ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin, the renowned scholar, reached Cerbère three weeks after me, and at the prospect of having to climb across the peak of the Pyrenees, gave up and killed himself. Marianne Loring, 3 who arrived there with her parents (her father was a top-level Socialist Party official) two weeks after Benjamin, notes that luckily for them, the frontier had just been reopened for twenty-five—randomly chosen—possessors of transit visas per day. But whereas she was full of nostalgia for the France she had known, I gladly left and focused only on forging ahead, on muddling my way through. I was as stunned by the beauty of the soaring rocks of this imposing mountain chain as she was, by the juxtaposition of their majesty on my right and the brilliant azure Mediterranean far below on my left. Our train seemed precariously suspended in-between. Fleeting comparisons to Viareggio, La Spezia, and Genoa came to mind, but I discarded them as my anxiety overwhelmed me—long before the train jerked to a halt.
