Then liberation came; again the summer was very complicated, I will not go into detail. My nominal activity was to raise horses, which of course I didn't know how to do, but my real activity was something else. I would like to skip that. Perhaps I will tell one story about that because it's somewhat unusual. I landed for reasons too long to explain in a little chateau, a big farm that was raising horses, what they call half-bred horses or they call them Anglo-Norman half-breeds. They're English racehorses crossed with other horses to provide the kind of animals for the colonels and generals in the cavalry. Very beautiful horses but short of thoroughbred and able to do some work. Well, the first day I arrived the owner of the place invited me for lunch, and said, "Well, in 1913 my horse Phoebus won the derby in Lyon. "Hi dam was.. his sire was.." and he recited to me the pedigree of the horse to many generations. In the evening Monsieur de Riviere, as his name was, started again ... "In 1913 -" I stopped him. "Your horse Phoebus won the derby in Lyon. His -" and I recited the pedigree absolutely as verbatim. I was able to do that routinely. I didn't try to remember the pedigree of that horse, but I remembered it, and that saved my life because Monsieur de Riviere was so impressed that anybody had listened to him. He was used not to be listened to and being spurned as an old cavalry man whom everybody viewed as being a man of the past and not worth listening to. Some people have saved their life because they could tell one thousand and one tales of Scheherazade. I saved my life, to some extent, by reciting the pedigree of a horse long dead. It was actually rather interesting to raise these horses and to be in this community of people who were then at the end - they were raising horses by force of habit. Nobody wanted their horses as there was no need for the horses, but later on, of course, when France and England became more prosperous, horses came back. At that time they were just animals that those people had been paid in the past to ride and to raise and to breed.
