by John Baxter
Paradoxically, the occupation has left more signs in the country, particularly in areas like Charente, where the Nazis had time to put down roots. Incongruity makes such survivals stand out. A crumbling pillbox is more sinister for being surrounded by grazing cows, and a rusting metal pylon for the family of storks that has set up house on top. At the La Pallice submarine base a few kilometers outside La Rochelle, pleasure boats idle by as their owners peer into the dark from which wolf packs of U-boats once slipped out into the Atlantic. Today, the bases are maintained as locations for foreign filmmakers. Those at La Pallice were used in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Das Boot.
La Rochelle bears numerous signs of occupation. With twenty-two thousand Germans billeted in a town of only thirty-five thousand people, its cafés, theaters, and cinemas were so completely engulfed that the Germans created their own.
Nazi bunker in La Rochelle.
The strangest began life as the best hotel in town, a four-story building down a quiet side street. As was typical, the officers of the Kriegsmarine moved in, which created a tempting target for local resistants or a precision bombing raid. The officers needed something solid to protect them from bombs; a shield as thick, in fact, as that protecting the submarine pens. With Teutonic thoroughness, engineers cleared the lowest floors of the hotel and filled the rooms with concrete.
Once the bombing intensified, the basement was enlarged to accommodate a small hospital. As they spent more time there, officers demanded a bar and a space for dancing. They decorated the walls with examples of Navy humor, and a few mermaids. An air-raid shelter became the town’s hottest, indeed only, nightclub.
My guide to the bunker proudly informed me that his father, who had projected films for the Germans, also found the music they most enjoyed, scouring the city and surrounding districts for records by American big bands, in particular Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Jimmie Lunceford. As Hitler frowned on such “decadent” music, one had to be cautious about discussing titles in the hearing of the more committed servants of the Reich. “Saint Louis Blues” became “La Tristesse de Saint Louis”: “the sadness of Saint Louis.”
As the war turned against Hitler, the garrisons in La Rochelle and the nearby town of Royan were trapped in a “pocket” with their backs to the sea. The Luftwaffe air-dropped supplies and other necessities, including movies. The last production of Studio Babelsberg before Berlin fell to the Russians was the historical epic Kolberg. Goering ordered a copy parachuted into the pocket, allowing a defiant joint Berlin–La Rochelle premiere to take place on January 30, 1945. Since the film dealt with a German city’s resistance to Napoléon in 1806, when the whole population marched out against the enemy, the message was clear: La Rochelle was expected to hold out till the end.
Once I showed curiosity about the local history of the war years, word got around. Like shy animals nervous of the daylight, amateur conservators and armchair historians emerged from the shadows to show off their treasures.
“This will interest you,” one bookseller said, taking what looked like a school exercise book from his locked cabinet. “It’s a recipe book from 1943.”
I leafed through the neatly handwritten pages. Eggs, cream, ham; soufflés, roast goose, even lobster thermidor.
“They lived well,” I said. “I had no idea.”
“Oh, I don’t think the owner ever cooked these dishes. Everything was rationed. The Germans got anything good.”
“Why compile this book, then?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps . . . to remember?” He replaced it reverently. “Think of it as . . . culinary pornography.”
Fouras itself is too small to support a bookshop, but an enterprising bibliophile runs a stall in the market square. He hailed me one morning as I walked back from the halles, loaded with produce for lunch.
“I was talking to a friend in La Rochelle,” he said. From under his table, he produced a carefully wrapped book. “Is this the kind of thing you’re looking for?”
I put down the bags of cheese, peaches, and pâté. The family wouldn’t mind waiting for lunch. And if they did . . . well, even in France, history could trump appetite.
The book, in a flimsy brown paper wrapper, was called Occupation (1940–1945): Siège de La Rochelle. I’d never heard of the writer, Albert Miaux, but the fact that the book was published by an obscure press in La Rochelle suggested he wasn’t a household name. (In fact, he wrote only one book, and I was holding it. Nor was it ever circulated more widely than the La Rochelle area.)
The text was made up of poems, illustrated with smudgy drawings. From a quick glance, Miaux was no Verlaine. What made the book interesting was his subject matter: He had created a poetic history of the occupation. There were poems about the exodus from La Rochelle as the Germans approached, people clogging the roads, possessions heaped on top of ancient automobiles; the triumphant troops in gray; the huddle of people under the colonnade outside the Kommandatura as the Germans imposed their restrictions on Jews and other non-Aryans. Here were glimpses of a submarine heading back to base at La Pallice and German officers dining on the products of the black market or enjoying a film with a mostly French audience, but also the roundup of young men being shipped to Germany as forced labor. (Marie-Dominique’s father had been among them. He survived the trip, but died of tuberculosis contracted there.)
If Miaux had photographed these things or even recorded them in a diary, he would have risked imprisonment, even death, as a spy. But who would suspect an amateur poet? Poetry was like a cloak of invisibility, as the Allies knew. As D-Day approached, the British intelligence agency warned the French underground by broadcasting coded messages on the BBC. One text they used was Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne.” The Germans listened to such transmissions as “Les sanglots longs / Des violons / De l’automne / Blessent mon coeur / D’une langueur / Monotone,” thought, “Those crazy English. What are they on about now?” and shrugged it off.
