Papa Hemingway and Lauren Bacall in Havana

In Our Time 

Ernest Hemingway

chapter 1

Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk going along the road in the dark. We were going to the Champagne. The lieutenant kept riding his horse out into the fields and saying to him, “I’m drunk, I tell you, mon vieux. Oh, I am so soused.” We went along the road all night in the dark and the adjutant kept riding up alongside my kitchen and saying, “You must put it out. It is dangerous. It will be observed.” We were fifty kilometers from the front but the adjutant worried about the fire in my kitchen. It was funny going along that road. That was when I was a kitchen corporal.

chapter 2

The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him out. The second matador slipped and the bull caught him through the belly and he hung on to the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place, and the bull rammed him wham against the wall and the horn came out, and he lay in the sand, and then got up like crazy drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for his sword but he fainted. The kid came out and had to kill five bulls because you can’t have more than three matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he couldn’t get the sword in. He couldn’t hardly lift his arm. He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or the bull and then he finally made it. He sat down in the sand and puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and threw things down into the bull ring.

chapter 3

Minarets stuck up in the rain out of Adrianople across the mud flats. The carts were jammed for thirty miles along the Karagatch road. Water buffalo and cattle were hauling carts through the mud. No end and no beginning. Just carts loaded with everything they owned. The old men and women, soaked through, walked along keeping the cattle moving. The Maritza was running yellow almost up to the bridge. Carts were jammed solid on the bridge with camels bobbing along through them. Greek cavalry herded along the procession. Women and kids were in the carts crouched with mattresses, mirrors, sewing machines, bundles. There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.

chapter 4

We were in a garden at Mons. Young Buckley came in with his patrol from across the river. The first German I saw climbed up over the garden wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him. He had so much equipment on and looked awfully surprised and fell down into the garden. Then three more came over further down the wall. We shot them. They all came just like that.

chapter 5

It was a frightfully hot day. We’d jammed an absolutely perfect barricade across the bridge. It was simply priceless. A big old wrought iron grating from the front of a house. Too heavy to lift and you could shoot through it and they would have to climb over it. It was absolutely topping. They tried to get over it, and we potted them from forty yards. They rushed it, and officers came out alone and worked on it. It was an absolutely perfect obstacle. Their officers were very fine. We were frightfully put out when we heard the flank had gone, and we had to fall back.

chapter 6

They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.

chapter 7

Nick sat against the wall of the church where they had dragged him to be clear of machine gun fire in the street. Both legs stuck out awkwardly. He had been hit in the spine. His face was sweaty and dirty. The sun shone on his face. The day was very hot. Rinaldi, big backed, his equipment sprawling, lay face downward against the wall. Nick looked straight ahead brilliantly. The pink wall of the house opposite had fallen out from the roof, and an iron bedstead hung twisted toward the street. Two Austrian dead lay in the rubble in the shade of the house. Up the street were other dead. Things were getting forward in the town. It was going well. Stretcher bearers would be along any time now. Nick turned his head carefully and looked down at Rinaldi. “Senta Rinaldi. Senta. You and me we’ve made a separate peace.” Rinaldi lay still in the sun breathing with difficulty. “Not patriots.” Nick turned his head carefully away smiling sweatily. Rinaldi was a disappointing audience.

chapter 8

While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell everyone in the world that you are the only thing that matters. Please please dear jesus. The shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.

chapter 9

At two o’clock in the morning two Hungarians got into a cigar store at Fifteenth Street and Grand Avenue. Drevitts and Boyle drove up from the Fifteenth Street police station in a Ford. The Hungarians were backing their wagon out of an alley. Boyle shot one off the seat of the wagon and one out of the wagon box. Drevetts got frightened when he found they were both dead. Hell Jimmy, he said, you oughtn’t to have done it. There’s liable to be a hell of a lot of trouble.

—They’re crooks ain’t they? said Boyle. They’re wops ain’t they? Who the hell is going to make any trouble?

—That’s all right maybe this time, said Drevitts, but how did you know they were wops when you bumped them?

Wops, said Boyle, I can tell wops a mile off.

chapter 10

One hot evening in Milan they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Ag could hear them below on the balcony. Ag sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot night.

