Régine Deforges: Le Diable en rit encore | The Devil Is Still Laughing (1988)

Régine Deforges's Le Diable en rit (translated as The Devil Is Still Laughing) is the third volume of her La Bicyclette bleue series which stretches to ten volumes, although this is probably as far as I'm going with it: not through disappointment or other dissatisfaction, but after almost 1200 pages all told I think I get the idea, and action-packed sagas aren't exactly my main interest in literature.

Nevertheless this is a fine book which is in no way less of an accomplishment than the previous two I've read. It continues the story of Léa Delmas during World War II, and like the second volume 101, avenue Henri-Martin, is much more violent than the first and with a much less important love interest.

The tense atmosphere of terror, suspicion, brutal murder and torture is continued here, with again the setting changing between rural France (mainly the area around Bordeaux) and central Paris. But some of the action takes place in Germany too, when France is liberated and the allied push into Nazi Germany finally destroys Hitler's regime.

Many characters lose their lives, perhaps the most notable of them all being Léa's uncle Adrien, the priest who loses his belief in God because of the atrocities he's seen in the war; he goes out with two resounding bangs: a bullet through the loathsome Nazi Maurice Fiaux's head, and one through his own tormented brain; but although people later learn of his suicide, no one knows that he killed Fiaux.

Léa's cousin Camille is killed by the Nazis quite earlier on, and much later her husband Laurent meets his death too; Léa's uncle Luc, a collabo, is one of those killed by the French seeking vengeance after the Germans leave; Otto, the lover of Françoise and father of her child, dies in battle in Germany; and Léa's old school-friend and former lover Mathias joins the Nazis in what seems like a suicide mission.

In the Belsen-Bergen prison camp in Germany Léa – while working for the Croix-Rouge – discovers Sarah, her Jewish friend who was tortured in Paris. She manages to save her by having her transported to England.

This book, along with the two preceding volumes in this series, represents a remarkable achievement. Although these are works of fiction, the background and many of the events are based on true facts that happened during World War II, and give powerful illustrations of the horrors of war.

My other Régine Deforges posts:

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Régine Deforges's grave
Régine Deforges: La Bicyclette bleue
Régine Deforges: 101, avenue Henri-Martin

Régine Deforges: 101, avenue Henri-Martin (1983)

The design of this book cover, with Léa Delmas and her blue bicycle in the foreground and a germanopratin* background – Café de Flore on the left, Abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the right – is fine. It's just a shame about the gaudiness of it, which gives it the appearance of a trashy novel, which it isn't at all.

Régine Deforges's 101, avenue Henri-Martin is the second volume in La Bicyclette bleue series, and I think it's more successful than the first volume. But it's much darker than the first, with the love interest cut to a bare minimum. The Prologue, with the murder of scores of French prisoners by Nazi firing squad, gives a brief (and very subdued) idea of the violence the reader is in store for.

As in the first volume, the story is set in both Paris and the Bordeaux area, and Léa, her sisters, her sister-in-law Camille and her lover François still play a prominent role, although her early lover Laurent only makes a few brief appearances.

Much more to the fore is Léa's gay friend Raphaël Mahl, who is an eccentric but likeable writer who is obviously making quite a profit from the black market, but who may well be a police/Gestapo informant. His existence more or less sums up the threatening and fearful atmosphere of the second volume: no one at all is to be trusted. In fact the least members of the Resistance know about each other the better because under torture almost everyone cracks and is forced to reveal the whereabouts and activities of even their closest friends.

Literary references abound: in a bookshop Léa replaces a message inside a volume of Proust and the assistant recommends she read Marcel Aymé; Mahl is obsessed by literature and as an adolescent was much affected by Le Jardin des supplices by the anarchist Octave Mirbeau (incidentally buried in Passy, although that is not mentioned here), and shows Léa the tombs of Renée Vivien and Marie Bashkirtseff in the cemetery at Passy and gives as a password a line from Baudelaire; François takes Léa to Chateaubriand's Vallée-aux-Loups in Châtenay-Malabry, and so on.

