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no more fires flickering from barricades to light up the rising clouds of smoke and tear gas, no more flashes and the cracking reports of the percussion grenades. Something indeed had truly ended.
    By leaning out I could look up the quai to the Pont de la Tournelle and see that the two squad cars of police were changing shifts. Twenty-four hours a day they guarded that bridge’s access to the home of M. Pompidou on the Île’s Quai de Bethune.
    I made myself another, very stiff drink, and downed it. Then I made another, and downed that. Damn it, I thought, I’m going to bed. And if I can’t sleep, I’ll take a Mogadon.
    I didn’t take the Mogadon.
    I feel I have not given an adequate picture of Harry Gallagher. To understand him you have to understand something of his background. Harry at 49 comes of an old Boston Irish family, who left him an income of some 20-odd thousand a year. In spite of that he has made a considerable name for himself as a screenwriter, and makes an excellent living on his own. He is famous enough and competent enough—what they call a “star” writer in the industry—to be in demand by big-money American producers. He has published two novels in the past six years. He has written screenplays for France’s most successful young avant-garde movie makers. In short, Harry was a winner, a man who, entering the bottom edge of middle age as he was, could relax a little and look back without anger.
    When he was 19, Harry left Harvard in his junior year as a social protest, to become an actor in New York with the idea of writing plays of social protest somewhat in the manner of Odets. When his first accepted play was in production, but long before it actually reached the boards to flop, he was on his way to Hollywood—at what then seemed a fabulous salary—to do his first screenplay, and on a big production. An old Communist-buddy director pal of his from the New York stage, who had gone out there before him, had asked for him and got him.
    I will not go into any moral issues here about their going to Hollywood. Suffice it to say that they two (as well as a whole generation of them, I guess, who went out there then) felt that they could reach more people with their message through films than through the theater. That was in 1939. By the time the war came at the end of 1941, at the age of 23, Harry had written two hit screenplays and was a boy-genius in the industry, with a big name.
    After Pearl Harbor, Harry threw all this up. Unlike his dedicated Communist confreres, who mostly received commissions as Lieutenant Commanders and went right on, making propaganda films for the Government now, Harry enlisted in the Marines where he fought the war in the Pacific as a Sergeant.
    After the war, of course, he had to start all over. A lot of new blood—that voracious, clamorous, greedy-ambitious new blood—had come in and taken over every place that was not occupied, and a lot that were. But he re-established himself in Hollywood as a top writer; and though his friends who had fought the war on the Silver Screen had trouble looking him in the eye, he became again a wheel and involved himself in the intellectual and humanistic Communism-Marxism side of the film-industry community which he had always been drawn to. There is no use here of my going into the relative goods and evils of Communist-Marxism as they were seen in the 1930s and ’40s. A lot of things that have happened in the world since then have changed an awful lot of things. But back then everybody was a pearly idealist. And Harry Gallagher was one of them. And, in 1947, on a visit home to Boston to his conservative Irish family, he met and married young Louisa Dunn Hill, another dedicated Marxist-Liberal idealist from an old Boston Brahmin family whose line and whose Liberalism dated even from before the days of Thoreau and Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Together they carried on their political activities in Hollywood, although neither