Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation Page 5

  On 14 June, Sylvia’s and Adrienne’s bookshops, like all other businesses in Paris, were closed. Sylvia’s premises enjoyed some protection. Two American diplomats, Third Secretary Tyler Thompson and her friend Keeler Faus, had personally affixed red American seals to her apartment and shop to tell the Germans they belonged to a US citizen. But Sylvia and Adrienne’s anti-Nazi past made them vulnerable to the occupier. Adrienne, as well as hiding Arthur Koestler, had assisted the brilliant German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin’s escape from Paris to the south of France. (Benjamin was hoping to obtain an American visa from the consulate in Marseilles and travel to the United States via Spain and Portugal. He made an exhausting trek over the Pyrenees, but Spanish police forced him back to Nazi-occupied France. Rather than be sent to a concentration camp, he committed suicide.) Adrienne had also written a long condemnation of Nazi anti-Semitism in her Gazette des Amis des Livres in 1938: ‘From the day the Jews were emancipated (as you know, it is one of the glories of the French Revolution that they were), they have proved that they could be national elements of the first order.’ Sylvia had sold artists’ prints in her shop to raise money for Spain’s legitimate republican government to fight the Nazi-supported Francisco Franco. She also had many Jewish friends, including an unpaid voluntary assistant at Shakespeare and Company, Françoise Bernheim.

  As the Germans occupied each arrondissement in Paris, someone told Adrienne that they were ordering everyone to remain indoors for forty-eight hours. Wehrmacht loudspeaker vans repeated this message, until it became known the curfew had been amended to begin at 9 p.m. Adrienne waited with Sylvia all morning in her apartment. At noon, they noticed civilians on the streets. In some places, Parisians were accepting gifts of food from German army trucks sent to feed the populace. In others, women flirted with soldiers. One of the better bordellos posted a notice: ‘Business as usual from 3 p.m.’ A few cafés opened to serve their first uniformed German customers, who were polite and paid for all they ate and drank. Adrienne was disgusted by a common sentiment she overheard: ‘What if the Germans are here? At least there will be order.’ She prepared lunch for Sylvia in the kitchen where for twenty years the earthy and maternal bookseller had cooked oily peasant dinners for the luminaries of French and American literature. It would be her last lunch before the Germans began requisitioning most of France’s food.

  After lunch, the husband of Adrienne’s sister Rinette, painter Paul-Emile Becat, came to the flat to see her and Sylvia. He told them he had seen ‘the procession of the first German battalions this morning at the Place de l’Etoile’. A great phalanx of helmeted Wehrmacht troops marched to a Nazi band, while the Swastika flew over the Arc de Triomphe. At this scene, Parisians had stared sullen and silent, many of them weeping. Adrienne ended her diary of the day, ‘In the evening, great depression.’ She was not alone.

  German forces seized both houses of France’s parliament, the Chamber of Deputies over the Seine from the Place de la Concorde and the Senate in the Luxembourg Gardens. They also commandeered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d’Orsay, the Naval Ministry beside the Hôtel Crillon and most other government buildings. Signs were posted in German saying they were under the ‘protection’ of the German army. Troops set up light cannon and machine guns at the main approaches to the Arc de Triomphe. They replaced French flags with Swastikas on government buildings, monuments, the arcades of the rue de Rivoli and the main hotels. Robert Murphy wrote, ‘I was amazed in those first occupation days to discover how thoroughly the Germans had prepared for every phase of military government. It became apparent that they had drafted comprehensive blueprints long in advance to suit whatever conditions they might encounter in conquered countries.’

  The only fatal incident occurred at nine in the morning, when a lone French soldier shot at German troops in the southern suburb of Antony. ‘The German soldiers responded to the firing, killing the French soldier and a woman,’ noted the Paris Prefect of Police, Roger Langeron, in his diary. No Americans were harmed.

