act of irredeemable violence and has relinquished all hope of reconciliation short of mass slaughter. In this conclusion Giraudoux adheres to the same basic thought of Electra, but with one major difference: Electra ends with only the dimmest forecast of what the post-war future would bring, and The Madwoman of Chaillot gives us a detailed plan. In 1940 Giraudoux told an audience, "Peace must find us with our programme ready, cut and dried down to the last detail."⁷The Madwoman, as much as the political essays in Sans Pouvoirs and Pour Une Politique Urbaine,⁸ became Giraudoux's last will and testament for the future of France, and of European civilization. This is the third, final level of social analogy.

In this light, The Madwoman is Giraudoux's warning against the evils of a mechanized, technological society. It is no longer merely Prussianism which concerns him; it is the oppression of technological progress, either American, German, or Russian; the oppression of a technocracy which seeks to devalue individuality, artistry, history, and culture and to insist upon, in their places, efficiency, sterility, neatness, and uniformity. What terrified Giraudoux about this particular war, which was being battled about France's head, was that it led only "to the thought that peace will be no more than a horrible adjustment between a mutilated white race and a triumphant mechanical civilization."⁹ It was this thought above all which generated The Madwoman, as can be seen in several illustrations.

The pimps are the agents of technological progress; in their faceless anonymity they are the identical pistons in a huge economic machine. Their bent is for progress but their result is destruction. As the Madwoman explains:

Men everywhere who seem to be building are secretly involved in destruction. The newest of their buildings is only the mannequin of a ruin. . . . They build quays and destroy rivers (look at the Seine), build cities and destroy the countryside (look at Pré-auxclercs), build the Palace of Chaillot and destroy the Trocadéro. . . . The occupation of humanity is only a universal enterprise of demolition. (p. 141)

Progress, in the technological society, is merely a change from one form to another, and in the wanton sacrifice of the old, Giraudoux feels, vital components of the human character are destroyed.

The technocrats are "cool" people, bespeaking an age where emotion gets in the way of expertise. "They don't run, they don't hurry. You never see them sweat," says the Ragpicker (p. 124). Their motivating source is oil, and their taste for it is sensual, lustful. They find oil under Paris and so will destroy the city to get it. "What do they want to make with it?" asks the Madwoman.

"What one makes with oil—misery, war, ugliness," answers the young lover (p. 122). The interchangeable "presidents of administrative councils, delegate administrators, self-conscious prospectors, contingency stockbrokers, secretaries general of enterprising syndicates, patent expropriators . . . publicity arrangers" (p. 126), who are the ice-blooded arbiters of technological society, have no use for the queer assortment of characters that frequent the Madwoman's café; and the future conflict, we realize, is to be between these technocrats and the less progressminded. They will either be absorbed or eliminated. The first method is demonstrated at the play's beginning, where the Baron is taken into the fold by the President. The fifty-odd year old Baron exemplifies the degenerated French spirit and his name, Jean-Hippolyte, is the exact reversal of Giraudoux's. He has disposed of his inherited French estates for a series of foreign mistresses. "The more French the name of my estate—the more exotic the name of my mistress," he says pathetically (p. 88), referring to the falling apart of the French Empire, both physically and spiritually.

But many cannot nor will not be absorbed, and these the invaders must liquidate. The Broker summarizes the course of action which must be taken against the Madwoman and her friends, and its reasons, in this peroration from an early draft of the play:

This madwoman . . . that dealer in shoelaces, that juggler, these are our real enemies, Mr. Prospector. . . . Those who have a sense of humor, a nostalgia for the past (which we abolished!). We others, we pioneers of the modern age, we had thought that by the division of the world into two classes; one of workers and the other a managerial elite; one sweaty and the other perfumed, that by the radical suppression of all connections between money and the poor, between leisure and work, we thought we would have sterilized the epoch once and for all! The diversity of human types has become a major problem for the conscientious managerial executive .. . we have been thinking of reducing them to a single popular type. A thousand exploitees per one exploiter, how convenient that would be, how restful for the conscience. But look! Look about this district which we have filled with the largest number of delegate administrators in Paris, the district which we want to make the citadel of power and money . . . see these flesh and bone ghosts of liberty. . . . These are the phantoms of joyful poverty, of madness. .. .¹⁰

