Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (23 page)

Charles Bedaux left Paris again, with German permission, for The Hague to apply for a Dutch patent on a new method of analysing industrial productivity. At this time, according to Bedaux’s biographer Jim Christy, a Bedaux engineer named Gartner colluded with the Germans and Albert Ramond, who had replaced Bedaux as director of his American companies in 1937, to deprive Bedaux of his Netherlands interests. The Germans seized the Bedaux companies’ global headquarters in Amsterdam as ‘enemy’ property. When Bedaux heard of the confiscation a few days later in Paris, he informed the Nazis that, as an American, he was not an enemy of the Reich but a neutral. The Germans kept the headquarters anyway, declaring it ‘alien’ property, also subject to confiscation.

 

Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier had a few compensations for the hardships of life under the Germans. One was a reading by Paul Valéry of his unfinished masterpiece, ‘
Mon Faust (Ebauches)
’, ‘My Faust (Sketches)’ in the rue de l’Odéon. ‘With unconcealed pride,’ Adrienne Monnier wrote, ‘I shall say here that the poet gave a reading of it to us–to Sylvia, my sister Marie, and myself, in September 1940; I shall even say our own ears were the first to hear it’. Valéry’s words and voice captivated the women. Adrienne observed that Lust, ‘the feminine character of the play’, was ‘an ingenuous intellectual. She is a spirited, a lively spirited girl, very free with her master … There are many girls and women like Lust, there are many of them in France. This capacity for being smitten with genius and loving to serve it is certainly a trait of the women of our country, even if the genius inhabits an ugly or aged being’. She may have meant herself in relation to Valéry or, equally, Sylvia to James Joyce.

Sylvia was increasingly distraught for the Joyce family, who had been delayed for months without visas on the Swiss border in Haute Savoie. Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, was mentally disturbed, and he placed her in a French asylum. Sylvia had dedicated much of her adult life to Joyce as his publisher, secretary and factotum, but she could not help him now. Nor could she do anything for her aged father in California. She relayed assistance from her old friend, Carlotta Welles Briggs, to people in Paris. Carlotta sent her a cheque for 2,000 francs in October 1940: 600 for Sylvia to give to ‘old Rose’, whose pension had not been paid; and another six hundred for ‘Rigollet’, an old man who lived in the alley behind Carlotta’s flat in Paris. (She told Sylvia to keep the remaining 800 francs for herself, one instance among many in which Carlotta aided her impoverished childhood friend.) Carlotta wrote to Sylvia from California on 2 November asking her to visit an Armenian woman named Mme Barseghian at 22 avenue Paul Appell near Montparnasse. Mme Barseghian was losing her eyesight, and her only son was in the army. ‘In case she is still there a little call from you would cheer her up no end. Give her my love in case you find her.’

On 13 November, Holly Beach Dennis wrote to Sylvia, who was then taking a break at Carlotta’s house, La Salle du Roc, near Bourré. Because she had not received any reply to her recent letters, she wondered whether Sylvia was receiving her mail. Postal services between the United States and France were slow and unreliable. All letters were subject to German censorship in France and to British censorship en route through Bermuda. ‘I told you,’ Holly wrote, ‘that Father’s mind being somewhat bewildered, due to age, Cyprian has put him in an attractive “Rest Home” on Rosemead Boulevard, near Pasadena, where he is well taken care of … Father is such a wonderful person and I believe he is as happy now in his imaginings as he was when his mind was quite clear.’ Holly, meanwhile, had moved with her husband, Frederic Dennis, and their adopted son, Freddie, back to Princeton. Sylvester, blind, deaf and senile, received visits from Carlotta Welles Briggs and his daughter Cyprian, both of whom lived nearby. Cyprian wrote to her sister in Paris, ‘The greatest blessing is that he has forgotten there is a war in Europe, and thinks of you only as you were before.’ By the time Sylvia read the letters that told her of Sylvester’s confinement, he was dead. Cyprian wrote again, just after their father died on 16 November, to assure Sylvia that he lived ‘happily till the very end, and that end couldn’t have been more merciful’.

