The Hotel on Place Vendome

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  She told Elminger that she would return that evening with her luggage and, pleased with the world, sauntered across the lobby from the Place Vendôme side of the building to the rue Cambon exit—through that singular corridor that Marie-Louise Ritz had constructed in 1909 to expand the palace hotel. Decorated with glass cabinets displaying the finest Parisian luxuries, everyone called it the “lane of enchantment.” After years of wartime rationing and shortages, all those luxuries were a heady experience.

  Mary strolled east along the rue de Faubourg St. Honoré toward the avenue Matignon and the Champs-Élysées to visit more couture houses that afternoon. Everywhere on the streets, people were heading toward the boulevard, and the Champs-Élysées was a “moving mass of people,” she remembered. Charles de Gaulle was arriving at any moment, and she also wanted to witness the parade that was soon beginning.

  As General de Gaulle led the military procession through the central avenue of Paris, crowds lined the streets for miles, and historian after historian has only ever had one thing to say about that moment: August 26, 1944, in Paris was the world’s greatest party. Over and over, the same scene was played out: crowds cheering, throwing flowers at the tanks as they rolled past and blowing kisses.

  Henry Woodrum, hailed as one of the few downed Allied airmen ever to “walk out” of occupied Paris, was there to enjoy it all with the French family who had hidden him from the Gestapo. He had received Hemingway’s invitation to come to the Hôtel Ritz to meet the famous author for a cocktail. He never made it. He was having too much fun being feted—and was enjoying freedom with his friends too much—to care about a drink at the rue Cambon, even with one of the century’s most famous writers.

  The parade route wound its way at last to the Île de la Cité, poised in the middle of the Seine. There, at the geographical heart of France, the Cathedral of Notre Dame rang out bells of celebration, and as the military moved away, thousands gathered around to attend a “Te Deum” mass of thanksgiving. The VIPs and the press found seats within the gray cool of the building, but the service spilled out into the forecourt for the civilian population of Paris.

  Helen Kirkpatrick had already taken up position and reported what happened next for the Chicago Daily News in her dispatch. Just at the moment of the general’s arrival, a revolver shot rang out. “It seemed to come from behind one of Notre Dame’s gargoyles. Within a split second a machine gun opened from a nearby room. It sprayed the pavement at my feet,” she told her readers. “For one flashing instant it seemed that a great massacre was bound to take place as the cathedral reverberated with the sound of guns.” Then a group of war widows suddenly burst into the “Te Deum.”

  The sound of gunshots rang out up and down the river at that instant. Helen learned later that it had been a coordinated attack on Notre Dame, the Hôtel de Ville, the Tuileries, the Arc de Triomphe, and along the Champs-Élysées simultaneously.

  As the parade passed the Hôtel de Crillon on the Champs-Élysées end of the parade route, Jean Cocteau was once again watching from what he thought was a safe distance, this time from an upstairs window. He nearly didn’t live to tell the story despite his studious precautions. Gunfire broke out between someone in the crowd and insurgents on the rooftops, and one rifleman decided Cocteau was an enemy sharpshooter. He narrowly missed being shot down as a sniper. The bullet whizzed past him, knocking the cigarette out of his mouth and convincing him that he might be better off watching from a less lofty vantage point.

  “It was,” Helen was certain afterward, “a clearly planned attempt probably designed to kill as many of the French authorities as possible, to create panic and to start riots after which probably the mad brains of the militia, instigated by the Germans, hoped to retake Paris.”

  While inside the Cathedral of Notre Dame the generals and the worshippers had been astonishingly calm in the face of sniper fire, the scene outside on the public square was panic.

  Robert Capa was there among the crowds, covering the parade as a photojournalist, and he followed Charles de Gaulle as the general had walked from the Arc de Triomphe to the Notre Dame cathedral. When the sound of gunfire cracked through the clear blue skies that afternoon, thousands of French civilians fell to their knees along the square, ducking from the gunfire. Amid the crowd, “A beautiful, lone woman wearing sunglasses, utterly fearless, stood tall, too proud to cower any more,” and Capa captured the shot with his camera. It would become yet another of the haunting images of what it meant to be Parisian after the occupation.

