International

On a cold December day in occupied Paris in 1940, a large group lined up at the Nazi commandant’s office. Jews stood waiting to be registered, anxious for their lives. In the crowd was a thin, tall old man with a bulging, high forehead, a shallow chin and a small mustache. After waiting for hours in the cold, he caught a bad cold, caught pneumonia, and died on January 3, 1941. He died in the very town in which he had been born 80 years earlier. Registered by the Nazis, the old Jew was one of France’s most famous men, Professor Henri Bergson of the Collège de France, member of the French Academy of Sciences, winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature. In the Pantheon there is an inscription on one of the columns: “To Henri Bergson, a philosopher whose life and work have done honor to France and to human thought. [Alex Gordon]