Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (15 page)

Carlotta Welles Briggs wrote regularly to Sylvia, usually enclosing a cheque to help her survive. She reminded her to take some jam from her Paris apartment and to use or give away the clothes her husband Jim had left behind. On 25 August, Carlotta wrote to Sylvia from Altadena that she was ‘very glad to read a letter which Cyprian received by diplomatic channels and so to know that you had stuck to your shop and were still, as far as we could tell, all right’. She sent Sylvia money to have her piano moth-proofed by the Steinway dealer. In the same letter, she asked, ‘Are you still riding your bicycle around?’ Three months into the occupation, everyone in Paris was either riding a bicycle or walking.

Sylvia, from the distance of Paris, had also been commissioned to keep an eye on Carlotta’s house at Bourré. A mutual friend, an American named Gertrude de Gallaix, went to La Salle du Roc at the end of the summer with her French husband, Marcel de Gallaix. Marcel was a lawyer who represented some of the wine growers who were resisting German confiscation of their lands. Gertrude wrote a distressing letter to Sylvia on Monday, 2 September. While helping to take honey from the hives near the house, a bee stung her ankle and left her immobile for a few days. She continued, with a cavalier disdain for apostrophes,

Gertrude’s maid from Paris, Maria, and Mme Julia, Carlotta’s housekeeper, spent the whole day sweeping and polishing the house for the Germans. With Gertrude, they carried chairs and curtains down from the attic to make two rooms habitable for a captain and lieutenant who were to be quartered there.

Gertrude advised Sylvia to ‘be thankful you haven’t had to face soldiers and officers again and again as we have here’. In Paris, Sylvia confronted other difficulties. Merely to eat, she and Adrienne became scavengers, chasing the latest rumour of butter, eggs or fresh fruit in one shop or another. Shakespeare and Company no longer received periodicals and books from the United States. The Germans were censoring her favourite authors, including André Gide and Ernest Hemingway. Adrienne had ceased publishing her
Gazette des Amis des Livres
, because most of her authors were either banned by the Germans or could not pass German censorship. The writers who had fled from France or been forced underground were being replaced in the main journals and publishing houses by a clique, including Marcel Jouhandeau and Robert Brasillach, who were either fascists and anti-Semites already or adjusted their philosophies to German
Kulturkampf
. Symbolic of the change was the appointment of one of France’s most anti-Semitic authors, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, to edit André Gide’s prestigious
Nouvelle Revue Française
.

Odéonia, whose literary giants had been left-wing and pro-Jewish, was giving way to the salon of Florence Jay Gould. In the American beauty’s suite at the Hôtel Bristol, followed by the move to her flat at 129 avenue Malakoff in 1942, collaborationist French writers socialized over champagne with the celebrated German author Ernst Jünger and Propagandastaffel officer Gerhard Heller. The French writer Claude Mauriac wrote in his memoirs of one of Mrs Jay Gould’s parties that he was ‘stupefied to be shaking hands with one of those [German] officers whose contact I find so repugnant on the metro … The champagne and the atmosphere of sympathy and youth made everything too easy. I should not have been there.’ Florence’s friendship with the German Ambassador Otto Abetz was so intimate that he gave her a long-term
Ausweis
to travel freely between Paris and her winter house at Juan les Pins, where her husband Frank was living. Gerhard Heller was charmed by Mrs Gould and was honoured to be welcomed into her ‘sanctuary’. He reminisced, ‘She was beautiful, great, with chestnut hair; a very attractive woman in her thirties; she had a great knowledge and a great love of literature. She deployed another lure, very important for the period: her table ignored rationing.’ One writer, who smuggled an anonymous ‘Letter from France’ to Cyril Connolly’s London magazine,
Horizon
, described the new bookmen of the right:

