If Emil Cioran did not insist, again and again, that he had broken with his birth country, rejected it, and consigned it to oblivion, the persistence of Romania in Cioran's national imagination would be less surprising. What could be more self-evidently important than the country where one lived his first twenty-six years and the language in which one published his first five books of philosophy? Yet in his writings and interviews, Cioran frequently recounted a scene in which he renounces, categorically, Romanian as a language and Romania as a nation. While on a 1947 bike tour in Offranville, a town in France near the English Channel, Cioran was translating Mallarmé into Romanian, when “at a certain moment, I understood the absurdity and uselessness of my effort. My country ceased to exist, and my language as well.” Cioran turned away from Romanian, the story goes, with enough conviction to drive him into intense study of les moralistes, those old masters of French style, through multiple drafts of his first work in French, Précis de décomposition (A Short History of Decay, 1949), and toward the Rivarol Prize and his long Parisian career. However convincing—and many intelligent critics have taken him at his word—this account is a Cioranian exaggeration. Cioran never abandoned Romanian or Romania. Rather, he maintained correspondence in that language with his parents and brother, peppered his letters to other friends with Romanian words and expressions, corrected the French republication of his Romanian book Lacrimi şi sfinţi (Tears and Saints) in 1969, cotranslated the same book in 1985, and, in 1992 at the age of eighty-one, gave an extended interview for Romanian television in his native language. His involvement was even political: he assisted efforts to free Constantin Noica from prison. Rather than reading the Offranville translation story as Cioran's break with Romania, we should see it as a moment when the languages of Romania and France are juxtaposed, precisely in the account of rupture. Cioran's repetitions of the story indicate the persistence of a certain version of Romania.