 

The injured French soldier André Guillon had been in the American Hospital for two months, when a new patient moved into his room. Captain A., an Alsatian prisoner of war with two wounds in his leg, had been a German language instructor at the French military academy, Saint-Cyr. To pass the time, Guillon studied German under his tutelage.

During the winter, Guillon had little chance of taking sun therapy, but he walked along the corridors and outside to the terrace to strengthen his legs. At five o’clock one evening, ‘I found myself on the terrace admiring the dome of Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre, twinkling in the rays of the setting sun, and I dreamed of mosques in African lands.’ He encountered a new arrival at the hospital, a Royal Air Force pilot whose plane had been shot down over France. The British officer had lost the sight in both eyes. ‘Blind, he wandered slowly in his blue, slate-grey uniform along the paths of the hospital without saying a word.’ Soon, the officer was gone.

The officer’s escape in an American ambulance revealed the extent to which other hospital employees were aiding Sumner Jackson in the Resistance. They did this despite the ever-present prospect of torture and the firing squad.

Another gravely wounded French soldier told Guillon that, in addition to his war injuries, he had gonorrhoea. ‘The American doctor who took care of him with sulfa drugs at a very high dosage, trying the lot on everything, accomplished an exploit in healing. We learned that three weeks after he left the hospital, he was in London.’ The American doctor was undoubtedly the hospital’s genito-urinary specialist, Sumner Jackson.

On Friday, 11 October, General of the Army Charles Huntziger, who had signed the Armistice for France in June and was now minister of war at Vichy, presented the hospital with the Order of Merit and the Croix de Guerre for services to the wounded during the Battle of France. Sumner Jackson, Elisabeth Comte and Edward Close were cited by name. ‘Operating by day and by night,’ the citation read, ‘the hospital took care of an almost interminable number of wounded and undoubtedly saved a great number of lives. In direct contact with the enemy, and working in an enemy-occupied zone, the hospital continued with unflagging dedication not only to care for the wounded but also to bring aid to the prisoners.’ General Huntziger and his wife stayed for lunch, and the patients were given champagne for the occasion.

Lunch, dinner and walks broke up André Guillon’s otherwise tedious days. After six o’clock, there was nothing to do. He read books, including three that the hospital’s American staff recommended for him to understand their country:
Gone with the Wind
,
Babbitt
and a treatise on the American economy by French academic and now head of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Bernard Fay. ‘I read them,’ Guillon wrote. ‘I don’t know if I know the United States any better.’ He played chess and poker with the other soldiers. Occasionally, there was entertainment. An actor named Victor Boucher and the singer Marianne Oswald, who reminded him of Edith Piaf, came to the hospital. Miss Thierry, a nurse of French ancestry from Boston, gave them a violin concert in the library. ‘She had the grace to visit every room afterwards to play a little for those who were too injured to get up and join the rest of us at the concert. Neutral? The Americans? Oh, no. “Miss Thierry’s gesture shows us better”.’

At the end of November, the French patients celebrated the birthday of one of their comrades: ‘He was alone. He had lost his wife in the bombardment, and he was in bed with two broken legs. We obtained from outside a cake and a bottle of champagne. And we met in his room at seven o’clock.’ As they began the party, they were joined by a young Russian nurse whom Guillon referred to as Mademoiselle S. (She was probably a surgical nurse named Mlle Svetchine.) After finishing the cake and champagne, they played poker. By midnight, Mlle S. had lost all her money. One of the wounded soldiers suggested a way for her to win it back. ‘You undress,’ he said. ‘With each article of clothing you take off, we’ll place a bet for you.’ She lost hand after hand. By twelve-thirty, she had no clothes left. Guillon thought the girl was perhaps not as used to champagne as the Frenchmen were, because she accepted their suggestion to go back to her room nude as she was. ‘There was obviously a “black-out”, and Mademoiselle S. lived only two hundred metres from the hospital and at that hour she wouldn’t come across anyone.’ She ran home through the dark without a stitch or a mishap.