Ag stayed on night duty for three months. They were glad to let her. When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table, and they had a joke about friend or enema. He went under the anæsthetic holding tight on to himself so that he would not blab about anything during the silly, talky time. After he got on crutches he used to take the temperature so Ag would not have to get up from the bed. There were only a few patients, and they all knew about it. They all liked Ag. As he walked back along the halls he thought of Ag in his bed.

Before he went back to the front they went into the Duomo and prayed. It was dim and quiet, and there were other people praying. They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates. They felt as though they were married, but they wanted everyone to knew about it, and to make it so they could not lose it.

Ag wrote him many letters that he never got until after the armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch and he sorted them by the dates and read them all straight through. They were about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at night.

After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married. Ag would not come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or anyone in the States. Only to get a job and be married. On the train from Padova to Milan they quarrelled about her not being willing to come home at once. When they had to say good-bye in the station at Padova they kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel. He felt sick about saying good-bye like that.

He went to America on a boat from Genoa. Ag went back to Torre di Mosta to open a hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living in the muddy, rainy town in the winter the major of the battalion made love to Ag, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote a letter to the States that theirs had been only a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best.

The Major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Ag never got an answer to her letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl from The Fair riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.

chapter 11

In 1919 he was travelling on the railroads in Italy carrying a square of oilcloth from the headquarters of the party written in indelible pencil and saying here was a comrade who had suffered very much under the whites in Budapest and requesting comrades to aid him in any way. He used this instead of a ticket. He was very shy and quite young and the train men passed him on from one crew to another. He had no money, and they fed him behind the counter in railway eating houses.

He was delighted with Italy. It was a beautiful country he said. The people were all kind. He had been in many towns, walked much and seen many pictures. Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca he bought reproductions of and carried them wrapped in a copy of Avanti. Mantegna he did not like.

He reported at Bologna, and I took him with me up into the Romagna where it was necessary I go to see a man. We had a good trip together. It was early September and the country was pleasant. He was a Magyar, a very nice boy and very shy. Horthy’s men had done some bad things to him. He talked about it a little. In spite of Italy, he believed altogether in the world revolution.

—But how is the movement going in Italy? he asked.

—Very badly, I said.

—But it will go better, he said. You have everything here. It is the one country that everyone is sure of. It will be the starting point of everything.

At Bologna he said good-bye to us to go on the train to Milano and then to Aosta to walk over the pass into Switzerland. I spoke to him about the Mantegnas in Milano. No, he said, very shyly, he did not like Mantegna. I wrote out for him where to eat in Milano and the addresses of comrades. He thanked me very much, but his mind was already looking forward to walking over the pass. He was very eager to walk over the pass while the weather held good. The last I heard of him the Swiss had him in jail near Sion.

chapter 12

They whack whacked the white horse on the legs and he knee-ed himself up. The picador twisted the stirrups straight and pulled and hauled up into the saddle. The horse’s entrails hung down in a blue bunch and swung backward and forward as he began to canter, the monos whacking him on the back of his legs with the rods. He cantered jerkily along the barrera. He stopped stiff and one of the monos held his bridle and walked him forward. The picador kicked in his spurs, leaned forward and shook his lance at the bull. Blood pumped regularly from between the horse’s front legs. He was nervously wobbly. The bull could not make up his mind to charge.

chapter 13

The crowd shouted all the time and threw pieces of bread down into the ring, then cushions and leather wine bottles, keeping up whistling and yelling. Finally the bull was too tired from so much bad sticking and folded his knees and lay down and one of the cuadrilla leaned out over his neck and killed him with the puntillo. The crowd came over the barrera and around the torero and two men grabbed him and held him and some one cut off his pigtail and was waving it and a kid grabbed it and ran away with it. Afterwards I saw him at the café. He was very short with a brown face and quite drunk and he said after all it has happened before like that. I am not really a good bull fighter.

chapter 14

If it happened right down close in front of you, you could see Villalta snarl at the bull and curse him, and when the bull charged he swung back firmly like an oak when the wind hits it, his legs tight together, the muleta trailing and the sword following the curve behind. Then he cursed the bull, flopped the muleta at him, and swung back from the charge his feet firm, the muleta curving and each swing the crowd roaring.