  The Germans honoured most of the embassy certificates of American property ownership, including one that Bullitt personally issued to a French friend, Marie-Laure de Noailles. Married to an aristocrat, Marie-Laure was the daughter of a Jewish banker. Bullitt’s gesture undoubtedly saved her collection of Goyas and other masterpieces from German seizure. Nonetheless, the Nazis requisitioned two American homes near Paris in Versailles. One belonged to James Hazen Hyde, whose house was ransacked by German troops. The other was the villa of the twice-widowed Mrs James Gordon Bennett, in her youth Miss Maud Potter of Philadelphia. Her first husband had been Baron George de Reuter of the news agency his father founded. Five years after his death, she wed the eccentric, 73-year-old owner of the Paris Herald. When the Germans occupied her Versailles villa, she stayed in her Paris townhouse in the avenue d’Iéna near the American Ambassador’s residence. Other American losses were houses north of Paris belonging to Harlan Page Rowe and Ogden Bishop, both looted during the battles. The Luftwaffe bombed American oil and communications facilities on the northern French coast. Another American loss during the Battle of France was a consignment of 150,000 cigarettes for Ambassador Bullitt. The Germans did not tamper with any other embassy supplies, but a Wehrmacht colonel told French officials in the Paris customs house, ‘So these are Bullitt’s cigarettes! Well, he won’t get them. I used to live in Philadelphia and I never did like Bullitt. Take them away.’

  In the evening, Bullitt received a visit at the embassy from Police Prefect Roger Langeron. For the past weeks, the two men had come to know and respect each other. Langeron told the ambassador that the Germans had arrested and were interrogating his chief of general intelligence, Jacques Simon. This violated the assurances given that morning by General von Studnitz, who told Langeron, ‘If order is maintained, if you can guarantee the security of my troops, you won’t hear a word from me.’ Langeron asked for Bullitt’s help. The ambassador called Robert Murphy, who went immediately to the Crillon with a message from Bullitt: if Simon were not released, no one would be responsible for security in Paris. Without Langeron’s 25,000 policemen, who had remained at Bullitt’s request when the French government was planning to remove them, the occupation which had gone smoothly until evening would become a shambles. At 11 p.m., Simon appeared unharmed in Langeron’s office on the Ile de la Cité.

  THREE

  The Countess from Ohio

  THE NAZIS REQUISITIONED the best Parisian hotels–not only the Crillon, but the Ritz, Majestic, Raphael and George-V. The American Embassy beat them to the Hôtel Bristol, Ambassador Bullitt having already leased it from proprietor Hippolyte Jammet. The elegant hotel in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré was suitable as an American refuge, because its basement shelter was the only one in Paris with protection against poison gas. The hotel flew the American flag, which the Germans did not remove. One American expatriate, Isadora Duncan’s brother Raymond, made the Bristol bar his second home. The Hellenophile Duncan was easy to recognize, invariably dressed in a toga and hand-made sandals. His Left Bank art gallery, the Akademia in rue de Seine, was close enough to the Bristol for him to walk there over the river. Representatives of the American Red Cross, the Rockefeller Foundation and the American ambulance units moved into the Bristol. Anne Morgan also took up residence there, hiding foreign and French Jews under quasi-diplomatic protection until she found ways for them to leave France. Dorothy Reeder, directress of the American Library in the rue de Téhéran, went to the Bristol on the occupation’s first day to work for the embassy verifying that the residents were American citizens.

  Two days earlier, Miss Reeder had received an unexpected visit from the American Library’s first vice-president, Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun. The two women conferred in the darkness of a library whose windows were obscured in brown paper as a precaution against bombing. The rest of the library’s board were preparing to leave France altogether, but Countess de Chambrun was going that afternoon to the count
ry–imperiously informing Miss Reeder that she would return as usual in September. Miss Reeder, the countess recalled, ‘promised to remain on the spot and continue to wave the flag of neutrality. Meantime, she appeared to be getting what she termed “quite a kick” out of the position in which she was left as sole guardian of the premises, and with authority to negotiate the most delicate questions with the occupants, certain that the American Embassy would back her decisions.’ Miss Reeder herself wrote, ‘Was it really Paris whose streets I walked through the 11th, 12th and 13th of June 1940? I do not think so. It was a dead city. Everything was closed, locked and deserted. Even the fall of a pin could be heard.’

