Word: mathieu
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...season, Manhattan averages at least one first-rate art show (as against dozens of dull ones) every week. Last week's most exciting show fell to the Kootz Gallery, which hung ten weird canvases by a controversial Frenchman named Georges Mathieu. The exhibition was almost bound to draw as many boos as bouquets, but none could deny its forcefulness...
...homosexual watches blond, sun-tanned Germans fill streets emptied of law and respectability. "Anything goes!" he thinks, and lures a young deserter to his room. Roads are packed with townspeople fleeing the unknown invaders, while soldiers wait in vain for orders, seeing their officers desert. Among the soldiers is Mathieu, ex-teacher of philosophy; while his companions try to hold a cracking world together with plans for new life, Mathieu is absorbed in tracing their personal guilt in the collapse...
...first time in his series of novels, "Paths to Freedom," Sartre appears clearly in his dual role; characters of the novelist begin to confront questions set by the philosopher. In "The Age of Reason," and "The Reprieve," a nation of individuals, typified by Mathieu, shrank from commitment, thinking to escape choice. Now, a few wake to the thought that their very failure to act--the vote they did not cast, the protest they did not speak--was itself a choice: a choice of war, and with war, defeat-Mathieu understands: "Let them clamor to the skies: 'We have nothing...
...life, intellect has betrayed Mathieu. "Enough! I'm through! I'm sick of being the wise guy, the guy who always sees straight! . . . If only I could have pressed my finger on the trigger, somewhere some German would have fallen...
After three days, Mathieu ends his life in action, holding out against the German advance in the church steeple of a small village. The fifteen-minute fight in the tower climaxes the development of the first three novels--but the series could not end with it. The rest of "Troubled Sleep" and a fourth novel still in preparation, "The Last Chance," is concerned with those who must live on, "Day after day . . . to gather in the rotten fruit of defeat...