Free One Hundred Twenty-One Days by Michèle Audin, Christiana Hills

Daniel Roth, a historian who specialized in the historical events referenced in Dante’s Inferno. Evacuated to Clermont-Ferrand with the University of Strasbourg, he was arrested in June 1943 as a member of the Resistance and sent to Germany. He was beheaded in Wölfersheim on December 5, 1943. Impossible to know whether the letters Schmitt wrote actually reached their destinations. Ernst von Apfeldorf, who was well placed and very influential, didn’t come forward, according to Schmitt.
• Also in summer 1943: the bombing of Hamburg. 40,000 civilian deaths? Flames 8,000 meters high? Corresponding exactly with the dates of Kürz’s visit to Paris (June 1942): the filming of Les visiteurs du soir in Paris. The flames coming up to lick the hands of Jules Berry (the devil). How high? A girl’s love being stronger than the devil (this is a film!).
• “History is the science of man’s misfortunes” (Queneau, Une histoire modèl e). Mathematical modelling? A truly complex predator-prey system—certain sardines can become sharks, for example.
• Testimonials from those who survived the Nazi camps. During the transportation in uncovered freight cars following the evacuation of Auschwitz (march of death), survivors saw the corners of these cars as relative shelters.
• A circle has no corners. Neither does a cylinder. Hence, perhaps, the descriptions of hell: circles (Dante), a cylinder (Beckett’s little book The Lost Ones ).
• List of hells: Homer (steersmen, the dog of hell), Christian (pain and a black pit), Dante (wretched hearts), Brueghel (succubus, lemures), Goethe (cloven-hoofed demon).
Plus musicians, Liszt ( After a Reading of Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata ).
And now.
Beckett.
• Thinking of other books. For example: Painting at Dora (Dora was the camp where they developed the V-2 rockets). Le Lionnais was deported to Dora. During the roll call, he mentally recreates a museum of paintings (Brueghel at Dora). Painting numbers, which he speaks about with another deportee, beautiful numbers, π, the square root of 2. The finer points of number theory. His book Les nombres remarquables , dedicated “to my lifelong friends, delicious and terrifying, numbers.” Terrifying? Why terrifying? See, for example, what he says on the 7th positive integer. Or on the 24th?

CHAPTER VIII
    One Hundred Twenty-One Days
    On the 24th of August, 1944 at 8:45 p.m., the first tanks of General Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division made their entry into Paris via the Porte d’Orléans. The uprising had started on the 13th, the French flag was fluttering over the Sorbonne on the 19th, the Hôtel de Ville and the ministers were free on the 20th, but the fighting wasn’t over and Paris was covered in six hundred barricades. On August 25th, at the Montparnasse train station, Colonel Rol-Tanguy and General Leclerc accepted the surrender of the German troops. The most beautiful day of our lives, some said. That’s it, it’s over! We’re going to live again! everyone thought. The black vehicles were covered in a rainbow of summer dresses and flags. People were singing “La Marseillaise,” girls were dancing in the streets and boys were kissing them.
    This glorious and symbolic liberation was soon joined by the liberation of Troyes, in the east, and those of several cities in the Paris Basin and the middle of France.
    On August 27th, Clermont-Ferrand was liberated as well. This, too, was a collective outpouring of jubilation. The female Alsatian students who had been taking refuge in the town along with the University of Strasbourg for almost five years made traditional costumes with big black headdresses and danced in the Place de Jaude.It’s over, thought Mireille and her mother, we can go back home.
    Since the end of June 1942, the two women, both Parisians, had been living (or, in any case, surviving) in a hamlet near the town, more or less hidden away with the villagers’ discreet complicity. The two of them had left Paris and