  Mary Welsh was there inside the Cathedral of Notre Dame, too. Her press badge got her inside for a seat at the service. She heard a few shots ring out. Her mind on other things, Mary dismissed them as accidental. She made her way unconcerned back to the Hôtel Ritz, where she had a dinner date with Papa. The only trouble was, by then she was once again exhausted.

  As Mary staggered up the steps of the Ritz’s grand entrance, dusk was settling over Paris, and she found Hemingway waiting for her alone in the half-light. He had made plans to take her to a nice place over on the Left Bank, part of a little party he had organized.

  She wanted to go to bed, she protested. “Have a little of this nourishing champagne,” Papa urged, and told her that he had a surprise for her: “Pelkey got your stuff from that hotel. It’s here.” Convinced there was no getting around the wishes of a determined Ernest Hemingway, she went along with him resignedly.

  On their way home, just before midnight, came the sounds of the air raid sirens, as the German Luftwaffe flew over the city in a last vindictive attack on the city. Once again, Paris was plunged into darkness. A large working-class suburb in the northeastern corner of the city was heavily damaged that night. But when Mary Welsh and Ernest Hemingway walked up the steps to the Hôtel Ritz, the Place Vendôme had escaped, unscathed as always. There was only the sleepy night watchman on duty to welcome them. There in Papa’s room, Mary quickly stripped down to just her underwear.

  To Ernest’s disappointment, Mary settled down enticingly—and then fell asleep in an instant.

  In the morning, Mary cracked her eyes in the sunlight streaming in from the broad French windows. Papa was uncorking a bottle of champagne. Only then did she notice that the bed across from her was covered with Garand M-1 army rifles, hand grenades, and other ammunition.

  You snore, Hemingway told her bluntly and cheerfully. “You snore beautifully.” In the corner of the room, one of the soldiers was brewing coffee on a camp stove.

  13

  The Last Trains from Paris

  Studio with paintings by Pablo Picasso.

  HE HAS TWO LOVES—BEAUTIFUL OBJECTS AND MAKING WAR.

  —Count Galeazzo Ciano, on Hermann Göring

  Paris was free. But the screaming nighttime air raids over Paris were not the only sign that the war was still far from over. For those in the military, the fighting just beyond the capital continued.

  On August 27, a young French lieutenant named Alexandre Rosenberg, attached to General Leclerc’s Second Armored Division, was not partying at the Hôtel Ritz. In fact, he wasn’t just then celebrating much of anything.

  Instead, Lieutenant Rosenberg was in command of an urgent and dangerous operation taking shape along the railway lines heading out of the city. All month, the Germans had been loading the trains. When it became clear at last that the Allies’ advance was insurmountable, they began destroying the tracks behind them as the last conveys rolled toward the far horizon. It was Rosenberg’s mission to get his men out in front of those disappearing convoys and somehow to stop them.

  Even as the first morning after liberation dawned over Paris, the last trains were still creeping their way eastward, toward Berlin and peril.

  There was one convoy, in particular, that the French and their Allies were watching. Alexandre had been assigned to the mission of intercepting it. Members of the French resistance in the SNCF—the national railway of France—had alerted the newly arrived French Forces of the Interior that the Germa
ns were guarding heavily several cars on a large train heading northeast out of Paris. The switch workers across the capital were slowing down the tracks, doing their best to cause a massive traffic jam along the lines, but this train was already nine miles outside the city, in the small station at Aulnay. Throughout the war, the SNCF was a dangerous line of work. More than 1,500 cheminots died for their small and systematic anti-German acts of obstruction, sabotage, and information sharing—although far fewer raised a hand to prevent the deportation of Jews.

  Now, with the delay of the convoy in Aulnay, the Germans and the Gestapo were reportedly furious. Delaying the train more than another few hours would be impossible. There were already railway workers risking their lives to hold it.

