Even as the Gaullist narrative of the Resistance and Deportation asserted its primacy, the Jewish story continued to percolate, drawing growing public attention to itself. That was in part thanks to the intercession of sympathetic Catholics, a number that included, not just Father Riquet, but also François Mauriac and Paul Flamand. Both were practicing Catholics, the former a Nobel prize-winning novelist, the latter a founding editor of Le Seuil, one of France’s leading publishing houses. Mauriac enabled Elie Wiesel to get into print and in fact wrote the preface to Wiesel’s La Nuit when it first appeared in 1958. The latter was patron to André Schwarz-Bart, author of Le Dernier des Justes (1959), the first Holocaust-themed best-seller in France. He also helped launch the career of Saul Friedländer, then a student of the Vatican’s wartime diplomacy but soon to become one of the world’s leading Holocaust historians.

This chapter offers a reconsideration of the well-known letters–atoms analogy in Lucretius’ DRN. By reviewing two readings of this analogy and then turning to the anagrammatic ‘readings’ of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (who in three unpublished cahiers found significant names hidden in DRN), the chapter highlights gaps and omissions in the two existing interpretations. In particular, whereas the previous interpretations use the analogy as license to focus on either the sound of syllables or the arrangement of letters, Saussure instead allows us to think that the force of the analogy may lie not only in the written or spoken properties of letters but also in their creative power, their performative ability to create new words and denote new objects in the world.