Le mal de Paris par Régine Robin (review)

of unsubstantiated charges, finding Sauvage’s original and inspiring Weapons of the Spirit (1989; 2014) guilty of having a 40-second portion (in this 93-minute film) in which the filmmaker“asks”whether the rescue mission might have been helped because the head German officer in the region looked the other way. From someone who hammered Hallie and savaged Sauvage, one might expect impeccable scholarship. But the text is riddled with dozens of mistakes: Madeleine Dreyfus was never General Secretary of OSE (Jewish Children’s Welfare Organization), nor did she work on the Swiss border or in the internment camps. Georges Garel was Russian, not Polish; neither Joseph Bass nor Georges Loinger were Righteous Gentiles because both were Jewish. Darbyists are Protestants. OSE was not in Paris in 1932 and Albert Schweitzer was hardly its president, but in 1923 OSE was in Berlin where Albert Einstein was its honorary president. Finally, Moorehead snipes continuously at Pastor André Trocmé, whom she accuses of “malice,”“complacency,” and self-importance; the same Trocmé who wrote in his unpublished autobiography, when informed that he would be given the Righteous Among the Nations Award:“Pourquoi moi, et pas la foule des humbles paysans [...] qui ont fait autant et plus que moi? Pourquoi pas ma femme, dont la conduite a été beaucoup plus héroïque que la mienne? Pourquoi pas mon collègue Édouard Theis?” Whitman College, emeritus Patrick Henry Robin, Régine. Le mal de Paris. Paris: Stock, 2014. ISBN 978-2-234-06509-3. Pp. 345. 21,50 a. Robin is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, and her study of her native city is a mixture of both. She wanders around various sections of Paris, combining her experience with the insights of writers like Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano, and a host of others, including detective novelists and filmmakers, new and old—even Woody Allen (not her favorite). In Robin’s best-known fictional work, La Québécoite (1983), her central character wanders around different areas of Paris and Montreal, shuttling regularly from one to the other, although always returning to Paris, much as Robin does in real life. A former professor of sociology in Montreal, Robin is also a Frenchtrained historian. In Le mal de Paris these multiple skills and experiences are brought to bear on her fascinating account of a city that has undergone much change in recent decades, beginning with the transformations in her own neighborhood, symbolized by the well-known and much-denigrated Tour Montparnasse. This is an area in which many of us in the French-teaching profession spend much of our Parisian time, if only waiting for an airport bus or seeking the ghosts of Sartre and Beauvoir in the nearby cemetery or the well-known cafés. Robin’s portrait of her neighborhood cannot help but evoke a bit of nostalgia, even while it explains and integrates the modernized elements: the high-rise Tour, surrounded by the renovated Gare Montparnasse (where, 202 FRENCH REVIEW 88.4 Reviews 203 Robin tells us, the long, high-speed walkway has been retired after many mishaps), the shopping mall and giant Monoprix, and the unusual 750-unit apartment complex where Robin herself has chosen to live.Although a devoted Parisian often to be found, like her predecessors, writing in the Select, Robin nonetheless understands the necessity of modernization and continual change if Paris is to remain a living city. While many of us can resonate to Robin’s loving analysis of the new Montparnasse, her discovery of the more recently modernized areas on either end of the Simone de Beauvoir bridge may be a step into the as-yet-unknown. Robin welcomes the transformation of the old wine chais of Bercy, where she now happily visits the Cinémathèque, and looks forward to the transformation of the rapidly modernizing area around the Bibliothèque nationale into a new Quartier latin. Moving outward, Robin undertakes a study of the Parisian banlieue—a term best used in the plural, since the regions beyond the périphérique range from immigrant ghettos in the north to the impersonal commuter suburbs of the west, well described by Annie Ernaux. Robin explores...