  Clara Longworth de Chambrun was reluctant to abandon Paris. Her husband’s employers, the National City Bank of New York, had a ‘theory that, should the enemy enter Paris, certain French directors might be held as hostages and endanger the interests of the establishment’. So, Count Aldebert de Chambrun, the Marquis de Mun and six French employees were ordered to move the bank south of any imaginable German penetration to Le Puy. Clara told Aldebert that he could leave Paris without her. She refused to desert their house at 58 rue de Vaugirard, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens and the Senate’s ornate Palais du Luxembourg, in the 6th Arrondissement. A few dozen yards away was the Théâtre de l’Odéon, where Clara staged plays. Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company was just around the corner. Clara was obstinate: ‘My temperamental dislike of retreating from danger when others less capable of facing it remained behind caused me to protest vigorously against this mandate [from the bank to leave].’

  Her husband reminded her that she would be alone in Paris. Aldebert himself had to be in Le Puy with the bank. Their only son, René, was in Washington on a mission from the French government at the request of Ambassador Bullitt to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt, a distant cousin by marriage, to send emergency military aid to Britain. Her husband’s brothers had also left. Pierre, who as the eldest had inherited their father’s title of Marquis de Chambrun in 1891, had gone to his country seat, the Château l’Empery-Carrières, in Lozère. As representative of Lozère in the Senate, he was the only American citizen in the upper house. With him was his wife, Clara’s cousin, Margaret Rives Nichols. Aldebert’s younger brother, Count Charles, known as Charlie and formerly French Ambassador in Rome, took refuge with relatives in Brittany. ‘My husband argued that, if I remained in Paris and saw the hideous swastika replace the tricolor, I would be cut off from everyone and everything I loved except the house itself and a little grave [of her daughter] nearby. I gave in before the inevitable and busied myself with the practical arrangements for that hated flight.’

  On 12 June, after her visit to Dorothy Reeder at the American Library, Clara met her husband for a last lunch at home. Their chauffeur having disappeared in the chaos, an American employee of the bank, Mr Hunt, drove the count, the countess with her Japanese dog, Tsouni, on her lap and the Chambruns’ house maid out of the city that afternoon. With a million other Parisians, they found themselves in a disorderly procession that disrupted military convoys heading to the front. Their car crawled southwards along National Route Seven to Juvisy. There, where the highway joined regional roads, the traffic halted.

  There were trucks, delivery wagons, military lorries and the whole running equipment of certain factories and aviation centers. Men and women were standing entwined on flatcars, careless of the fact that they could not remain erect for ever–or even at all–when running at normal speed. No question of that now; all proceeded at a footpace, and were stopped completely every three minutes. A lad on a dark brown thoroughbred pushed past our car and, on extricating himself from the mass, galloped off across country.

  Further along the road, Clara noticed people setting out picnics. One man and woman in particular caught her eye: ‘I recall the silhouettes of a distinguished-looking couple in well-cut clothes seated at a tiny folding-table which formed part of their Rolls-Royce equipment. She was dressed in printed crepe de Chine with silver fox boa; he, in impeccable grey jacket with decorations. His carefully trimmed beard recalled Leopard II.’

  Mr Hunt drove them for twenty-five hours on a journey that normally took seven. They had to sleep overnight in the car. On the second night, they reached Vichy, where the Hôtel du Parc gave Aldebert and Clara a room. They were lucky. Most of the other displaced Parisians who survived Luftwaffe strafing on the highways were sleeping rough in barns, on roadsides and in cheaper hotels and inns, several families often crowded into the same room. The rambling, white-porticoed Hôtel du Parc was the best that the spa town had to offer. Its management knew the Chambruns, who had summered there to ‘take the waters’ since 1926. Their July reservations were simply pushed forward to June. The couple took baths and settled in for their first good sleep in three days.

  At four o’clock in the morning, while the Germans were about to occupy Paris, the urgent banging of a gong woke them. The incessant racket worsened when ‘an excited servant thundered at our door, and commanded us to dress and pack without delay as all guests must be out of the hotel by five o’clock’. The military staff of General Maxime Weygand, France’s new minister of national defence, had requisitioned the hotel. ‘We argued, but to no avail,’ Countess de Chambrun recalled. The hotel servant ‘compromised by giving us a cup of coffee before the start’. Despite their age, their wealth and Aldebert’s status as a retired army general, they packed and left the hotel before dawn.

