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The POD for this is about 65 years earlier. (No, it's not the Orphans of the Third Republic TL. Same question, different answer.) Some different policies in the early Republic have had long-term knock-on effects...

Previously posted on soc.history.what-if.

* * * * *

April, 1940: The Nazi storm is about to break over the frontiers of France.

26 year old JOE DIMAGGIO, a lieutenant of artillery, is on leave in Metz. DiMaggio became a national hero after his astounding performance in the 1936 Olympics; four years later, his modest charm (and several lucrative contracts that have put his face on billboards across France, promoting the table wines of the Drome) have kept him close to the French heart, so he is still occasionally followed by reporters.

"Monsieur Vin" is sitting in a cafe, reading fan mail; though it takes an hour or more each day, he tries to reply at least briefly to each one. He has just written a brief postcard to a schoolgirl in Marseilles, young OLYMPIA DUKAKIS (who says that she, too, would like to be in movie theaters some day). Picking up the next letter, he frowns; it is from his persistent admirer...

...38 year old AYN RAND ("Ayn Reine" in this TL), who has a weakness for handsome young men. Reine is the editor of "Épatant", a Paris literary journal that combines science fiction and right-wing polemics.

After a single humiliating episode, Reine has given up on philosophy; the French are as vulnerable to poseurs as anyone else, but they take their philosophy seriously, and relentless mockery has forced her to abandon her "objectivisme". So Reine has thrown herself into writing and editing science fiction instead, with considerable success, although she vehemently rejects stories that are not sufficiently "forward-thinking".

The latest issue is close to deadline now, and Reine stubs out a cigarette and calls for the office boy. She is impatient; the editorial, she feels, is perhaps her best ever. It's a scathing attack on her old enemy: journalist, writer and philosopher ISAIAH BERLIN. Berlin helped orchestrate the critical destruction of her first novel, _La Fontanelle_. Now, at 32, he has just been nominated to the Academy. To add insult to injury, Berlin recently contributed a piece of SSP -- "Speculation Scientifique et Philosophicale", an essay or fiction after the manner of Jules Verne -- to a rival publication, "Renversant"

"Garcon!" she snaps. The dreamy teenage boy who answers is pale and distracted; has be been experimenting with absinthe again? Reine frowns. She'd love to find a better assistant, but with the war she must take what she can get. She snaps her fingers impatiently, and 14-year-old ANDY WARHOL picks up a pile of papers from her desk and staggers out of her office.

A few blocks away, in the offices of "Renversant", chief editor HUGO GERNSBACK has problems of his own. His last editorial, calling once again for SSP to be renamed 'scientifiction', has met with universal disdain, as has his call for a 'convention' of 'fans'. This is France; readers of SSP are serious minded people. And the Berlin story was great stuff, but now he has to work the slush pile...

...here's another story from 20 year old ISAAC ASIMOV. Young Asimov is a clerk in a front-line unit just south of the Belgian frontier. (Nearsighted and hollow-chested, Asimov is nobody's idea of a soldier, but France's need has drafted him away from his studies.) He's had several stories published in minor periodicals, but... Gernsback sighs and shakes his head. There's a certain rude vigor to Asimov's ideas, but no style. The great editor takes a few moments to pen a rejection letter. "... et on doit avoir quelques normes littéraires."

Elsewhere in Paris, Socialist Mayor FIORELLO LAGUARDIA is strutting through the Jardins du Luxembourg. The retinue trotting in his wake includes, among others, ambitious young politician TIP O'NEILL and equally ambitious young journalist ARTHUR SCHLESINGER. "Le quatrieme Napoleon" is going to inspect a Civil Guard unit; he has sworn to defend his beloved city ("the greatest in all the world and time") to the last breath in his body.

A thousand miles to the south, another great Frenchman is equally defiant. General ALPHONSE CAPONE, formerly of the Foreign Legion, has finally achieved his lifelong dream: last month, he was appointed military governor of Algeria.

Capone's ruthlessness, drive, and organizational ability propelled him rapidly upwards through the ranks of the Legion d'Etrangere in the '20s. Repeated mercury treatments (prescribed by military doctors) have left him with palsy and mild aphasia, but have slowed the course of his syphilis so that it has not quite yet entered the tertiary stage. Many fear Capone and many hate him, but all acknowledge his competence and determination; under his direction, Algeria, too, will fight to the last.

Meanwhile, at the Sorbonne, ALBERT EINSTEIN is shaking his head sadly. Though a resident of France since 1928, and a national icon, he has never accepted French citizenship; officially he is still Swiss, and national security concerns have increasingly hemmed in his scholarship in the last six months. Twelve years ago it made sense to choose France over America (New Jersey, indeed), since it was clear that the world's cutting edge of physics would be at the Institute Curie, but this war is disturbing him greatly. Late last year he wrote a letter to the Premiere, expressing concern about the military potential of uranium; it has gone unanswered...

And in one of the poorest arrondissements of Paris, two teenage boys are rehashing an old argument. POUL ANDERSON is 14; his friend Leonard Albert Schneider, is 15. The tall, blond, quiet Anderson and the short, dark, manic Schneider are an unlikely pair, but they have been inseparable since beginning school, united by a common love of words and books and stories.

"But I don't understand," says Anderson for the hundredth time. "What he said was almost all dirty words and cursing. And it didn't make any _sense_."

They are discussing -- also for the hundredth time -- a dramatic encounter that took place the previous year. The two boys had found a very old man badly hurt, beaten for the few centimes in his pocket and then left in an alley to die. A common enough sight in their poverty-stricken neighborhood, but Anderson's tender heart had moved him to help.

As the two boys carried him to a nearby convent, the dying old man began a rambling monologue... incredibly imaginative obscenities, scraps of poetry, blood-curdling blasphemies, and pleas for forgiveness to someone named "Verlaine". Anderson was appalled. Schneider was intrigued and then fascinated... but when he came back to the convent the next day, the sisters curtly told him that the old man had died in the night.

(Neither Anderson nor Schneider will ever know that the dying man had once been ARTHUR RIMBAUD, genius, degenerate, and the father of modern poetry. In OTL, Rimbaud died young, his Rasputin-like constitution destroyed by a combination of alcholism, malaria, drug addiction and syphilis. In this TL, fin-de-siecle France's more energetic economy draws him back from Africa sooner, and he never meets the fatal malaria mosquito.

(Rimbaud makes and throws away two fortunes, spars with Picasso and Braque, hails Dada as the "culmination and betrayal" of his work, goes in and out and in and -- finally -- out of fashion, and lives into his 80s, sick, mad, poor and alone. France is unaware of his death for nearly a week, until his last remaining friend -- the aging EMMA GOLDMAN -- identifies his body, at which point the nation goes into a frenzy of mourning.)

"What he said didn't have to make sense to be important," Schneider is saying to Anderson. "I think it was kind of like a... poem." (Or a prayer, he thinks, but does not say).

Anderson is skeptical. "Well, a poem should mean something. So if it was a poem, what was he trying to tell us?"

"I think..." Schneider -- OTL's LENNY BRUCE -- is uncharacteristically hesitant. "I think he was saying... don't be afraid."

Thoughts?


Doug M.
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