When he started to kill it was all in the same rush. The bull looking at him straight in front, hating. He drew out the sword from the folds of the muleta and sighted with the same movement and called to the bull, Toro! Toro! and the bull charged and Villalta charged and just for a moment they became one. Villalta became one with the bull and then it was over. Villalta standing straight and the red kilt of the sword sticking out dully between the bull’s shoulders. Villalta, his hand up at the crowd and the bull roaring blood, looking straight at Villalta and his legs caving.

chapter 15

I heard the drums coming down the street and then the fifes and the pipes and then they came around the corner, all dancing. The street full of them. Maera saw him and then I saw him. When they stopped the music for the crouch he hunched down in the street with them all and when they started it again he jumped up and went dancing down the street with them. He was drunk all right.

You go down after him, said Maera, he hates me.

So I went down and caught up with them and grabbed him while he was crouched down waiting for the music to break loose and said, Come on Luis. For Christ sake you’ve got bulls this afternoon. He didn’t listen to me, he was listening so hard for the music to start.

I said, Don’t be a damn fool Luis. Come on back to the hotel.

Then the music started up again and he jumped up and twisted away from me and started dancing. I grabbed his arm and he pulled loose and said, Oh leave me alone. You’re not my father.

I went back to the hotel and Maera was on the balcony looking out to see if I’d be bringing him back. He went inside when he saw me and came downstairs disgusted.

Well, I said, after all he’s just an ignorant Mexican savage.

Yes, Maera said, and who will kill his bulls after he gets a cogida?

We, I suppose, I said.

Yes, we, said Maera. We kills the savages’ bulls, and the drunkards’ bulls, and the riau-riau dancers’ bulls. Yes. We kill them. We kill them all right. Yes. Yes. Yes.

chapter 16

Maera lay still, his head on his arms, his face in the sand. He felt warm and sticky from the bleeding. Each time he felt the horn coming. Sometimes the bull only bumped him with his head. Once the horn went all the way through him and he felt it go into the sand. Someone had the bull by the tail. They were swearing at him and flopping the cape in his face. Then the bull was gone. Some men picked Maera up and started to run with him toward the barriers through the gate out the passage way around under the grand stand to the infirmary. They laid Maera down on a cot and one of the men went out for the doctor. The others stood around. The doctor came running from the corral where he had been sewing up picador horses. He had to stop and wash his hands. There was a great shouting going on in the grandstand overhead. Maera wanted to say something and found he could not talk. Maera felt everything getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then it got larger and larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything commenced to run faster and faster as when they speed up a cinematograph film. Then he was dead.

chapter 17

They hanged Sam Cardinella at six o’clock in the morning in the corridor of the county jail. The corridor was high and narrow with tiers of cells on either side. All the cells were occupied. The men had been brought in for the hanging. Five men sentenced to be hanged were in the five top cells. Three of the men to be hanged were negroes. They were very frightened. One of the white men sat on his cot with his head in his hands. The other lay flat on his cot with a blanket wrapped around his head.

They came out onto the gallows through a door in the wall. There were six or seven of them including two priests. They were carrying Sam Cardinella. He had been like that since about four o’clock in the morning.

While they were strapping his legs together two guards held him up and the two priests were whispering to him. “Be a man, my son,” said one priest. When they came toward him with the cap to go over his head Sam Cardinella lost control of his sphincter muscle. The guards who had been holding him up dropped him. They were both disgusted. “How about a chair, Will?” asked one of the guards, “Better get one,” said a man in a derby hat.

When they all stepped back on the scaffolding back of the drop, which was very heavy, built of oak and steel and swung on ball bearings, Sam Cardinella was left sitting there strapped tight, the younger of the two priests kneeling beside the chair. The priest skipped back onto the scaffolding just before the drop fell.

chapter 18

The king was working in the garden. He seemed very glad to see me. We walked through the garden. This is the queen, he said. She was clipping a rose bush. Oh how do you do, she said. We sat down at a table under a big tree and the king ordered whiskey and soda. We have good whiskey anyway, he said. The revolutionary committee, he told me, would not allow him to go outside the palace grounds. Plastiras is a very good man I believe, he said, but frightfully difficult. I think he did right though shooting those chaps. If Kerensky had shot a few men things might have been altogether different. Of course the great thing in this sort of an affair is not to be shot oneself!

It was very jolly. We talked for a long time. Like all Greeks he wanted to go to America.

