ABSTRACT
The late historian of the French Revolution Richard Cobb's 'Ixelles' (1998) is an unsurpassable evocation of a commune of Brussels in the immediate post-war years, roughly between 1944, after the liberation, until the mid-1950s; as Cobb puts it, 'a framework of a novel that has not been written and that he will not be likely to write'. Ixelles was a nineteenth century municipality, in essence a small town with its own town hall, the maison communal. Cobb's loneliness drew him into routines and timetables, walks, observing other people, and overhearing conversations in cafes and buses. Cobb's writing on Ixelles might be seen as an example of the work of mourning, the need to revisit and recall, often in tangible material detail, what has been lost, as part of a process whereby the object is relinquished internally and established within the self. This chapter focuses on the experience of the individual in the face of rapid changes and dislocations.