This statement, somewhat attenuated in the final version in order to preserve the light tone of the play, gives an ironic rationale for all "clean" economic systems, which gain efficiency by reducing man to a uniform figure, easy to program, easy to monitor, easy to keep in line. Such systems were proposed to France during and after the war, first by Hitler through the Vichy government, afterwards by America, via SHAPE, NATO, and European Recovery; and Russia, via the French Communist Party. All of these forces fought for France's destiny in the 'forties and 'fifties, and not until the present Republic under De Gaulle can France truly be said to have taken her destiny in her own hands. Even this Giraudoux had prophesied. "The only hope rests with De Gaulle,"¹¹ he had said shortly before his death. While he never was to appreciate the full import of that remark, the relevance of these political concerns became enormous in the post-war period.

The prophesied future for which Giraudoux ultimately hoped was not a sentimentalized fantasy world of madwomen and shoelace peddlers (just as the technocrats were not to be faceless, identical robots—at least in the literal sense), and his rebellion against the mechanized society was considerably more than nostalgic, wistful rumination. He was a political realist, and he had a program. It was not his idea of dramaturgy to use the theater for this sort of exposition—and the play must be seen as a general sounding of alarm rather than a detailed manifesto. Nonetheless, the play offers certain definite guidelines toward the future. It appeals to the Frenchman's love for freedom and to his searching after personal and natural glory. (The President became a pimp only after he sacrificed his dreams of glory and "turned instead to the inexpressive and nameless faces" [p. 89].) It appeals to a respect for tradition, for history, and for a natural state of man and country. It demands a tolerance for all sorts of eccentricities and peculiarities which define the human being. It celebrates the simple qualities of provincial life, and demands that they be protected in an increasingly urban world. To Giraudoux, born in rural Bellac, this was what the war was all about: the preservation of the simple, honest, French way of life. Defending the war, he wrote in 1940:

What sort of man is a Frenchman? He is a man who likes to spend his time not in the glorification of a race, nor in manifestations of some dark divinity within him, but in simple ways of daily life, the ways of living that his forefathers bequeathed him, in a pleasant, fruitful land, a life based on rational principles and respect for the rights of others. He has his rules of conduct: work, activity, a lively interest in all things. He has his pleasures; the joys of family life and the company of friends; his hobbies, such as fishing, games of bowls. And he has his special passions—a passion for personal freedom .. . with which he tolerates no interference, and a passionate dislike of injustice.¹²

Idyllic? Of course. But Giraudoux was never to shrink from an idea merely because it seemed sentimental. Sentiment, he felt, was one of the distinguishing abilities of the human species, and proper sentimentality was consonant with an honest, natural manner of life. The stability of rural life, which was also that of French life, was in Giraudoux's mind a reflection of French rationality—an essential honesty between body and spirit. "I hate ugliness, I adore beauty," says Irma Lambert, the dishwasher (p. 130). It is the obvious truth which is shocking to hear said, for it is the truth of the body rather than the politic speech of society. By contrast progress is, in Giraudoux's thoughts, an unnecessary demand of the world which continually yanks man from his more natural, honest, and peace-loving destiny; and mere progress, by itself, must be resisted. "France has always had one principle, one programme: to be contented with the existing state of things, and whenever feasible, to turn it to account and to ameliorate it,"¹³ said Giraudoux, who craved a society which would slowly evolve by internal movements and august leadership, never by revolution or ideological invasion. Though often thought of as a liberal (as he would probably be called in America), Giraudoux was a staunch conservative. He wished to conserve the trees,¹⁴ conserve the simplicity of rural life, and conserve the importance of love, nostalgia, beauty, and communality. These values are not frequently spoken for in literature, not at least in good literature, for they smack of the super-obvious and the overly sentimental. Yet Giraudoux laced them with such brilliant measures of irony, wit, and savage understatement that they have become palatable.

