by Paul Kix
He needed a phone book, so he could find the hotel, but didn’t see any telephone booths around; the Yonne remained an agrarian and somewhat antiquated department in the 1940s. Up ahead, however, he saw a grocery store with its lights still on.
The clerk at the front paid him little mind when he walked in. La Rochefoucauld asked for a phone book and the grocer pointed to the back of the store. Robert flipped through the pages until he found the address—then realized that, while he could walk to the hotel, it might be more discreet to place a call and get a sense for the owner. If he suspected that the man was in fact a résistant, he could ask to meet him. If the call went poorly, however, La Rochefoucauld could hang up without disclosing his location. He dialed the number.
The employee who answered said the owner had gone home for the night. Should a message be left for him? “It was hard to explain to the person on the other side why I needed to talk to him,” Robert later remarked. He said there was no message and hung up.
One option was to return to the woods—but he was hungry and thirsty and exhausted. Besides, even if he spent the night there, he would still have to walk back into Auxerre tomorrow and get to the hotelier during the day, during business hours. That wouldn’t work.
He stared hard at the grocer at the front of the store. What if . . . ?
Robert’s relative, François de La Rochefoucauld, wrote in his acclaimed book of Maxims that “one cannot answer for his courage if he has never been in danger,” and perhaps nothing—not fleeing to Spain or training in England or bombing a power grid or escaping the firing squad—was more dangerous than what he considered doing now. In those other instances Robert had placed his life in his own hands. Now he thought about placing it entirely in someone else’s. What if I asked this stranger for help?
The grocery store was closing and La Rochefoucauld watched the other customers pay and leave. He debated his move. He was twenty years old and had already been denounced twice by his countrymen. Then again, those same countrymen had helped him flee to England and sabotage German war materiel.
The store’s last patron walked out the door.
La Rochefoucauld moved with purpose to the front.
He put his hands on the man’s shoulders. “Are you a good Frenchman?” he asked.
The grocer stared at him, baffled, and a little angry. “Of course I’m a good Frenchman,” he barked.
La Rochefoucauld took in a sharp breath.
“I escaped,” he said. “And I’m being chased by the Germans.”
The man looked at him, his eyes widening. “Well, I’ll be,” he said, and then with curiosity: “So it was because of you that there’s all that nonsense in the city since this morning?”
La Rochefoucauld gave the man a slight nod.
“You can trust me,” the grocer said, his face suddenly sincere. “You’re at home here.”
Robert exhaled.
His name was Monsieur Séguinot. He closed up shop and took La Rochefoucauld to his nearby house, where Robert met Madame Séguinot, who hugged and welcomed him as one of her own and began preparing the résistant a plate of food. She “served me a meal big enough to choke on,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. She told him that if the Germans came, he could escape through a door at the back of the house. When he finished eating, Madame Séguinot said she had no room for him other than a bed that her paralytic father occupied. Robert, grateful for anything, soon climbed in, the old man neither moving nor uttering a word. “I fell asleep, exhausted, as if I had been sleep-deprived for several months,” La Rochefoucauld said.
The next morning, he faced a troubling reality. He knew he was endangering the Séguinots by staying, but he also knew he risked his own life by being out in public. He had to find a Resistance member who could get him out of the Yonne. The Alliance had been decimated months ago, and even if he found an old comrade, he wouldn’t know if he could trust the man, given the double agents in France. La Rochefoucauld explained to the couple about the care packages, and about his suspicion of the hotel owner’s secret life. He didn’t want to risk placing a phone call in the grocery store during the day, so Robert asked Séguinot a difficult question: Would he talk to the hotelier? Séguinot agreed to do it.
That evening, Monsieur Séguinot asked La Rochefoucauld to come to the back room of the store. So Robert walked into the night, onto a street where he had the familiar sensation of thousands of eyes following him, and then quickly into Séguinot’s grocery. There, in the back, he saw the hotel owner, his round cheeks bunching themselves again into a smile. The man moved toward La Rochefoucauld and gave him a hearty embrace. He said his name was André Bouy and Robert had been right about him: He came with clothes and a plan for escape.
