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ACROSS PARIS AND OTHER STORIES, by Marcel Aymé. Even in translation, these are the year's best short stories. French Author Aymé tells about seemingly ridiculous or fantastic situations in which ordinary Frenchmen find themselves lost. Wit and clean writing save him-if not his characters-at every turn...
Before De Gaulle, no French government would have dared outrage French liberals and leftists by clasping hands with Dictator Franco. Even now not all Frenchmen would appreciate Franco's testimonial that De Gaulle's return to power "shows to what extent that country which gave birth to the democratic system of government abominates it and rejects it." On their side of the Pyrenees, the Spanish still nurse resentments from the Napoleonic invasion...
Since the days of the French Revolution, when fanatics proclaimed that they had dethroned God and placed Reason on the ramparts of heaven, Frenchmen have struggled over the deathbeds of famous men. Stories, some apocryphal and some authenticated, tell of the last moments of such famed skeptics as Aristide Briand, Paul Valéry, Voltaire and André Gide. Last week the battle was once more joined over the final hours on earth of Edouard Herriot, who had done as much as anyone to insist on the separation of church and state, and had fought tirelessly against church control...
Last week a searching party found the two Citroëns and four bodies long exposed to the sun-the young guide, the two Americans and one of the Frenchmen. Officials could only guess that the other had either struck out on his own or had died even before his companions. There was no evidence of foul play. An autopsy concluded that the young men had died of thirst and sunstroke...
...broke at a moment when France's rightists bitterly challenged De Gaulle's offer to negotiate a cease-fire with the Algerian rebels, and when one member of the French Assembly dramatically announced that assassins had crossed the Pyrenees, eager to put a few holes in Frenchmen who were considered soft on Algeria. So many French politicians had received assassination threats that there was joking about a "Condemned-to-Death Club." One of its charter members would undoubtedly be left-wing Senator François Mitterrand, 43, a fervid anti-Gaullist and outspoken proponent of a negotiated peace...