Used book – The Silence of the Sea: and other stories, Vercors

Les Editions de Minuit was conceived by Vercors in the autumn of 1941 and created by him with Pierre de Lescure. Le Silence de la mer was the first title to be published there. Around twenty others followed until the Liberation, but it was Vercors' inaugural text that had the greatest impact. This restrained story, in which a French family opposes, through silence, the German officer they were forced to house, is an implacable indictment against Hitlerian barbarism. Beneath the calm surface of the waters, the terrible "melee of beasts in the sea" is suddenly revealed, and all "the underwater life of hidden feelings, of desires and thoughts that deny and struggle."

The stories that accompany Le Silence de la mer here may be less complex but are just as powerful. All of them issue a vibrant call to the virtues of a humanism conscious of its duties.

Afterword by Yves Beigbeder.