I wonder where got that?

Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you. Khalil Gibran

Half of what I saw is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you, Julia. John Lennon

Garden loot

I should have been born Italian. I love the culture, the food...and I can grow things (I know, its a terrible generalization to some people, but me and them obviously know different Italians) I didn't grow the pink pig in the back of the picture or the watermelon, although, to my amazement, I do have two watermelons growing in the garden. That stuff to the left is "Pineapple Basil" it aroma is WONDERFUL. But I have no idea what to do with it. The beans we cook with soy sauce and warmed slightly in a stir fry. I also grew a jalapeno pepper, I think Mary grew that since one pepper would kill me. We have more squash and cucumber than we know what to do with.However, I did find out that the dogs can eat it and it has no ill effects on them and acts as a sort of coolant for them. I use the cucumber for my skin. I pulled some of those small tomatoes because they huge ones aren't ripe yet.

Françoise Sagan

Françoise Sagan ( June 1935 – September 2004) was a French playwright, novelist, and screenwriter, best known for works with strong romantic themes involving wealthy and disillusioned bourgeois characters. Remarkably, her best-known novel was her first – Bonjour Tristesse (1954)  written when she was a teenager and considered scandalous at the time. The characters from that book, over the decades, became icons for millions of disillusioned French teenagers, similar to those of J. D. Salinger in the United States. The novel was an international success and Sagan, due to her talent and age, became a star within a few months. The book also made her rich. She quickly ran through most of the money “wasting it indifferently on racing cars, gambling and night life with her beloved brother Jacques and a group of wild friends whom she supported for years.”

Her son added “The money slipped through her fingers. Her publisher would pay all the bills and channel the necessary sums; our lives were conducted on a high level and with generosity toward that gang of parasites who surrounded her. Most of the time she would read, walk around and dream. She loved to wander around flea markets and discover small and dusty Impressionist oil paintings. She would come home with them, we would clean them together and then look for the artist's signature in the hope that we had found a lost treasure. For the most part she would give away her paintings - even those that were very valuable - to those who loved them. When the publisher called and warned that the money was running out she would closet herself and write another book. She wasn't lazy, it was just that she knew how to make an impression of enjoying an endless vacation, of nonchalance"

Born to a prosperous family, she took the  pseudonym "Sagan" taken from a character named Princesse de Sagan in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).

In the 1960s, Sagan she began to write regularly and became a devoted playwright and  novelist. Sagan produced dozens of works, many of which have been tureen into films The conversations between her characters are often considered to contain existential undertones. In addition to novels, plays, and an autobiography, she wrote song lyrics and screenplays.

Sagan had an interesting personal life. She was married to Guy Schoeller, an editor, who was 20 years older than Sagan and then to Bob Westhoff, a young American playboy and would-be ceramicist.  

Westhoff was born in Minnesota and enlisted in the U.S. Air Force at the age of 16 with forged papers, it was easy for him. He  was handsome, of above-average intelligence, original and charming.

After military service in Alaska, he ended up in Canada, where he joined the ice ballet troupe Holiday on Ice. Afterwards he studied plastic arts in Mexico City and modeled for fashion photos.

"One day he decided to visit Paris for only two weeks," says his son, "but he stayed there until the end of his life. On the boat that brought him to France my father met the young aristocrat Charles de Rohan-Chabot, who was known for loving men," writes Denis Westhoff. "My father had no objection to such affairs either, and the two became close friends.

Rohan-Chabot was a close friend of Francoise Sagan, who at the time was intimate with Paola Saint-Just, a rich and beautiful woman, and primarily - a lover of women. Paola and Charles Rohan-Chabot decided to marry for 'business' reasons and came to spend their honeymoon with my mother at her home in Normandy. Charles was joined by his American friend Bob. When quarrels erupted between the new couple, and the plates flew in all directions, my mother and Bob would get into Francoise's Lamborghini and flee to the forests or the beach. That's how the love story between them began, a story than lasted for about a decade, and for about another two years after the divorce. Bottom of Form

"I was born to a happy and loving couple, who celebrated by night and slept by day. My godfathers were dancer Jacques Chazot and Paola, my mother's friends. Jacques chose my name, Denis. My parents got along very well and decided to divorce for practical reasons only: He returned to men only, my mother to women mostly.