Despite the urging from Berlin to hold out, the Germans in La Rochelle surrendered on May 7, 1945.
“You know,” said the curator of the bunker, “we had that Doktor Jazz down here.”
“Schultz-Köhn?” I said. “What was he doing in La Rochelle?”
“Something to do with the surrender. He didn’t make a very good impression on the Americans, I hear.”
“Why?”
“Apparently he asked if they had any Benny Goodman records.”
One of the last of Miaux’s poems celebrated the first harvest after liberation.
It’s the month when the earth rejoices in its abundance
When the hot sun brings the wheat to maturity
When the stalks are heavy with grain
And the harvesters gather them, singing.
The poem was called “Messidor.” Naturally.
46
The Pendulum Passes
Les Halles, Paris 2me. October 1929. 2 a.m. 12°C. As carts loaded with fruit and vegetables clop into the lamplight, sleepy farm boys wake, stretch, and climb down. Laborers off-load cauliflowers and potatoes and haul them to wholesalers inside the glass-and-iron pavilions. In Au Chien Qui Fume and other cafés, market people slurp onion soup next to socialites in evening dress who’ve stopped by to enjoy an early breakfast on their way home from a party.
WE WHO LIVE IN PARIS ARE USED TO LIVING BY THE WEATHER and the seasons. It’s second nature now. We notice it the way we register the clothes people wear. We may not comment on them, but it’s understood they are there to be noticed. Food also has a subliminal language. To serve the new green asparagus or the fraises des bois in the first week of their season conveys the host’s culinary credentials more succinctly than all the wine snobbery in the world.
Just as a scarf can be a fashion statement, depending on the manner in which it’s worn, the use of curtains or shutters in a room and whether they are open or closed can signify a consciousness of atmosphere and all that goes with it. The novelist Françoise Sagan was a past mistress
at such shades of meaning. The product of a wealthy family, she acquired this sense by osmosis. In her novel La Chamade, Lucile, the young mistress of wealthy businessman Charles, visits the home of Diane, an older woman rich enough to lead a life of leisure and self-gratification.
Diane’s apartment, in the Rue Cambon, looked very lovely, with fresh flowers everywhere, and even though the evening breeze was very mild and she had left the French doors open, big fires were burning in the two fireplaces, one at each end of the salon. Lucile, charmed by it all, moved about the room, alternately taking in whiffs of air from the street, already presaging the hot and dusty summer soon to come, and the smell of the flaming logs, which brought back for her the previous autumn, such a harsh one, inextricably linked in her memory with the woods in Sologne where Charles took her on hunts.
“How elegant,” said Lucile to Diane, “to have mixed two seasons in a single party.”
With air-conditioning or central heating, such subtleties of the changing seasons would be lost. Rather, Parisians prefer to meet these seasonal variations head-on. Each change comes with losses and disappointments, promises and expectations, which they interpret according to their inclinations.
Food writer Ann Mah, for example, sees the seasons in terms of food. She writes,
Fall has arrived in Paris. There is a northern wind in the air, and piles of crunchy leaves on the streets, and bushels of plums in the market to prove it. That quiche that I was making was for a picnic, one of the last of the season, and some friends and I enjoyed it on the Champ de Mars as we watched the golden late-summer day turn into a luminous evening lit by a blue moon and the sparkle of the Tour Eiffel.
You’d think that I’d be sad, what with the disappearance of peaches and nectarines, and my imminent departure from Paris, and Paul Verlaine’s gloomy refrain running through my head. But autumn has always been my favorite season, a time of new beginnings.
The art of living in France lies in adjusting to such new beginnings; even, as this writer does, relishing them for those variations of experience that make up the texture of the examined life—according to Socrates, the only one worth living.
Even before one opens one’s eyes in the morning, one knows what season it is and where one is experiencing it. There is no mistaking, for example, a summer morning in Charente. Sand, carried from the beach only a few hundred meters from the door, sifts in through closed shutters and finds its way even into bed, so that one has to brush it off the sheets. Salt is always in the air. One tastes it on one’s lips, feels it in a stickiness on the skin and the greasiness of ceramic basins and floor tiles. There can be few less inviting reminders that one is by the ocean than walking barefoot into the kitchen and stepping on a fat slug that has slithered in under the door from the garden.
In Paris, seasonal changes, particularly those of summer, are most evident in what happens in our own Parisian street. On our terrace, jasmine fills the night with its scent. The acacias come into leaf, shading the long windows that we leave open all night. Preparing dinner, I step out to clip fresh basil, parsley, mint, and thyme.
At the top of the street, tables and chairs are put out in front of the Théâtre de l’Odéon, turning the square into an outdoor café. At the same time, La Méditerranée restaurant, opposite the theater, opens its glass doors along the square, allowing its clientele to enjoy (or otherwise) the buskers performing “La Vie en rose” and the theme from The Godfather.
