Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (17 page)

At public meetings, René was usually introduced as Lafayette’s descendant and the nephew of the late House Speaker, Nicholas Longworth –links that emphasized his American origins. That René’s campaign worked was borne out by Roosevelt’s release to Britain of tanks, anti-aircraft guns and machine guns that had been ordered by France and embargoed since the beginning of the war. Lord Lothian, Britain’s ambassador to Washington with whom René had breakfasted regularly there, wrote to the young captain on 9 August, ‘You have been able, almost alone, to change official public opinion in favour of my country … For all of this, I want to assure you that Great Britain will never forget anything that you have done for her during her days of misfortune and distress.’

René maintained what contact he could from the United States, via telegram and occasional telephone calls, with his parents and his wife, Josée, in France. Aware of food shortages and the millions of refugees in the Vichy zone, he asked Roosevelt to send humanitarian aid to southern France. On 14 July, the president said he might do it, ‘if Bullitt agrees’. When William Bullitt arrived from Lisbon on 20 July, René was waiting for him at La Guardia Field. Bullitt endorsed his scheme to send food to France. On 1 August in Washington, René repeated his request to Roosevelt. The president wanted assurances that Germany would not seize the American food. René pointed out that the German army would not cross the line of demarcation to seize powdered milk, when its forces were concentrated in the north to invade Britain. FDR agreed to provide assistance on two conditions: Maréchal Philippe Pétain must cease his government’s anti-British propaganda and declare publicly to the American reporters in Vichy that he supported America’s increased defence expenditure and its democratic ideals.

Back in New York, Henry Luce, founder and owner of
Time
and
Life
magazines, invited René to lunch and an editorial staff meeting. René was already a friend of Luce and his glamorous wife, the playwright Clare Boothe, whom he had guided around the Maginot Line the previous May.
Time
had given favourable publicity to René, noting on 24 June that Roosevelt had returned from his cruise with de Chambrun on the
Potomac
‘refreshed and ready to act within the limits of his great powers. Some of them he used forthwith–to wave U.S. planes across the Canadian border’. Luce asked René a favour: would he meet
Time
’s 33-year-old editor, Frank Norris, and photographer Ed Riley ‘by chance’ on the Pan Am Dixie Clipper to Lisbon and ease their way across Portugal and Spain to Vichy? Luce told René he wanted
Time
to be first with a story out of the Free Zone, perhaps choosing to forget that a dozen American newspaper correspondents were already there.

When René arrived in Vichy with the two
Time
men, Clara was proud of her son and his achievements in the United States. She did not have to tell him what everyone in France knew: that his father-in-law, Pierre Laval, believed that Britain would lose the war and France must find a place, albeit secondary, in the new German Europe. If René de Chambrun and Pierre Laval argued about their differing conceptions of the outcome of the war, neither René nor Clara spoke of it. Nonetheless, Clara persisted in her belief that René, rather than Charles de Gaulle, who had been condemned to death in August for desertion by a Vichy court martial, was the man to save France.

After seeing his parents at the Hôtel du Parc, René met his father’s old commander, Maréchal Pétain, to deliver Roosevelt’s message. Pétain agreed to the president’s conditions for supplying powdered milk and other necessities to France. His foreign minister, Paul Baudoin, was immediately instructed to suspend his verbal attacks on Great Britain. At five o’clock that evening, Pétain gave the press conference Roosevelt had asked for. Correspondents from the United Press,
New York Herald Tribune
,
New York Times
,
Baltimore Sun
and
Chicago Daily News
recorded Pétain’s words: ‘France will remain firmly attached to the ideal that she shares with the great American democracy, an ideal based on respect for individual rights, devotion to family and the fatherland, love of justice and humanity.’ Satisfied that Pétain had done all Roosevelt asked, René returned to the United States on 31 August with his wife, Josée, bearing a letter from Pétain to the president.

René’s plans unravelled as soon as he reached New York, where Missy Lehand told him over the telephone not to come to Washington. Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt’s closest advisers in the cabinet, was on his way to New York to meet him for dinner that night. Hopkins was candid: ‘The president has had to give up the plan of shipping condensed milk. Churchill telephoned him insisting that we maintain the blockade [of France].’

René de Chambrun, whom the president declined to meet again, felt betrayed. Arrayed against him were, in addition to the British, many French émigrés in the United States like Eve Curie who believed that aid to any part of German-occupied Europe would only help the Nazis. Yet René persevered, campaigning across the country and seeking private assistance from Anne Morgan and the Quakers. Henry Luce’s
Time
magazine wrote, ‘René de Chambrun, a captain of French infantry, is a wiry little man of 33, with the late Nick Longworth for an uncle, a profitable knowledge of the law, both French and American, a host of important connections, a taste for driving too fast in an automobile and an inborn capacity for landing out of any catastrophe on his feet.’ The praise was for the book he had just published,
I Saw France Fall: Will She Rise Again?
, whose royalties he donated to a charity for French prisoners of war.

When Clara learned of Roosevelt’s change of mind, she took her son’s side:

René’s circumvention of Britain’s blockade of France attracted the attention of the British Embassy in Washington. Forgotten was Lord Lothian’s praise for René’s help to Britain in its most difficult hour. The embassy sent a cable to the Foreign Office in London recommending that René and Josée be denied transit visas for Bermuda, where the Pan Am Dixie Clipper stopped on its way across the Atlantic. (On René’s first return to France from New York in August, he had carried an introduction from Lord Lothian asking the Governor of Bermuda to offer him full hospitality.) An embassy officer named Mr Butler wrote on 14 November of René, ‘He is a plausible anti-British talker and the Passport Control Officer agrees that he and his wife be granted visas for the outward journey [to France], and his return [to the United States], if possible, be impeded. He possesses United States citizenship as well as French, but difficulties may be put in the way of him using a United States Passport on return.’ A handwritten note in the margin signed ‘MS’ added that ‘we don’t like the Chambruns’.