"My father was a sculptor, and an opera lover, who was a great expert on the subject. He arrived in France without knowing a word of French, but within a short time he became an expert on the language, someone who was more meticulous about rules of grammar than any Frenchman. He modeled, sculpted, translated, continued to love men and was famous for his elegance, his personal charm, and his pleasant behavior. Unfortunately, he died at a relatively early age from an illness."

Sagan also had an on-again-off again relationship with 1970s fashion stylist Peggy Roche, who reinvented Sagan’s look. Roach, a former model, was the wife of French actor Claude Brasseur.

Sagan and Roach were together for fifteen years and in some part, she helped to raise Sagan’s son who wrote  “Between these two women, it was a mixture of passion, tenderness, mutual admiration, mutual recognition, friendship and collusion as my mother never knew, in my memory, neither before nor after her.”  However, Sagan never publicized her bisexuality and during her affair with Roach kept their relationship in absolute discretion.

There were also relationships with Bernard Frank, a married essayist obsessed with reading and eating. Aside from Roche and Frank there was also a long-term affair with the French Playboy editor Annick Geille.

A 1957 car accident in the US almost killed Sagan and left in a coma for weeks and then confined her to her bed for months. It was at the point that she became addicted to morphine and despite several hospitalizations to end the addiction, she repeatedly returned to it until her death.

She returned to France after her recovery.

"In 1959, my mother, who was already famous and being chased by paparazzi, tired of the annual vacation in Saint Tropez, which had become too popular and crowded. She looked for a quieter place for herself and her friends and rented a house in a Normandy village for one month, from July 8 to August 8. The place was dangerously close to the casino in the vacation village of Deauville and to the roulette table. Sagan and her friends, author Bernard Frank and dancer Jacques Chabot, really did end up spending their nights in the casino.

"On the last night of the vacation, and after having dropped huge sums in the casino during the course of the month, Sagan won 80,000 francs. She gathered up the money and toward morning the three returned home drunk and lighthearted and went to sleep. When the landlord arrived as planned on August 8 in order to check the condition of the house, Francoise, too tired and sleepy to undergo the inspection, asked him whether he wanted to sell it. 'Yes,' replied the owner.' 'How much?' asked Francoise. '80,000 francs.' She pulled out the sum she had won the previous night, bought the house, and went back to sleep. That was on the eighth day of the eighth month at 8 A.M., and the house cost 80,000 francs."

"Peggy (Roach) took over the running of the house and the accounts, kept away the exploiters, the cheats, the drug dealers and the parasites who surrounded my mother, and even fired some of the devoted servants who had been with us throughout the years. There were some who accused her of total domination of [Sagan's] life, but it suited my mother and she was happy. ... Peggy ran the household, created a calm atmosphere and shielded Sagan from everyday worries. They moved frequently, and then too Peggy took care of everything; my mother would go to live in a hotel during the transition period and when the house was ready, she would come, get a key and a tour of the new place: 'Your room is here, your clothes are hanging here,' etc.

"My mother also financed Peggy's professional adventures. Peggy opened a fashion house in a trendy location on the Left Bank, but despite her talent and her refined taste in fashion, she knew nothing about business. After my mother had financed several collections and lost a fortune, the company failed."

Roach’s death in 1991 devastated Sagan "With the disappearance of Peggy” her son wrote “it was as if my mother had been torn to shreds, that we would have torn pieces of her alive" And so began a long descent for her into drug and debt. She had simply lost control of her complicated life with out Peggy Roach there to manage and protect her.  Her spending increased unguarded, her debts rose, and her use of coke increased. She was charged with and convicted of possession of cocaine several times including one arrest for drug dealing because of the  large quantity found in her possession.

The French Tax office hounded her for back payment. For a while she was protected by the French President François Mitterrand “a friend and a lover of literature” shielded her. That ended when an international businessman named  Andre Guelfi, succeeded in convincing Sagan to ask  intervene with François Mitterrand for the sake of his oil business in Uzbekistan. In return, Guelfi promised to pay for the renovation of her house in Normandy. Sagan had no head for business and naively wrote to Mitterrand asking for help.  Shortly afterwards it turned out that the business deal involved fraud, Sagan was accused of tax evasion.