The hospital attracted medical staff with no obvious medical expertise. One of these was Mademoiselle D. ‘A very beautiful girl,’ Guillon thought, ‘she nonetheless did not win our sympathy because we were wounded and she certainly knew absolutely nothing about the nursing profession.’ Three weeks later, Guillon read in the German-sponsored Paris press a communiqué from the
Feldkommandatur
of Grossparis that a young American woman, who turned out to be Mademoiselle D., had been expelled for abusing her privileges on ‘neutral territory’. Guillon took this to mean she was ‘conducting anti-German activities’. Mademoiselle D. was probably Elizabeth Deegan, a clerk in the American Embassy who was arrested by the Germans on 1 December. Because the US Consulate was representing British interests in France, Elizabeth Deegan had visited British prisoners at the German prison in the rue du Cherche Midi and at the American Hospital. The Nazis held and questioned her at Cherche Midi. Before the Germans finally allowed her to be deported under pressure from the State Department, the Paris press alleged that her crime was ‘conniving at the escape of British officers’.

IN PARIS, CHARLES BEDAUX became more closely involved with Otto Abetz and Pierre Laval over what
Time
magazine would call ‘the affair of the dead eaglet’. On 12 December, Abetz delivered Laval an invitation for Maréchal Pétain. Adolf Hitler was asking Pétain to join him in a ceremony to inter the ashes of Napoleon’s son, the Duke of Reichstadt, in his father’s crypt in the Hôpital des Invalides. Simultaneously, the Germans issued an official announcement of the Führer’s gift to France.
L’Aiglon
, or ‘the little eagle’, as the French affectionately called the younger Bonaparte, had been buried in Vienna’s Capuchin church at his death in 1832. Hitler himself would accompany the remains on the train to Paris in two days, the hundredth anniversary of the return of Napoleon’s body from St Helena. The Germans intended their public relations extravaganza to demonstrate the benefits of collaboration. The return of the little eagle’s remains drew Charles Bedaux into a political web whose strands led from Berlin to Vichy and Paris for control of France.

Laval warned Abetz that Pétain’s age and the December weather might prevent his attendance, but he called Vichy anyway to urge the Maréchal to accept. An official there declined on Pétain’s behalf, so Laval drove early the next morning to Vichy with his daughter Josée to invite him in person. Josée Laval de Chambrun, who had just left her husband, Comte René de Chambrun, in the United States, noted ominously in her diary that the day was Friday the thirteenth. Laval claimed that Pétain met him that afternoon and agreed to attend the interment service in Paris. At five o’clock, Laval presided at a short meeting of the cabinet in the Hôtel du Parc. Afterwards, someone informed him that the cabinet would meet again at eight o’clock. ‘I had scarcely entered the Council Room when the Marshal came in … He said, “I wish each minister to hand in his resignation.”’ When they obeyed, Pétain accepted the resignations of only Laval and one other minister. Laval argued with Pétain. Pétain accused Laval of not pressing the Germans to allow him to move the government from Vichy to the Paris suburb of Versailles, traditional seat of French kings. (The Pétain government was responsible for police, roads and the rest of the civil infrastructure in both the Occupied and Free Zones. It also commanded the colonies, which at the time comprised 10 per cent of the world’s landmass. Vichy had begun as a temporary capital that Pétain longed to leave.) When Laval denied keeping Pétain from Versailles, the Maréchal walked out.

A special unit of Vichy police, the
Groupe de Protection
, arrested Laval and took him to his modest chateau at Châteldon, 13 miles from Vichy. Fifty policemen held him, his wife and daughter under house arrest. At the Hôtel du Parc that evening, Fernand de Brinon tried to leave his room. But a policeman pointed a revolver at him and ordered him back inside. At Châteldon, police cut Laval’s telephone line.

Vichy’s 13 December coup d’état amused Charles de Gaulle in London. The Free French leader dismissed it as ‘a palace revolution that expelled the Grand Vizier’. Washington accepted the result quietly, but with satisfaction.