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Les Editions de Minuit were conceived by Vercors in the autumn of 1941 and created by him with Pierre de Lescure. The Silence of the Sea is the first title to be published there. About twenty others would follow until the Liberation, but it is Vercors' inaugural text that achieved the greatest impact. This understated story, where a French family opposes, through silence, the German officer they were forced to house, is an implacable plea against Hitlerian barbarity. Beneath the calm surface of the waters, it is the terrible "melee of beasts in the sea" that is suddenly revealed, and all "the underwater life of hidden feelings, of desires and thoughts that deny and struggle." The stories that accompany The Silence of the Sea here may have a less complex scope but are just as powerful. All issue a vibrant call to the virtues of a humanism conscious of its duties. Afterword by Yves Beigbeder.