Munich Agreement

The Munich Agreement marks the tense historical threshold around which Romain Gary recalls 1938: war was being discussed, his mother’s letters summoned France toward an imagined victory, and he returned to Nice before entering the French Air Force Academy. The memoir places his unsuccessful attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life in this same period, but treats the agreement less as a diplomatic event than as the edge of a looming catastrophe—and as a moment whose confidence would be judged against France’s defeat in 1940.

The Eve of Munich in Retrospect

The recollection begins with Gary in sentimental exile on Björkö, where letters from his mother carried her fervent patriotism across the distance. One, written in large, forward-leaning characters, declared, "France will conquer because she is France." The words sound to the later narrator like a confident prediction, but he reads them ironically: in retrospect, they reveal how little France was prepared for its defeat in 1940. The Munich-era passage therefore holds two moments of knowledge together—the mother’s certainty before the war and the narrator’s awareness of what followed.

Gary tries to understand the source of his mother’s attachment to France. He considers the bourgeois values prevalent around 1900, when France was regarded as the pinnacle of civilization, and her two youthful visits to Paris. Yet these explanations remain tentative. His simplest account is that she loved France without a specific reason, as people do when they truly love. He compares her attachment with the enduring warmth he himself felt for Sweden, turning a public question of national allegiance into an intimate inheritance between mother and son.

1938: Return to Nice and the Berlin Plan

The memoir places Gary’s unsuccessful attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life in 1938, after his return from Sweden. He had abandoned hope of recovering a woman he loved and was sickened by the behavior of Brigitte’s husband; discovering that someone else had been preferred to him, after everything his mother had promised, left him feeling wounded. He went back to Nice to recover and spend his last weeks at home before entering the Academy. Gary says the attempt was never reported in the press and presents its failure with rueful exaggeration: he did not save France or the world, and had missed an opportunity unlikely to come again.

His return is rendered through the approach to the family hotel. A taxi turned from Boulevard Gambetta into rue Dante, bringing the garden in front of Hôtel-Pension Mermonts into view. The garden no longer existed when he wrote, though the hotel still stood; on later visits to Nice, he would look at its entrance and wait for the impossible. At home, his mother greeted him not with the tears and embraces he expected, but with sobbing and despairing looks. Although her diabetes was controlled and the business was flourishing, she continued to weep before leading him to their usual corner table in the empty restaurant. There, she began explaining a plan that involved his going to Berlin. The account establishes the destination but does not, in this passage, supply the plan’s full details.

Patriotism, Ambition, and the War Ahead

The Berlin plan belongs to the same charged period as the mother’s anticipation of her son’s military future. Gary had completed a law degree with difficulty but had been accepted into the Air Force Academy in the top listing. He imagines his mother’s patriotism rising to fever pitch at the prospect of the golden stripe that would mark him as a second lieutenant in the French Air Force. Her faith in France and her ambitions for her son converge: national destiny becomes personal promise, while the coming war exposes the gulf between expectation and outcome.

The Munich-era recollection does not narrate the agreement’s negotiations or terms. Its significance in the memoir comes instead from the way it organizes foreknowledge: the reader encounters a mother’s bold assurance and a son’s dangerous, unsuccessful effort against Hitler, while the older narrator already knows that France would be defeated in 1940. The failed attempt is presented both as a youthful episode and as a lost chance to avert catastrophe, with self-mockery marking the distance between the scale of the imagined opportunity and its actual result.

The Longer Retrospective Frame

The memoir’s historical perspective is shaped by later discoveries and endings. In 1958, after coming from Bolivia to Paris to receive the Prix Goncourt for The Roots of Heaven, Gary received a letter revising what he had been told about his father’s death during the war. His father had not died in a gas chamber: according to the correspondent, he had died of fright from a heart attack a few yards from its entrance. Gary describes sitting with the letter in his hand, then standing for a long time by a staircase at the publishing house, dressed in London-made clothes and wearing his French diplomatic title, the Cross of the Liberation, the Legion of Honor rosette, and the prize. This later scene reinforces the memoir’s layered treatment of historical knowledge: events acquire meanings through information that arrives long afterward.

The narrative’s framing present lies still farther on. It opens with the forty-four-year-old Gary alone on the beach at Big Sur, absorbed in a longing for universal tenderness. After the account of France’s liberation, he returns to Nice and finds no one waiting at Hôtel-Pension Mermonts. His mother had died three years and six months earlier, shortly after his departure for England, but had arranged for nearly two hundred and fifty undated letters to be forwarded to him at intervals. The Munich-era letters that carried her confidence in France belong, in retrospect, to a larger history of maternal words sustaining her son across separation, defeat, and even her death.