Peace must bring this freedom to conserve the old while relishing the new, Giraudoux maintained. To the troops fighting for the country, he defined the policy of the war:

You must look forward to a France equipped for action and well-being on modern lines. While you are defending your country, you must feel assured that, when peace comes, you will find awaiting you not only the heritage of our age-long civilization—which we shall do our best to keep intact for you—but also a larger freedom, a wider field of enterprise, more trustworthy guides and ample safeguards, at last made thoroughly effective against parasites and profiteers.¹⁵

Giraudoux's activity in establishing the new France "on modern lines" was not strictly limited to polemics. He revived and reorganized the important Ligue Urbaine et Rurale and authored its manifestos and policy documents. The league functioned after the liberations and "followed out, on the practical level, the goals which Giraudoux had broadly fixed."¹⁶ He travelled extensively to collect information and spread his gospel—even during the Occupation. He did work in the details as well as the general policies, and worked extensively to preserve certain monuments and parks in the city of Paris in their original forms. It could be argued that this work was trivial, yet that argument is shortsighted. What Giraudoux sought above all for France was a pride in Frenchness, a cultural nationalism, a love, amongst the citizens, of their environment. And no one can now doubt that this pride—or stubbornness as foreigners occasionally consider it—is a major factor in France's international prestige in the post-war world.

For this is the import of The Madwoman of Chaillot, and in the 1945 production it came across loud and clear. It was an appeal to Frenchmen not to be swept up in immediate reconstruction and reindustrialization, not to allow any systematized economy to engulf the nation, not to permit France to be left to the mercy of either her enemies or her allies.¹⁷ It is not strictly a matter of Capitalism or Communism, but of "isms" in general. It is an appeal for France to hold on to her eccentricities and irregularities, to protect the individual freedom of her nonconformists, her artists, and her "unproductive" citizens. It is an appeal for the persistence of history and culture, for the maintenance of national monuments (the Trocadéro, the Café de l'Alma, Paris itself) and rural quiescence. It is an appeal for France to find her destiny in the values of honesty, simplicity, and purity-rather than in mechanical, technological confusion. In France, these issues are entirely real. Giraudoux's appeals, by and large, have been followed.

¹ Haskell M. Block and Robert G. Shedd, eds., Masters of Modern Drama (New York, 1962), p. 730.

² Page references are to the Bernard Grasset 1959 edition of Giraudoux's plays. The translations are my own.

³ Gerald Walter, Paris Under the Occupation (New York, 1960), pp. 101-102.

⁴Sans Pouvoirs (Monaco, 1946), p. 64.

⁵ Thomas Kernan, France on Berlin Time (Philadelphia, 1941), p. 147.

⁶ See Frederic Lefevre, Une Heure Avec . . . (Paris, 1924). "Siegfried . . . is a little pamphlet which I had written to draw to the attention of a certain French public the necessity for reforging our contacts with the Germany of letters and literature" (p. 150).

⁷The France of To-Morrow (Paris, 1940), p. 5.

⁸ Paris, 1947.

⁹ "L'Avenir de France," Sans Pouvoirs, p. 134.

¹⁰Théâtre Complet (Paris, 1945-53), XV, 37-38.

¹¹ Jean Blanzat, "Giraudoux et la Résistance," Le Figaro, September 23, 1944, p. 2

¹²Réponse à Ceux qui nous demandent pourquoi nous faisons La Guerre (Paris, 1940), p. 4.

¹³Ibid.

¹⁴ A common theme. "A nation finds itself in trouble with destiny .. . by its faults . . . such as the citizens wantonly cutting down the trees." Trojan War, II, 13.

¹⁵The France of To-Morrow, p. 5.

¹⁶ Raoul Dautry, appendix to Jean Giraudoux, Pour Une Politique Urbaine (Paris, 1947), p. 144.

¹⁷ Giraudoux was more afraid of the Allies than Germany. His last days were spent attempting to create an agency which would tabulate French losses in the war as a negotiating weapon for reparations. He was fearful that the Allies would run the entire peacetime show themselves. See Blanzat, p. 2.