It would not be easy. La Rochefoucauld’s face was plastered on posters throughout Auxerre. So Bouy said the first thing to do was nothing at all, to wait a day or two until the fury to find La Rochefoucauld dissipated. But Bouy would check in with him, and he would shepherd Robert to safety.
Bouy was thirty-eight that spring, a short but powerfully built man who encountered the world with an arched eyebrow and that warm smile, which served him well in his chosen field. His parents had owned the Hôtel de la Fontaine since 1925, a three-story, fifty-room neoclassical beauty on Place Charles Lepère in Auxerre. Bouy had been a curious boy and voracious reader but found the life around him the most fascinating of all. After high school, he earned a business degree from the École supérieure de commerce, in Paris. He spent the last of the Roaring Twenties working in big hotels around the city, before moving back to Auxerre. By the outbreak of World War II, the family business was effectively his.
But he didn’t want it alone to define him. He enlisted in the army, something no Bouy had done before, his patriotism fueled by the military histories he’d read and the love of a country that had allowed him to thrive.
France’s quick defeat ashamed him, angered him, and he vowed to fight on, even as he returned to his hotel and found German officers billeted there. The businessman in him catered to them; throughout the war, various Nazi officials frequented his establishment, dining there, sleeping there, reserving the banquet room and celebrating there, drinking and shouting and stomping their big heavy boots well into the morning. The patriot in him abhorred this, but he never let it show. Instead, he and a few friends—an attorney, a bailiff, and a farmer—joined an underground group and spent their evenings and off-hours shuttling parachutists to Resistance camps and hiding weapons in nearby gardens. The hotel, even with the Germans there, became a meeting point for Bouy and his close friends to discuss which résistant needed transport, which one a shipment of arms, and which a care package, like the ones Robert received while in prison. The Germans knew Bouy and soon all his respectable friends, and the Nazis suspected little while mingling in the lobby or walking to the restaurant for a meal. Why should they? Only a fool would plan such operations from a German-occupied hotel, and Bouy was no fool. His food was quite good and he and his staff were always hospitable to the Nazis. He even spoke a little German.
Bouy cultivated this image, the obeisant businessman, because it kept his wife and three children safe. He never stocked his hotel with anything but German-censored newspapers, never flipped on anything but Vichy-approved radio, never even told his wife all he was doing. He tried to be absolutely discreet. But discretion was not the same as inaction, and talking about rebel missions in hushed and coded phrases did not protect him from the fear of repercussions, even if he was clever enough to carry out those conversations in the one place Germans would not suspect. As the “terrorist acts” spiked in the Yonne—sixty in one month in 1943—Bouy watched the prison fill, the Germans ever more suspicious, and their anonymous French conspirators affirming that paranoia with each new denouncement. Bouy had long thought there was safety in transparency: That if he delivered a care package to the B wing with a German officer at his side, his true intent would remain hidden. But by 1944, with the war worsening and the p
rison rolls adding more and more names, he questioned his cleverness. One day he told his wife everything. He feared reprisals, he said, and wanted her and the kids to move to Valençay, in the Loire Valley, where Bouy thought they would be safer. Françoise Bouy, ten at the time and the oldest of the children, only remembered her parents telling her that she and her younger brothers, Jean Pierre and Claude, were moving with their mother, until the war was over. No one explained why they needed to go to Valençay, nor why their father would remain behind.
After their departure, André Bouy did not cease his involvement with the underground. If anything, he acted more boldly.
After meeting La Rochefoucauld, he took Robert’s existing identification papers and in a day had a new false set for the young man, made out once more under his pseudonym of choice, René Lallier, since the Auxerre prison staff knew him by his given name, La Rochefoucauld. Bouy then finalized his plan to get him out of the Yonne.