Neither Sylvia nor Adrienne had a place in the collaborators’ literary milieu, and they despised those who did–apart from Jacques Benoist-Méchin. They had known Benoist-Méchin as a teenage music student, who played in George Antheil’s orchestra when Antheil was living above Shakespeare and Company. A writer and translator as well as a musician, war veteran Benoist-Méchin came to Odéonia in 1920. Adrienne wrote of him in 1926, ‘He was there when [Paul] Valéry read us, in a corner of the bookshop, the pages of
Eupalinos
, which he was about to hand over to his publisher. One day he showed us, jubilant, a copy of
Partage du midi
[
Break of Noon
] that he had written by hand. We saw him translate fragments of
Ulysses
for [Valéry] Larbaud, who was preparing his lecture on Joyce … No young man was so much the son of the house as he was … I am very proud of our son.’ She did not write what became of that pride in January 1941 when his ministerial-level appointment as Vichy’s secretary general for relations with Germany put him in daily touch with the Nazis.

POLLY PEABODY WAS A RAVISHING, 22-year-old ‘all-American girl’ from East 57th Street in New York. The blonde-haired society beauty spoke perfect French and German, having studied in France, Switzerland and Germany for much of her childhood. Defeating the Nazis became her obsession from the moment the war began in September 1939. Seeking to play a part, she volunteered to drive ambulances in France for Anne Morgan’s American Relief Service. Miss Morgan, who had returned to Paris from New York in March 1940 to direct humanitarian operations, rejected Polly’s application on the grounds that she was too young. Undeterred, Polly applied to the American-Scandinavian Field Hospital and was accepted for medical work in Finland. ‘About that time,’ she wrote, ‘stories of Finland’s gallant resistance were flooding New York.’ Stalin’s Red Army, allied with Hitler, was invading its neutral neighbour, and the Finns fought hard to defend their independence. ‘Finno-hysteria broke out in New York, like a violent rash on a baby’s face … “My deah! you simply MUST come to my little ‘do’ for the Finns”.’ The American-Scandinavian Field Hospital’s trustees, no doubt recognizing determination when they met it, made her their Assistant Secretary. Polly set sail for Norway in March 1940, one of ‘twenty-eight wild Americans’ including Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, ‘the Black Eagle of Harlem, a negro who claimed he was going to teach the Finns how to fly’. When her ship docked in Norway, the Germans invaded the country–the first stage of an operation leading to the Nazi conquest of Denmark, Holland, Luxembourg, Belgium and France. She escaped to Sweden, Russia and Switzerland. By the time she caught a train over the border to France, it was a German-occupied country.

‘At each station,’ Polly wrote, ‘a huge pile of twisted and rusting metal was dumped beside the tracks. Old bedsteads, pipes, etc.–all intended to make guns for the defence of France.’ On one of the many buses she took through the ravaged countryside after her train broke down, she overheard a disheartened French soldier moan, ‘Hell, we’ll be just as well off under German rule as under our own.’ That was too much for Polly Peabody.

The bus dropped her in Clermont Ferrand, the industrial centre of the French midlands. The government had left only hours before. ‘“Where is everybody?” I asked, like the ostrich peering over the rumps of other ostriches whose heads were in the sand. But I couldn’t find out where the Government had gone to, although everybody seemed pretty sure they had gone somewhere.’ In the government’s wake, the Germans arrived.

Polly Peabody was unaware that German soldiers who committed rape or pillage were subject to court martial and execution, a precaution the Wehrmacht had not taken in Poland. The Franco-German Armistice, signed at Compiègne on 22 June, carved France into four zones: the northern coast around Calais, administered from Belgium as a ‘forbidden’ area; Alsace and Lorraine, incorporated as provinces of the German Reich from which citizens of French origin were expelled; the bulk of France around Paris and down to Bordeaux, officially occupied territory; and the south, free of direct occupation by German troops. Because Clermont Ferrand fell south of the main line of demarcation between the ‘Occupied’ and ‘Free’ zones, the Germans withdrew from the city. Polly then noticed that ‘the Mayor had not waited until the last Nazi tank was out of sight before he ordered the French flag to be hoisted in the public square. Around it the townspeople quickly gathered and sang the Marseillaise with unrestrained emotion.’