The most striking thing about the book, though, is not just the atmosphere of terror, but the horror of the Nazi régime itself, and just to give a few examples: Sarah's living but mutilated body after the cigar-burn torture; Raphael's beating up by the Gestapo and later gruesome murder in prison for having betrayed young Loïc (but strangely, not Léa's uncle Adrien); and worst of all, the London radio announcement in French of more than one hundred Jews being bundled into a tiny wagon with five centimetres of quicklime to eat their feet and asphyxiate them, as if they wouldn't already be asphyxiated – and them being left like that for about a week, when their dead bodies are shovelled into a pit.

Not a comfortable read, but there is a tremendous power here.

* germanopratin is simply a French adjective for the Saint-Germain-des-Prés area of Paris.

My other Régine Deforges post:

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Régine Deforges: La Bicyclette bleue
Régine Deforges: Le Diable en rit encore
Régine Deforges's grave

Régine Deforges: La Bicyclette bleue | The Blue Bicycle (1981)

There's a great difference in time and space between Atlanta of the Civil War and France of World War II. But although there are a number of similarities between Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and Régine Deforges's La Bicyclette bleue (which Deforge freely acknowledged as an influence), she eventually defeated the litigious Mitchell estate after a series of court cases.

The principal settings in La Bicyclette bleue are the fictitious Montillac near Bordeaux, and Paris, and the story follows the spunky seventeen-year-old Léa Delmas from the beginnings of the war, through the Armistice of 1940, to the early period of the Resistance against the Pétain régime. On a personal level, it is very much a sexual and political coming-of-age of Léa.

We follow Léa and her three lovers: Clément (who is married to her cousin Camille and whom she at last makes love a few times towards the end); the more mature François Tavernier, who is almost as madly in love with her as she originally was for Clément; and Mathias Fayard, her long-time schoolfriend who leaves with the STO (the 'service du travail obligatoire'). And we follow the various political affiliations of the central characters, which creates much of the tension that drives the plot.

Deforges doesn't depict a saintly Léa, who out of spite gets engaged to the (soon to die) Claude, and makes love to Clément behind (her supposed friend) Camille's back, for which she has no remorse. But on a number of occasions she risks her life for the Resistance, delivering messages and other items on her blue bicycle.

This blue bicycle is of course a symbol, and is a force of opposition to the Nazis in general and the Vichy regime and its 'collabos'. This is a world in which everything must be done clandestinely, in which no one can be trusted: for instance, the Delmas family itself is deeply divided – Léa's paternal uncles are on opposite sides of the political camp, with Luc (whose face Léa savagely spits on) a Nazi sympathiser while Father Adrien is a resistance fighter on de Gaulle's side; and then Léa's sister Françoise is pregnant by a German officer and they want to marry.

This book is the first of the series and it's one of resistance in more than one sense: forget the Léa Delmas/Scarlett O'Hara and François Tavernier/Rhett Butler comparisons, the natural ancestor of this book is the weighty, linear nineteenth-century novel; this is simply an updated, sexier version of it. But that didn't put me off as sometimes it's a refreshing change to read such 'old-fashioned' books, and I'll probably read the next two in the series.

My other Régine Deforges posts:

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Régine Deforges's grave
Régine Deforges: 101, avenue Henri-Martin
Régine Deforges: Le Diable en rit encore

Régine Deforges: Cimetière du Montparnasse #28

'ICI REPOSE

RÉGINE DEFORGES

PRINCESSE WIAZEMSKY

1935 – 2014'

The once controversial publisher and prolific novelist Régine Deforges married the artist Pierre Wiazemsky, the grandson of François Mauriac and inheritor of the title Prince Wiazemsky from his father Yvan Wiazemsky, to whose memory Deforges dedicates her most famous book La Bicyclette bleu (1981), the first of a series which consists of ten titles.

My other Régine Deforges posts:

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Régine Deforges: La Bicyclette bleue | The Blue Bicycle
Régine Deforges: 101, avenue Henri-Martin