No this is not me being fancy. This is the name of a book i've just read.

Crossroads to Marseilles 1940 is Mary Jayne Gold's memoir of Marseilles during WWII. not just any memoir though. Gold was a rich kid from america with a bent for foreign travel. She landed in France after making her way around other Euro climes under chaperone of an Italian headmistress of sorts. Gold struck France shortly before Hitler's posse invaded spurring fascist politics. During the general terror of the Nazis Gold, like most of France, headed in the opposite direction to invading panzers and ended up in Marseilles where she became involved in the American clandestine Emergency Rescue Organisation - a group with substantial private American backing that aspired to get Nazi targets out of France and over to America. Gold's part in this whole affair was not substantial (the leader was a man called Varian Fry who dedicated his whole existence to this cause during his tenure in France), but she was a member of the team and a sponsor with funds to contribute. Gold mixed with some of the most eminent intellectuals in Europe as they passed through the milieu of the organisation - Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Andre Breton, Victor Serge. There was something very idyllic about that situation, even against the terror of the nazi blight, fascist French local forces, and food rationing. I felt that pang of regret for my own inability to find myself in such monumental times. Can't be helped, i guess, but things are so unexciting in my daily life that it is easy to romanticise someone else's straits.
Gold also relates her relationship with a young french legionnaire deserter called Killer. he was a right scumbag and not worth her worthy attention, but she persisted with him, nontheless. There are many sides to Mary Jayne. I am guessing she would've been someone worth knowing -very big heart, forgiving, dynamic, modest. She doesn't shy from relating conversations littered with swear words, nor anecdotes concerning sex and its awkward paraphernalia. It's only upon reading such accounts that my long-held ideas of a sex-fearful past are destroyed.
After the war Gold headed back to America where she continued a life at odds with that in France. This memoir was written in the late 70s (published 1980), after making contact with these figures from her past and putting the pieces together from that period of the most momentous time of her life. It may be important that we all live through such a momentous time to look back on and be altered by. I know that i have mine. And I know some people are yet to experience anything. I wouldn't want to get to the end of my life and feel regret that nothing had happened to me to make it a life, but there is still much more to do, and after this year I hope it is flavoured less by library theory.