Following the new Pétain government to Vichy, Polly chanced upon a French officer in the lobby of the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs. He had been military attaché in Norway, where they had met two months before. He offered to help her find lodgings, and he introduced her to the dapper Senator Gaston Henry-Haye. Senator Henry-Haye and the officer took Polly out to see ‘all the Vichy celebrities’ at the fashionable Restaurant Coq d’Or. ‘Stepping into the street, whom should I see emerging from a long black limousine, but Ambassador Bullitt? He looked so dashing and neat, just like the hero in the million-dollar picture, compared with all those who ogled him.’ Polly settled into ‘a questionable, small hotel’, which charged her twenty francs a night for a room shared with three other people. She remembered, ‘During the first few days in Vichy, I witnessed some of the saddest and most amazing pages of French history.’

 

Aldebert and Clara de Chambrun, after three weeks of privation at the Polignacs’ austere castle near Le Puy, were back in Vichy for their usual summer vacation. In their absence, the town had transformed itself from a bourgeois resort for rich hypochondriacs into the temporary capital of France. Vichy’s resident population of 50,000, while used to providing rooms for 40,000 summer visitors, was hosting almost 100,000 refugees, civil servants, soldiers, diplomats, legislators and journalists. All of them were clamouring for places to sleep, wash and eat. Polly Peabody observed ‘a French duchess–who for eight nights slept sitting bolt upright in an armchair, because she could not find a room’. Aldebert and Clara had, thanks to a longstanding arrangement with the Hôtel du Parc, their own room. But government officials found themselves running ministries from hotel bathrooms, receiving ambassadors in garrets and sleeping in corridors.

The American Embassy made its ambassadorial residence in a luxurious summer house, Villa Les Adrets at 56 rue Thermal, that it leased from Florence Jay Gould and her husband, Frank. The chancellery was in a doctor’s house, the Villa Ica, nearby. Most of the diplomats moved into the fortuitously named Hôtel des Ambassadeurs. Clara’s already low opinion of American diplomacy sank further because of what she saw as Counsellor Robert Murphy and his staff’s hostility to Maréchal Pétain and Pierre Laval. She wrote, ‘They made up their minds first on what tack they had best embark, avoided any information which might be calculated to bring new light on the subject in hand, and were particularly careful not to get mixed up with other than leftist politicians with whom their sympathies obviously lay.’

Ambassador Bullitt had left Paris on 30 June with Carmel Offie, his longtime secretary who had served with him in Moscow, as well as Commander Roscoe Hillenkoetter and Robert Murphy. Riding in their chauffeured convoy were Bullitt’s Chantilly neighbours, the Gilroys. Frances Gilroy was an American friend from Bullitt’s home town, Philadelphia. Her British husband, Dudley, was a thoroughbred trainer. Bullitt caught up with the government in Clermont Ferrand and lodged in the comfortable Hôtel de Charlannes in the mountains nearby at La Bourboule. By the time he contacted the government again in Vichy, Clara wrote, Bullitt ‘seemed to have lost many of his illusions concerning the Popular Front [the leftist coalition that won the last pre-war parliamentary elections, in 1936], and missed no opportunity of getting in closer touch with Pierre Laval, whose feelings toward him were very friendly’. She reserved particular animosity for Third Secretaries Douglas MacArthur, nephew of his namesake, General MacArthur, and H. Freeman Matthews–both of whom believed Laval was too accommodating to Germany. The Americans tended to see Laval as Vichy’s villain, although Pétain and most of the new Vichy establishment curried favour with the German occupier as much as Laval did. The British were also critical of Laval, but they were forced to withdraw their diplomats when Pétain broke relations with Britain in July. The diplomatic rupture resulted from a British ultimatum to French warships in the Algerian naval base of Mers-el-Kébir to surrender on 3 July. When the French commanders refused, the Royal Navy sank their ships and killed 1,267 French seamen to avoid the possibility of the ships falling into German hands. Pétain not only cut relations with Britain, he ordered an aerial bombardment of Gibraltar. The United States and about forty other countries kept embassies in Vichy–to the fury of Britain.