In _The Age of Longing_ Hydie Anderson reports Feyda Nikitin’s deadly activities to Jules Commanche of the French Home Security Department. A scholar and hero of the Resistance, he is one of a new type, but there are not enough of them to fill “the sclerotic veins of French bureaucracy with fresh blood.” Their effect amounts merely to “the injection of a stimulant into a moribund body.” In _The Reprieve_ Sartre had presented France as unaware and unready before the Nazis, already bled white from great wars. After another conflict, the patient is almost in extremis. Playing the recurrent part of American pupil to European teacher, Hydie listens to Commanche’s bitter lecture: Our last message to the world was those three words which are on our stamps and coins. Since then, we no longer have anything to give to the spirit, only to the senses--our novelists, our poets, our painters, all belong to an essentially sensualist world, the world of Flaubert, and Baudelaire and Manet, not to the world of Descartes, Rousseau and St. Just. For several centuries we were the inspiration of Europe; now we are in the position of a blood donor dying of anemia. We can’t hope for a new Jeanne d’Arc, not even for a young First Consul, not even for a Charlotte Corday.... He has told Hydie that the French Revolution substituted its slogan for the Holy Trinity, that the scalpel which excised autocracy from the body politic also removed its soul. The French thus seem to be suffering from a malady which, in somewhat different form, infects the Spaniards, Italians, and Greeks. Their splinter parties, their disorganization, their pervasive political cynicism are a legacy of centuries of conflict, inequities, and colonial misrule. But beyond this there is exhaustion, a vitality sapped by past efforts and a sadness increased by awareness of faded glories. RUSSIA: A COMPOSITE PORTRAIT Assessing Russian national character or behavior from the novels presents a greater problem than that found in any other national literature. One must first separate Russian Communism from the Russian people. In the same way one must distinguish the old Russian from the new. And this dichotomy has to be made after the Revolution as well as before it. Turgenev’s fathers are hardly more different from their sons than are Koestler’s Old Guard from the Neanderthalers they have sired. When Rubashov’s old comrade Ivanov is shot, Gletkin replaces him as interrogator. Rubashov looks at the shaven skull, appraising the huge ominous figure in the stiff heavy uniform: “You consequential brute in the uniform we created--barbarian of the new age which is now starting.”