American novelist Irwin Shaw wrote about La Méditerranée and the theater in 1953:
You can look across the square to the Greek-styled theatre whose columns are illuminated each night by marvelously theatrical blue floodlights. Just after the Liberation, you could meet Jean Cocteau at that restaurant, and Christian Bérard, bearded and carrying a tawny, long-furred cat. You could also get a fluffy chocolate mousse there, made with American Army chocolate, whose availability was no doubt connected with the nightly presence of the smiling, well-fed American soldier at the bar who must have been a mess sergeant.
Not much has changed in sixty-five years. Both the theater and restaurant are still there—the latter, however, without a bar and the former without floodlights, which offended its neighbors in what is now the most expensive district of Paris. Jean Cocteau and Christian Bérard are still present, Bérard in the mural he painted for one of La Méditerranée’s dining rooms and Cocteau in the designs used on its marquee, linen, and china, based on a sketch he dashed off in its guest book. The American army has gone, but not the chocolate mousse, which still appears on the menu.
In many other cities, some of them even in France, La Méditerranée would long since have become a supermarket and the Théâtre de l’Odéon an ascetic performance complex in steel and glass, designed by a pupil of Jean Nouvel. That could still happen, but not, I like to think, on our watch.
Postscript
THE FOOT OF OUR STREET, RUE DE L’ODÉON, CONVERGES WITH RUE de Condé, rue Monsieur-le-Prince, and boulevard Saint-Germain to create an open space, the Carrefour (crossroads) de l’Odéon. Bars and restaurants line the square, and just around the corner on the boulevard three cinema complexes attract long queues most afternoons and nights.
When I first moved to Paris, drivers—particularly on Saturday nights—would park around the square but also in the middle, leaving almost no space for traffic to pass. In summer, cars blocked the square and even edged onto the sidewalk as families abandoned them to stroll up to the Luxembourg Gardens. Occasional raids by the pervenches (periwinkles), as traffic policewomen were called because of their blue uniforms, didn’t deter them. A few papillons (butterflies), slang for “traffic tickets,” were regarded as part of the price of city living—and besides, in August no tickets were issued, since the pervenches were on holiday like almost everyone else.
Just when it seemed the city government was helpless to solve this problem, it intervened in a manner that was decisive, original, and entirely in tune with the traditions of Paris.
One Monday morning, a truck dumped slabs of stone in the middle of the square. Workers appeared, and by lunchtime they had dug up the cobblestones laid during Paris’s reconstruction in the 1860s, exposed the subsoil, and created the beginnings of a traffic island. The next day they planted a tree, two or three meters tall and already in leaf.
By the end of the day, most of us had found a reason to walk down to the corner and stare at this addition to the neighborhood. A tree. Of course. Why hadn’t we thought of that? Had it been just a traffic island, drivers would have found a way to park on it, but a tree . . . As nobody on our street was intimate with any plant larger than a geranium, we had to look it up. It was a paulownia, specifically the Paulownia fortunei, or dragon tree, which promised to blossom with purple flowers in the spring.
The following Saturday evening, some of us contrived to be relaxing with an aperitif outside the cafés on the carrefour. We took quiet satisfaction as driver after driver swung off the boulevard in expectation of parking in his customary spot, only to halt, glare up at the tree, and, muttering to himself, drive on.
Today the paulownia, now five or six meters tall, dominates the intersection, its purple blossoms a feature of the quartier. They have inspired the hotel opposite to decorate each of its windows with a box of geraniums and greatly increased trade at local cafés and restaurants, introducing an accent of rural calm to one’s evening aperitif. During the publishers’ annual trade show, the Salon du Livre, people hang books from its branches, and on the Fête de la Musique, when amateur musicians are encouraged to exercise their creativity in public, a children’s choir performs under its shelter.
The Carrefour de l’Odéon, with paulownia tree.
Carrefour de l’Odéon.
One Sunday evening shortly after I finished writing this book, Marie-Dominique came home from having dinner with her mother showing more good humor than was usual after these often trying occasions.
“I read something at maman’s place,” she said, with th
e expression of the cat that has found the cream. “You know the carrefour?”
“Where they planted the tree?”
“Yes. Well, before they built the boulevard, that was the end of rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie. The cross street was called passage du Riche Laboureur, the Passage of the Rich Laborer.”
“And so . . . ?”
“Guess who lived at 12 rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie?”
We’d discussed the theme of this book often enough for me to see what was coming.
“Let me guess. Fabre d’Églantine?”
“Yes!”
“Well, it makes sense,” I mused, a little too unexcitedly. Marie-Dominique looked miffed, so I continued, “Danton lived just around the corner, and Desmoulins and Marat a few streets away. The Chapelle des Cordeliers is close too. But why the Rich Laborer?”
“It’s from La Fontaine. One of his fables. Maybe there was an inn there that used the name.”
Later, I looked up the story. Like most of La Fontaine’s cautionary tales, the French equivalent of Aesop’s Fables, it was in verse:
A wealthy farmer, feeling death draw nigh,
Called round his children, and, no witness by,
“Beware,” he said, “of selling the estate
Our fathers left us, purchased with their sweat;
For hidden treasure’s there.
The spot I know not; but with zeal and care