POLLY PEABODY TIRED OF VICHY IN MID-AUGUST and obtained a pass to drive to Paris. ‘It was late afternoon when we reached the Gates of Paris,’ she recalled. ‘We rolled into the Capital which had become a vast garrison. Millions of black boots stomped noisily along the stone pavements, the Swastika fluttered from building fronts, road signs in German characters were pinned on the street corners. A cloud of sadness hung over the city.’ She stayed in a borrowed flat on the Left Bank, where the concierge was wary until she ascertained that the blonde Polly was not German. The concierge told her that she and her friends, despite German prohibitions, listened to BBC radio transmissions from London. It was not the only defiance the young American detected. On the terrace of Fouquet’s restaurant near the Arc de Triomphe, where ‘sword-scarred, bemedalled’ German officers feasted, she saw a drunken old Parisienne watching the Nazis from the sidewalk. The woman ‘put both fists on her hips and yelled out: “
Eh bien, moi je vous dis MERDE!
” [“All right, me, I say to you SHIT!”] The waiters bumped into each other trying to conceal their amusement, while I and the few French people present laughed heartily into our napkins.’ Polly observed, ‘This was my introduction to the spirit of resistance which existed in the occupied zone.’ It was a contrast to what she had seen in her last six weeks at Vichy, although hardly representative of all Paris.

France’s internal frontiers deprived Clara and Aldebert de Chambrun of news from Paris for the first weeks of the occupation. Train service soon resumed between Paris and Vichy, at least for those privileged to possess a German travel permit, the much-coveted
Ausweis
. Vicomte de Poncins arrived from Paris to tell Clara that Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering had seized the Senate building, the Palais du Luxembourg, opposite her house at 58 rue de Vaugirard, for his headquarters. Empty flats in the rue de Vaugirard became billets for his officers. The vicomte comforted her with the assurance that her housekeeper, Mlle d’Ambléon, ‘continued to hold the fort’ at Number 58. Clara wrote, ‘My old lady, though frightened out of her wits, showed energy and character by insisting that the premises were not empty and that the proprietors would be back before the first of September. “We shall see on September the first if what you say is true,” the German officer said significantly.’

The threat determined Aldebert and Clara to return to Paris. ‘Our cure was finished,’ she wrote of their six weeks in the spa town. On 1 September, they drove home. When Clara entered the city through the Porte d’Orléans, ‘a German official handed out an order to present our car for requisition within forty-eight hours. It was our first indication that what we possessed was not really our own.’ She was relieved to discover the Germans were not, as rumoured, capturing and killing dogs like her darling Tsouni, who was buried beneath her skirts. At Vichy, she had heard rumours about the new German Paris: ‘The use of the sidewalks was reserved for the
Wehrmacht
; citizens were kicked off the street and French passengers booted in the subway. Curfew was tolled at seven o’clock. Loiterers after that hour were imprisoned. All household linen had been requisitioned for German service. There was a constant interchange of shots across the Champs Elysées, etc. … etc.’ On the contrary, she discovered, the Germans in the early months of the occupation were cultivating both the French and the neutrals, especially the Americans. German soldiers behaved well and left policing of the capital to French Prefect Roger Langeron and his 25,000 gendarmes. What annoyed Clara more than German behaviour was the symbolism.

Clara did not brood long over the Swastikas. When Aldebert surrendered their car to the Germans, she accustomed herself to long walks and to the novel experience of riding the Metro. She took a bus over the Seine to the American Library, where she was still on the board of trustees, in the rue de Téhèran. The library had yet to reopen, but its appearance had altered for the better. The brown paper pasted on the windows against bomb-shattered glass had been removed, as had the anti-fire sandbags blocking the doorways on the top floor. The US Embassy seal guaranteed that it was American property, safe in law from German seizure. Two flags, American and French, still hung over the ornate doorway. The building housed about 100,000 books, mostly in stacks at the back where desks and chairs beside French windows faced a small garden. An ornate staircase led to the periodicals reading room and the office of the directress, Miss Dorothy Reeder. On this, the countess’s first visit since her return to Paris, she found Miss Reeder at her desk. Behind the directress hung a large aerial photograph of Washington, DC, where Miss Reeder had trained and worked in the Library of Congress for six years before coming to the American Library of Paris in 1929. Miss Reeder was a popular librarian, whom the American writer Marion Dix had described to American radio listeners the previous February as ‘young, attractive and full of pep–with, at the same time, that quality of friendly but efficient leadership which has made a smoothly running machine as well as a useful organization of the library’. Dix thought the librarian had ‘a grand sense of humor, as well as good sense’.

Miss Reeder told Clara about her work for the American Embassy at the Hôtel Bristol since 14 June. For two and a half months, she had been living in the hotel and had ‘pasted U.S. seals on U.S. and British property, helped take over the British Consul General’s office and tried to console those left stranded … My job was to check to see that only American passports were admitted and to inform all others they could not live there.’ Miss Reeder was either unaware of or ignored the non-American Jews whom Anne Morgan had smuggled into the hotel for their safety. Of her employment by the embassy, she insisted, ‘This in no way interrupted or interfered in my work at the Library.’ She added that she regularly carried books from the library to the Bristol so the Americans there would have something to read. Some were too old to walk to the library, and reading filled the long curfew hours that confined the Americans to the hotel at first from 9 p.m., later relaxed to eleven and finally to midnight.