Her health declined badly in the in the 2000s. In 2002, she was unable to appear at a trial that convicted her of tax fraud in a case involving the François Mitterrand. (She received a suspended sentence.)

Sagan with a nurse at a rest home where she went to recuperate 

Her last relationship, a destructive one, was with Ingrid Mechoulam, the much younger wife of a Mexican Jewish billionaire Felix Mechoulam. Ingrid lived in a luxury apartment on trendy Avenue Foch in Paris (It was one of five residences) and freely spent her husband’s money.

Ingrid and Sagan

Sagan had Ingrid snap this photo after she crashed her jaguar 

Ingrid fell in love with Sagan, and after her husband's death, when Sagan was broke and ill, (suffering from osteoporosis and pelvic fractures, was confined to her bed most of the time) moved into her house. But Ingrid was a big cocaine user, which Sagan didn’t need at that point in her life and her dependency on Ingrid cut her off from all her friends and her son.

 Sagan, 69,  died of a pulmonary embolism in Honfleur, Calvados, on  September 24, 2004. At her own request she was buried in Seuzac (Lot), close to her beloved birthplace, Cajarc.

Her son, Denis Westhoff, wrote “When she died in 2004 my mother left behind a debt of over a million euros. She died ill, penniless. The house in Normandy, the furniture, the personal items, the many paintings she collected during her life, the manuscripts - everything was seized or sold at public auction. Had I agreed to accept this 'inheritance,' I would have found myself within a few months in exactly the same catastrophic situation that she had been in. All my property - and there isn't much - would have been taken away from me, the authorities would have pursued me. Only after years of negotiations with the Finance Ministry and the Culture Ministry was I able to reach a repayment arrangement that enabled me to receive the rights to her books and to ensure that they would be reprinted in France and abroad”

Sagan, of course, being a writer, wrote her own obituary for the Dictionary of Authors "Appeared in 1954 with a slender novel, Bonjour tristesse, which created a scandal worldwide. Her death, after a life and a body of work that were equally pleasant and botched, was a scandal only for herself."

"She was wonderful, full of humanity, generous, refined, warm.” Her son wrote of her  “I'm not saying that because she was my mother - it's simply that everyone who knew her well knows that. She loved night life and mainly the people you meet over a glass of whiskey on smoke-filled nights of drinking. She knew that night people tend to tell tall tales about themselves but claimed that they were far more interesting and entertaining. 'I prefer them to those who tell the boring truth,' she said.  She had a weakness for outsiders, for wanderers, for adventurers. She hated any form of racism, and I recall a dinner when I was a child, with people I didn't know, where someone made anti-Semitic comments. She suddenly got up, grabbed my hand, and said, 'Come, Denis, we're leaving!' and left without saying a word. My mother hated loud and vulgar quarrels. She frequently handed out huge sums of money to beggars - she simply couldn't tolerate poverty. She also trusted people endlessly and that's why she eventually suffered so much from the betrayals of those who called themselves 'friends.'

   

Art must take reality by surprise. 

One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter.  

It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the 'fronts' people assume before one another's eyes, and the 'front' a writer puts on the face of reality.

To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

Every little girl knows about love. It is only her capacity to suffer because of it that increases.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

  

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent.

Marriage? It's like asparagus eaten with vinaigrette or hollandaise, a matter of taste but of no importance.

I had a strong desire to write and some free time.

For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.

Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

It would be bad form for me to describe people I don't know and don't understand.

All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me.

I dreamt of being a writer once I started to read. I started to write 'Bonjour Tristesse' in bistros around the Sorbonne. I finished it, I sent it to editors. It was accepted.

I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place.

You should celebrate the end of a love affair as they celebrate death in New Orleans, with songs, laughter, dancing and a lot of wine.

I always believe things are going to work out.

Every time I see a film about Joan of Arc I'm convinced she'll get away with it. It's the only way to get through life.

The house is 6,200 feet on three fours with four acres and my dogs sleep inches away from each other.

This recipe is for 4 lamb shanks. We cooked two of them and it wasn’t enough meat, so make at least four of them for two people.

