ABSTRACT
The features of Maurice Thorez's career which used to be ''secret''—his sympathy for Leon Trotsky and his links with that early Bolshevik dissident Boris Souvarine—have often been reported in the past. Thorez was a fabricated figurehead, a leader behind whom others did the thinking and others made the decisions, and others even produced the ghostwritten memoirs. Louis Aragon—as an author known simply as ''Aragon''—considered himself a particularly close friend of Maurice Thorez, and he celebrated Thorez's return from a lengthy spell of recuperation in the Soviet Union with one of his most embarrassing dithyrambic encomiums. Aragon has been more of a virtuoso than a creative spirit in terms of intellectual and artistic achievement. Aragon's union with Eisa Triolet, a Russian authoress whose sister was the mistress of Vladimir Mayakovsky, created just as exemplary and power-conscious a ''royal couple'' as were Maurice Thorez and Jeanette Vermeersch.
