Word: pontillac
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Dates: during 1948-1948
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...Scum. Top specimen of social scum is Adrien de Pontillac, French aristocrat and Vichyite ruler of Marseille. His instincts refined to a delicate dimension of amorality, De Pontillac is one of the lovely brutes who classifies women by zoological categories, and has made indifference to other people into an art of living. When orders come from Vichy to round up all Jews into internment camps, he sets about his task with the precision of an official in an abattoir...
...Resisters. When De Pontillac prepares his bullies to search for "their load of Jewish meat," posters of protest, mute and futile gestures though they are, appear on the city's walls. They are the work of Marc Laverne, leader of an anti-Stalinist leftist group, a man so imbued with revolutionary fatalism that he seems like a disembodied symbol of rebellion. More human than Laverne is Ivan Stepanoff, an Old Bolshevik who has miraculously escaped from Stalin's prisons and who feels himself increasingly a historical anachronism. When Stepanoff is arrested, "his first concrete thought [takes] the form...
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