  Some of the trains leaving Paris in the last days of the occupation were loaded with Nazi loot, the antique chaise longues and last bits of opulent bric-a-brac collected by the retreating German officers.

  It was feared that other trains might carry human cargo—the final unlucky Parisians who had been rounded up before the liberation. Some of those arrested in the last summer of the occupation were the surviving members of the city’s Jewish population. Seven thousand French Jews were deported from Paris between April and August 1944. Many, however, were people suspected of supporting a now-burgeoning and emboldened French resistance movement. There were deportations still some days numbering in the hundreds. Some of the last trains carried children.

  Since the winter of 1944, the roundups had intensified again fiercely. For the circle of French artists and socialites who gathered at the Hôtel Ritz during the occupation, the fact had hit home at last that there were fissures even in the gilded world they inhabited. Jean Cocteau, Sacha Guitry, Pablo Picasso, Serge Lifar, Arletty, and Coco Chanel all knew intimately the Jewish-born writer and artist Max Jacob. Arrested by the Gestapo, he died that spring in the transit camp at Drancy. He had pleaded with Cocteau in a last, desperate letter to find some way to help him. “I am writing this in a train,” Max said, “profiting from the leniency of the guards. We shall soon be at Drancy. That is all I have to say. Sacha, when he was told about my sister, said, ‘If it were Max himself I could do something.’ Well, this time it is myself. Je t’embrasse.” Cocteau had at last been spurred to some kind of action, but the petition he circulated among his friends for a signature and sent to Otto Abetz was not enough to save Max Jacob.

  Alexandre Rosenberg and his men had been sent into the capital to stop the last trains of deportees from leaving the city, and, on the morning of August 27, he would be far from the Hôtel Ritz. But the story unfolding that day had its origins in the group of friends and acquaintances who had gathered during the war on the Place Vendôme.

  Since the days early in the twentieth century, when the Dreyfusards and American expatriates alike declared the Ritz their social province, the Paris-based international circle of film stars, artists, writers, and avant-gardists who frequented the hotel had been a tight-knit group. The Rosenberg family was an essential part of that circle. It was an old story.

  This part of that story dated to the early days of the war. The spring of 1942 was the high-water mark of the glamorous life in occupied Paris. It was also one of the high-water marks of French collaboration. That season, the Ritz was once again the talk of the capital. And some of those who had been there that night decades earlier, while Marcel Proust made awkward love to the Princess Soutzo on a balcony as German bombs exploded, were still hotel regulars.

  That spring there were once again fashion shows in the ballrooms at the Hôtel Ritz and dinner socials on Sunday evenings in full swing with orchestras and dancing. Since winter, leading French industrialists, designers, and politicians had been joining their German counterparts in the Ritz dining room for those convivial lunches where economic policies of long-term integration were decided. In January, Hitler’s “man with the iron heart,” German chief of police Reinhard Heydrich, unveiled his “Final Solution” to the Jewish “question” at a Nazi conference in Germany. Deportations to Auschwitz would begin in June.

  In May 1942, though, the event drawing the attention of all of Paris back again to the Hôtel Ritz was artistic. The arts in Paris flourished during the occupation. The reasons were twofold. The Germans—and many on the far right in France as well—had long held that modern French culture was decadent and effeminate. Letting the Parisians indulge in their moral corruption and in the frivolity of the arts was cast as a simple way, at first, to keep the capital compliant. By the second year of the occupation, however, those who governed Paris were keen to trumpet their vision of an “aryanized” French culture. The newcomers, after all, intended to occupy the city permanently as part of a unified and timeless Third Reich.

  In 1942, Paris was abuzz with news of a monumental exhibition of new art. Celebrities from Paris and Berlin were turning out in droves for the festivities. The opening night party would be—of course—on the Place Vendôme.

  The cause of all the fuss and excitement was a forty-two-year-old sculptor and art professor from Berlin name Arno Breker, familiar already to many in the city. He had lived in Paris throughout much of the 1920s and into the early 1930s. Jean Cocteau was an old friend. His Greek-born wife, Demetra, once posed for Picasso as a model and remained fond of the artist. Both the Brekers were keen modern art collectors. They had been part of that dazzling interwar circle in Paris. It is impossible that they did not also know Alexandre Rosenberg’s father.