1 tsp each salt and pepper

2 - 3 tbsp olive oil , separated

1 cup onion , finely diced (brown, yellow or white)

3 garlic cloves , minced

1 cup carrot , chopped in circles

1 cup celery , finely diced

2 1/2 cups red wine , full bodied

28 oz /can crushed tomatoes

2 tbsp tomato paste

2 cups / chicken stock

5 sprigs of thyme or 2 tsp dried thyme

2 dried bay leaves

Preheat the oven to 350F/180C.

Sailboats, 1921, David Kakabadze.

Davit' Kakabadze (August 20, 1889 – May 10, 1952) was one of the leading Georgian avant-garde painter, graphic artist and scenic designer. A multi-talent, he was also an art scholar and innovator in the field of cinematography as well as an amateur photographer. Kakabadze's works are notable for combining innovative interpretation of European "Leftist" art with Georgian national traditions.

The stragglers

 “To this soldier, duty took precedence over personal sentiments. Onoda has shown us that there is much more in life than just material affluence and selfish pursuits. There is the spiritual aspect, something we may have forgotten.” The Mainichi Shimbun, a Tokyo newspaper.

Hirō "Hiroo" Onoda was an Imperial Japanese Army intelligence officer who remained at his jungle post on an island in the Philippines for 29 years, refusing to believe that World War II was over. Onoda spent 29 years hiding out in the Philippines until his former commander traveled from Japan to formally relieve him from duty by order of Emperor Shōwa in 1974. (Another holdout,  Teruo Nakamura, surrendered later in 1974.)

Lieutenant Onoda, an intelligence officer trained in guerrilla tactics, and three enlisted men with him found leaflets proclaiming the war’s end, but believed they were enemy propaganda.

Onoda trained as an intelligence officer in the commando class "Futamata, was sent to Lubang Island and was ordered to do all he could to hamper enemy attacks on the island, including destroying the airstrip and the pier at the harbor. Onoda's orders also stated that under no circumstances was he to surrender or take his own life.

Onoda’s last order in early 1945 was to stay and fight. Loyal to a military code that taught that death was preferable to surrender, he remained behind on Lubang Island, 93 miles southwest of Manila, when Japanese forces withdrew in the face of an American invasion.

Onoda, who had been promoted to lieutenant, ordered the men to take to the hills. They command built bamboo huts, pilfered rice and other food from a village and killed cows for meat; they were tormented by tropical heat, rats and mosquitoes, and they patched their uniforms and kept their rifles in working order.

Considering themselves to be at war, they evaded American and Filipino search parties and attacked islanders they took to be enemy guerrillas.  One of the enlisted men, Yuichi Akatsu, left the others in 1949, and surrendered to Filipino forces  in 1950 after six months on his own.

This seemed like a security problem to the others and they became even more cautious. In 1952 letters and family pictures were dropped from aircraft urging them to surrender, but the three soldiers concluded that this was a trick.

Another man, Shimada, was shot in the leg during a shoot-out with local fishermen in June 1953, after which Onoda nursed him back to health. On 7 May 1954, Shimada was killed by a shot fired by a search party looking for the men. Enlisted man Kozuka was killed by two shots fired by local police on 19 October 1972, when he and Onoda, as part of their guerrilla activities, were burning rice that had been collected by farmers. Onoda was now alone. He was officially declared dead in 1959.

In 1974, Onoda was found by Norio Suzuki, a student  who was traveling around the world, looking for "Lieutenant Onoda, a panda, and the Abominable Snowman, in that order"

Suzuki found Onoda after four days of searching. Onoda recalled "This hippie boy Suzuki came to the island to listen to the feelings of a Japanese soldier. Suzuki asked me why I would not come out ..."

Onoda with Norio Suzuki, 1974

 However the lieutenant rejected Suzuki’s pleas to go home, insisting he was still awaiting orders.  Suzuki returned with photographs, and the Japanese government sent a delegation, including  lieutenant Onoda’s brother and his former commander, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi, who had since become a bookseller, to formally relieve him of duty. Taniguchi met with Onoda and fulfilled a promise he had made back in 1944: "Whatever happens, we'll come back for you".

Onoda turned over Arisaka Type 99 rifle, 500 rounds of ammunition and several hand grenades, as well as the dagger his mother had given him in 1944 to kill himself with if he was captured.

In Manila, lieutenant Onoda, wearing his tattered uniform, presented his sword to President Marcos, who pardoned him for crimes (Murder and shoot outs with national police. Onoda he and his comrades had killed about 30 Filipinos after World War II ended) committed while he thought he was at war.