  Clara Longworth de Chambrun, a stalwart American matron of 66 years, and her American-born husband did not complain. ‘I must say for our personal honor,’ she wrote, ‘all thought of self was totally forgotten in the magnitude of national disaster. Even my little dog seemed to understand that no attention could be paid to him. Instead of balancing himself on my knees to supervise the chauffeur or admire the landscape, he crept down on the floor of the car and lay between my feet.’ They left Vichy for Le Puy, where the National City Bank had arranged lodging for its Paris staff.

  This was Clara’s third war since she left Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1901. She took it in her stride. Four years before the Battle of France, she had written, ‘By birth and education, my life–which began on October 18, 1873, was predestined to adventure, tragedy, romance and mirth.’ By the time her third war began in September 1939, she was an accomplished Shakespearean scholar and had written sixteen books, eight each in English and French. These included the memoir of her life to 1935, Shadows Like Myself, and The Making of Nicholas Longworth, a biography of her brother. Nicholas Longworth III had been a Republican congressman from Cincinnati and was twice Speaker of the House of Representatives. His marriage to President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, at the White House was the American social event of 1906. Born into a rich and respected Cincinnati pioneer family, Clara Eleanor Longworth was, by her own admission, no beauty. ‘Why should any man wish to marry a woman who is not extremely beautiful?’ she asked in her first memoir. Clara nonetheless had bountiful chestnut hair that she tied back to reveal a striking face that exuded patrician self-confidence. Her fiercely independent, intellectual temperament had probably made her unsuitable to the Ohio boys who congregated at her family’s mansion on Grandin Road. In 1895, her cousin, Margaret Rives Nichols, married a French aristocrat, Pierre de Chambrun. Clara met his younger brother, Count Aldebert, at the same time.

  Although the Chambrun brothers had an impeccably French pedigree, they were American twice-over. Aldebert and Charles had been born in Washington, DC, where their father, Adolphe de Chambrun, served as legal counsel to the French Embassy during the administrations of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. The Marquis de Chambrun’s Washington memoir, Impressions of Lincoln and the Civil War, recounted his friendship with President and Mrs Lincoln, who invited him to join them at Ford’s Theatre on the night Lincoln would be assassinated. The Chambruns were direct descendants of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of American independence and loyal friend of George Washington. Under a
n April 1788 act of the Maryland legislature, all of Lafayette’s male heirs were automatically citizens of the state and, thus, of the United States. Aldebert’s favourite sport, dating to his Washington boyhood, was baseball. Clara said that Aldebert ‘never considered the United States, where he was born and passed his early school-boy days, as foreign soil’. She also thought that he looked at moral problems ‘from a more American point of view’ than she did. Their differences were many: ‘Like all his family, he upholds a woman’s right to vote; I am firmly and temperamentally against it … His ultrahumanitarian views condemn the practice of capital punishment while my baser and more practical mind considers that in our present imperfect state of civilization it is a necessary evil.’ They wed in 1901, a Cincinnati ceremony presided over by the Episcopal Archbishop of St Paul for the Longworths and the Catholic Archbishop of Ohio for the Chambruns. Aged 27, she was not a young bride for her generation. Aldebert, born in Washington on 23 July 1872, was a year older.

  Clara moved with Aldebert to France and tackled French life with the determination that her late eighteenth-century forebears brought to settling the Ohio frontier. She perfected her French, took a doctorate at the Sorbonne and became a figure in the conservative world of the French aristocracy. The couple had a son, René, whose godfather was President William Howard Taft; and a daughter, Suzanne, who died of an accidental electrocution in Paris at the age of 19. In 1910, Aldebert was dispatched to Washington as French military attaché and became with Clara part of what the press called President Taft’s ‘golf cabinet’. Taft, a jovial and rotund Ohio Republican who had been governor of the Philippines and vice-president under Theodore Roosevelt, called Aldebert ‘Bertie’. The Longworth and Taft families had been friends in Cincinnati, where Taft had taught her brother Nicholas at law school. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt challenged Taft, his former protégé, for the presidency, splitting the Republican vote and handing the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The Longworths and Chambruns, almost alone in Washington, remained close to both the Roosevelt and the Taft families.