  The day that Alexandre was born, back in 1921, Pablo Picasso was one of the witnesses. His father, Paul Rosenberg, was one of the world’s two or three most famous and successful dealers in modern art, just at the moment in the 1920s and 1930s when modern art was reaching its first great acclaim. He was Picasso’s exclusive art dealer, close friend, and next-door neighbor.

  In fact, there were few in the art world in 1942 that Paul Rosenberg did not know personally. Among the friends and acquaintances of Alexandre’s parents were not just Picasso and his wartime lover, Dora Maar, but also Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, Coco Chanel and her prewar lover Pierre Reverdy, Jean Cocteau, Lee Miller and Man Ray, the mischievous and melodramatic Count and Countess de Beaumont, Serge Diaghilev, Sacha Guitry, and, of course, the late Max Jacob. Only a very few among that crowd had not been habitués of the Hôtel Ritz at one time or another. Most had spent the Second World War in and out of its salons and suites—or they had spent the war, as American correspondents, trying to get back to Paris.

  But on the eve of that great event in the Parisian art world in the spring of 1942, Alexandre Rosenberg’s father was not on the list of those invited. That was for the simple reason that the family—who were Jewish and prescient—had fled France for the United States in the weeks before the country fell in June 1940. The nineteen-year-old Alexandre had gone to England to fight with Charles de Gaulle and the Free French Forces. A large part of his father’s vast art collection—declared abandoned Jewish property—was considered forfeit to the Germans. Among the modernist artworks lost were hundreds of pieces by artists such as Cézanne, Renoir, Braque, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Gauguin. There were dozens of paintings just by Picasso.

  In the 1920s, Arno Breker had been an up-and-coming young German sculptor, interested in the avant-garde and modernism. All that had been abandoned now in favor of a public return to a more “masculine” and Teutonic neoclassicism. By 1942, Hitler had declared Breker “the best sculptor of our time,” and the artist had already been a card-carrying member of the NSDAP, or the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—the Nazi political party—for more than half a decade.

  Ironically, few Germans were interested in the art that Alexandre’s father had made a name for himself collecting. And it wasn’t the daring and experimental works by the cubists and the impressionists and the fauvists that interested Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler. Nazi tastes ran, as a matter of political philosophy, to the traditional and not to these degenerate examples.

  Making that break
with the “old” world of decadent Parisian art was precisely the point of that gala event in 1942. Arno Breker was there to show the world, with his towering, muscular statues, the kind of nationalist, civic art that would be rewarded.

  The exhibition was supported at the highest levels of the German government. On May 5, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich arrived at the Hôtel Ritz for a weeklong stay during the crucial advance stages. On May 6, fresh from Berlin, Arno Breker and Demetra joined him. The celebrity couple settled into rooms at the Ritz for a stay that would last considerably longer than a week. Breker had arrived in preparation for the social event of the spring, sometimes described as “the most glittering event of the Occupation years”: a massive display of his work later that month in the public space at the Musée de l’Orangerie, in the Jardin des Tuileries.

  The status-conscious Brekers immediately declared that their rooms at the hotel were neither lavish nor light enough and demanded that several Louis XV lamps and some marble candelabra be installed in the suite. Then they threw themselves into a round of hobnobbing and socializing—including dinner parties with the American heiress Florence Gould and many cozy evenings with the now pro-fascist writer Paul Morand and the woman who had become his wife, Marcel’s Proust’s Princess Soutzo. Jean Cocteau often joined them.

  When the Arno Breker exhibition opened on May 15, 1942, it was the talk of all of Paris. There was one event after another that first week to inaugurate the occasion. One of the leading novelists and pro-fascist journalists in the capital, Robert Brasillach, gave a laudatory lecture at the Théâtre Hébertot to the flashing of camera bulbs and hearty applause.