Onoda was already a national hero when he arrived in Tokyo, for his patriotism and admiration for his grit. He was met by his aging parents and huge flag-waving crowds. “I am sorry I have disturbed you for so long a time,” Onoda told his brother, Toshiro.

His story dominated the news in Japan for days, evoked waves of nostalgia and melancholy. Japan fell further in love with the 52-year-old soldier when he spoke earnestly of duty and seemed to personify a devotion to traditional values that many Japanese thought had been lost. “I was fortunate that I could devote myself to my duty in my young and vigorous years,” he said. Asked what had been on his mind all that time in the jungle, he said, “Nothing but accomplishing my duty.”

 

After his national welcome in Japan, Onoda was examined by doctors, who found him in amazingly good condition. He was given a military pension and signed a $160,000 contract for a ghostwritten memoir, “No Surrender: My-Thirty Year War.”

They New York Times described his return perfectly when it wrote “Caught in a time warp, Mr. Onoda, a second lieutenant, was one of the war’s last holdouts: a soldier who believed that the emperor was a deity and the war a sacred mission; who survived on bananas and coconuts and sometimes killed villagers he assumed were enemies; who finally went home to the lotus land of paper and wood which turned out to be a futuristic world of skyscrapers, television, jet planes and pollution and atomic destruction.”

The Japanese government offered him a large sum of money in back pay, which he refused. When money was pressed on him by well-wishers, he donated it to Yasukuni Shrine.

Onoda was overwhelmed with all the attention and was troubled by what he saw as the withering of traditional Japanese values. In April 1975, he followed his elder brother Tadao and left Japan for Brazil, where he raised cattle.

He married in 1976 and assumed a leading role in Colônia Jamic (Jamic Colony), the Japanese community in Terenos, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. Onoda also allowed the Brazilian Air Force to conduct trainings in the land that he owned.

After reading about a Japanese teenager who had murdered his parents in 1980, Onoda returned to Japan in 1984 and established the Onoda Shizen Juku ("Onoda Nature School") educational camp for young people, held at various locations in Japan.

Onoda revisited Lubang Island, where he had held out, in 1996, donating $10,000 (US) to the local school there.  For many years, he spent three months of the year in Brazil where he was awarded the Merit medal of Santos-Dumont by the Brazilian Air Force on 6 December 2004. On February 21, 2010, the Legislative Assembly of Mato Grosso do Sul awarded him the title of Cidadão ("Citizen").

Onoda died of heart failure on January 16, 2014, at St. Luke's International Hospital in Tokyo, due to complications from pneumonia

A few months after Lt. Onoda came in from the jungle, Japanese Private Teruo Nakamura was found  on December 18, 1974 in Indonesia, but his story was much different from Onoda’s. Nakamura, an Amis aborigine, was a Taiwanese soldier from the Imperial Japanese Army who fought for Japan in World War II.

Nakamura was enlisted into a Takasago Volunteer Unit of the Imperial Japanese army in November 1943. He was stationed on Morotai Island in Indonesia shortly before the island was overrun by the Allies in September 1944 in the Battle of Morotai.

Nakamura was declared dead on November 13 1945 by the Imperial Japanese army. However, he was very much alive and lived with other stragglers on the island until well into the 1950s, while going off for extended periods of time on his own. In 1956, he apparently decided to cut himself off from the remaining holdouts on the island and built his own, fenced camp.

Nakamura's hut was accidentally discovered by a pilot in mid-1974.  At the request of the Japanese Embassy in Jakarta the Indonesian government organizing a search mission, which was conducted by the Indonesian Air Force on Morotai. Nakamura was found and, unlike Onoda was arrested and handcuffed by Indonesian soldiers on  December 18, 1974.

He was flown to Jakarta and hospitalized and repatriated to Taiwan. 

The Taiwanese Kuomintang government downplayed his return because they considered Nakamura a Japanese loyalist.  A change in the Japanese law in 1953, essentially stripped him of his pension and back pay but did grant him about $1,200 a month to live on. His wife, assuming that Nakamura had died, had long since remarried. His son was a stranger to him.  

Private Nakamura died of lung cancer in Taiwan,  five years after he left the jungle,  on 15 June 1979.