Three days later, the hotelier pulled his vehicle up to the Séguinots’ house. Bouy had been given an Ausweis, a travel permit the Germans approved for certain Frenchmen in good standing, which allowed collaborators or small businessmen to travel beyond their towns, a practice that the Germans otherwise forbade the populace in 1944. Bouy had gained the Ausweis for legitimate reasons: He really did need to pick up food and supplies for the hotel. But he had never attempted anything like what he was about to do. In fact, for all Bouy’s secret meetings, for all the weapons he buried in gardens, this would be the most valiant act of his war: transporting a man the Nazis had condemned to death in a vehicle they approved for travel. Bouy likely told no one about the mission, and he entrusted only himself with La Rochefoucauld’s passage because he alone wanted to be punished if he were found out.
The plan was simple enough. Bouy would hide Robert in the truck and take him to the nearby town of Monéteau, where he’d purchase a train ticket that would get La Rochefoucauld to Paris. The difficulty lay in the military checkpoints. The truck was almost certain to be stopped outside Auxerre by the gendarmerie, the French military police who since the Occupation worked alongside the Germans. Sometimes officers checked vehicles thoroughly, and Bouy’s truck ran that risk because of both its size and the news of an inmate’s recent escape. He and Robert could do nothing to evade a search.
They could only hide him well. Bouy explained that he grazed sheep outside Auxerre and often loaded his truck with bales of hay for them. La Rochefoucauld would hide behind these bales in the truck’s covered bed. If they were stopped and any officer asked, Bouy would have a ready-made and quite legitimate answer: The hay is for the sheep I graze, monsieur. The only problem, the biggest problem, lay in police pulling down the bales.
If they made it to Monéteau, Bouy would park at the train station, walk inside to buy a ticket, and make sure he saw no German soldiers or French policemen on the platform. When the train came, he’d race back to the truck, and send La Rochefoucauld on his way, with his new clothes, false ID papers, and rail ticket.
Robert listened to the plan and nodded, grateful. He had washed himself, trimmed his beard, and treated his wounds, so, if he got that far, he would look like any other passenger on the train. He turned to the Séguinots and began the elaborate process of expressing a gratitude that could not be stated. Then he left with Bouy.
He slid into the back of the truck, situating himself between bales of hay that Bouy stacked around him and over him. The hotelier closed the truck’s rear door and La Rochefoucauld’s world turned dark. He heard the engine fire and now the hum of tires on the road beneath them. Monéteau was roughly five miles away.
La Rochefoucauld could not quell his nerves, and he and Bouy were barely on the road a minute when he felt the truck slow, and then stop, and then heard a voice: “Papers!”
Everything slowed down.
“Here you are, sir—my Ausweis,” he heard Bouy answer, in an attempt at nonchalance.
More time passed and then: “Where are you going?”
“To feed my sheep for my hotel. I own the Hôtel de la Fontaine in Auxerre.”
“The Hôtel de la Fontaine is very good,” the officer said. Another silence, this one somehow longer. Was the exchange over?
No. La Rochefoucauld now heard the officer move to the back of the truck, linger there for a moment, and then open the rear door.
Fear shot through him.
The officer took his bayonet and thrust it through a bale, missing La Rochefoucauld by inches. He dared not move or breathe. The officer pulled his blade out.
A moment later he closed the door. “Go on,” the officer called out, lazily.
Bouy tried not to speed away too quickly.
Minutes later, he parked at the train station and told La Rochefoucauld they’d arrived. He left to buy a ticket. When he returned, he said the train was coming and he saw no Germans or cops on the platform. Bouy had purchased a third-class ticket for La Rochefoucauld, not to be cheap, he said, but because a third-class car was often the most crowded.
La Rochefoucauld eyed the hotelier with his round smiling cheeks and thanked him. Bouy told him to go; the train was here.
Robert ran off and, at the platform, mixed in with other travelers, lines of them shuffling closer to the open train door, until an attendant stamped La Rochefoucauld’s ticket. He got on.
Masses crowded onto the third-class car, and La Rochefoucauld squeezed his slight frame into one of the few remaining seats, next to a traveling businessman. Robert kept glancing out the window. He waited, but the train would not move. He tried to will it forward, this close to freedom.
