On Books

ON BOOKS: A French village and 'The Longest Day'

If you have heard of La Roche-Guyon, a French village on the Seine some 40 miles northwest of Paris, it is likely because you have read Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day (1959), a novelistic history of D-Day, the first day of the World War II invasion of Normandy. (A new edition of the book will be published along with Ryan's other World War II history, 1974's A Bridge Too Far, by the Library of America on May 7.)

The book begins and ends in La Roche-Guyon, which Ryan identifies as the "most occupied" place in France, with German troops outnumbering the natives three to one. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel set up headquarters there in a fortified manor house at the base of a cliff overlooking the river, beneath the ruins of a medieval castle keep that lent its name to the town.

I was going to review The Longest Day this week, but then I discovered it's not being released until May 7. So, in accordance with convention and the publisher's wishes, I'll hold off for a while. But re-reading the book did lead me to thinking about La Roche-Guyon, the chateau that is still is owned by the noble La Rochefoucauld family, descendents of Francois de La Rochefoucauld, the 17th-century essayist who wrote Maxims, a collection of 504 aphorisms such as "Good taste is due more to judgment than to intelligence" and "Average minds usually condemn whatever is beyond their grasp."

It's still standing, and tours can be arranged (though the chateau is being renovated and, according to the website chateaudelarocheguyon.fr, will be "exceptionally closed" in 2019).

In the 18th century, La Roche-Guyon's library held nearly 15,000 volumes. Most of them were collected by Alexandre de la Rochefoucauld, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1690-1762). Alexandre began building the library in earnest after King Louis X essentially placed him under house arrest at the estate. (Alexandre made the mistake of detaining the king's mistress when she was on her way to see the king. That bought him 10 years of exile.)

There wasn't much to do on the estate but collect books, so Alexandre amassed a collection of philosophy, geography, physics and astronomy. He bound them all in red calfskin and affixed a gold foil seal. Later his daughter, Louise Elisabeth Nicole de La Rochefoucauld, duchess d'Enville (1716-1797), who socialized with Voltaire and ran a notable Parisian salon, continued to expand the library.

If you tour the chateau, you will likely be struck by the library. None of the books remains -- over the years they's all been sold off; the last major auction of them was in 1987 -- but have all been replaced by white-covered dummies of various sizes. The result is eerie, with blank volumes encased, some squeezed tightly in their shelves, some leaning gently against a neighbor. There's something in the scene that feels Kubrickian: Blank books with all the words -- all the meanings -- leached away.

I still think of books as objects, although I don't object to electronic editions. It's very easy for me not to download something, harder for me to ignore the heft of a hardback. On a recent visit to one of the last remaining used bookstores in the state, the proprietor said his customers simply don't buy hardbacks anymore, that Kindles and like devices killed the market for them. His customers tend to pick up cheap paperbacks -- they're interested in the content, not the form. And while a wall of books still feels like a kind of wealth to me, I would imagine that's a healthier and maybe more honest way to live.

These days no one needs to hoard books, at least not so long as there are libraries and electronic repositories. If you can read Gatsby or The Longest Day any time you want, you don't actually have to own it.

We did the same thing with music -- digitized it and set it free, and now artists who would have been solidly middle class a couple of decades ago are having trouble earning a living off their art. More and more of us have moved to models of access rather than ownership. While writers should be used to -- should expect -- poverty, I'd hate to see someone come up with a Spotify for books. (They've tried -- websites like Oyster and Entitle failed; Scrbid, Audible and Kindle unlimited are still experimenting with fee hierarchies and trying to acquire rights.)

There were still plenty of books in La Roche-Guyon's library when a deeply conflicted Rommel, horrified by the atrocities his countrymen had committed while he was fighting in North Africa, occupied the chateau and prepared to defend Adolf Hitler's shrinking Reich, though the field marshal set up his office in a bare salon and conducted most of his business in the courtyard. He knew what was coming, he was realizing what Hitler was.

"The first 24 hours of the invasion will be decisive," he told his aide aide Hauptmann Helmuth Lang in April 1944. "... the fate of Germany depends on the outcome ... for the Allies, as well as Germany, it will be the longest day."

And when it came, on the morning of June 6, he was home in Germany celebrating his wife's birthday. He didn't make it back to La Roche-Guyon until the early evening. By then 10,000 Allied troops had died, but 150,000 others had come ashore.

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Style on 04/28/2019

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