When it at last lurched ahead, he exhaled. He watched the trees blur by his window.
But then the train reached the next stop, Laroche-Migennes, some ten miles on, and Robert saw clusters of German soldiers and policemen on the platform. He asked the man next to him: Why such a show of force?
The man didn’t know, but said it had been like this for three days.
Three days?
Fear seized him again. He had his fake ID, his beard, and a pair of eyeglasses that helped mask his appearance, but what if any of the officers had seen the posters plastered throughout Auxerre and saw the resemblance when they looked at La Rochefoucauld?
He quietly excused himself from his seat and strode down the walkway. Already soldiers had filed on, one of them on either end of his car checking passengers’ papers. In the middle of the carriage, however, stood a bathroom. The older, cheaper cars still had a restroom positioned in their center, and La Rochefoucauld moved toward it as quickly and inconspicuously as possible.
The restroom’s dimensions were small, a toilet ahead of him and the sink behind the bathroom’s opened door. La Rochefoucauld decided to crouch down and settle himself beneath the sink. He then quickly pushed the door closed. Any officer who opened it would see only an unoccupied toilet. But if the German then walked into the restroom and peeked behind the door to the sink, well, then La Rochefoucauld would face another death sentence.
Cold droplets of sweat poured down his face. Anticipating what might happen next—not even on the day of his execution had he been this scared.
Suddenly a Nazi shoved the door open. La Rochefoucauld braced himself for what might—what must?—come. He heard the man step into the bathroom, the door separating the two men by inches. And then . . . La Rochefoucauld saw the door close again.
He tried not to shudder.
Minutes passed and the train still did not move. Why was it taking so long? Would the Germans still be there when La Rochefoucauld stepped out of the bathroom? Should he step out of the bathroom?
At last the train started, and he decided to face whatever appeared on the other side of the door. He washed his cheeks and forehead to compose himself and walked out.
He saw . . . nothing. No Germans in his railcar. No Germans on the train. He had somehow eluded them again.
Three hours later the train arrived at Gare de Lyon. When he reached the P
aris streets, Robert started giggling, “drunk with freedom,” he wrote. “I started to shout, to roar with laughter.” People stared at him but he didn’t care. “I was as happy as a king and singing like one too.”
CHAPTER 13
It had been eighteen months since he’d last been in Paris, and the city was stranger now. He noticed the change even in his giddy state. People looked . . . thin, as thin as the prisoners he’d lived among. Four years of rationing, of subsisting on a 1,300-calorie diet, of children told by the government to forage for acorns, had all affected the populace. La Rochefoucauld’s emaciated features didn’t look out of place in Paris, a city that didn’t have the tillable soil of the agrarian departments and didn’t have the more abundant—if unsanctioned—meals of the countryside either. And yet, in other ways, the capital remained rather remarkably its prewar self. The heavy bombing campaigns suffered by London and Warsaw had never reached the City of Light. “Paris was arguably the safest place in Europe,” one historian later noted, in part because the major manufacturing bases the Allies might target—specifically Dunlop, Renault, and Citroën, which were in fact bombed in 1943—lay in either the outer reaches of the city or the suburbs. Furthermore, the German military officers who’d clustered in Paris at the start of the war and remained there now, administering the state, had forced Resistance groups to the provinces. Sabotages and other “terrorist acts” occurred with far greater frequency in central and southern France. Saboteurs still found ways to damage the German war machine in Paris, but it looked more like 1938 here—if one ignored the swastikas.
Robert headed to the other side of the city, a young man out of the Yonne but not out of danger, with little money and a chilly night settling in. He walked to the eighth arrondissement, on the right bank of the Seine, where on rue Paul-Baudry, a few blocks from the Arc de Triomphe, lived an aunt and uncle of his. Monsieur and Madame Gotz did not have children and had once already taken Robert as their surrogate: During his student days in Paris, at the start of the war, he often stayed with the Gotzes. He endangered their lives by knocking now, but he knew nowhere else to go.