Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  Breker thought of his friends in Paris and nodded.

  ‘I must think of the future,’ the Führer went on. ‘Paris is the city by which others are measured. It will inspire us to reconsider our plans for the reconstruction of our major cities. As an old Parisian, you will be able to devise an itinerary that includes all the architectural highpoints of the city.’

  Some urgent news was brought to the Führer, and the audience ended. Breker was left to settle in to the guesthouse. He washed and shaved, then went for a short walk in the woods. The thought of seeing Paris again after so many years was thrilling, but he knew that it would be like visiting an old friend in hospital. When he returned from his walk, he was told that since the Führer did not want to be seen touring a captured city with civilians, they would all have to wear a military uniform. Breker chose a garrison cap that belonged to a lieutenant and a trench coat that covered his grey suit. They fitted him quite well but made his body feel small.

  He telephoned Mimina, who had been told nothing, then sat at the table in his room and drew up a list of monuments, which he was to submit to the Führer’s staff. At six o’clock, he left the guesthouse in his borrowed clothes and walked over to the mess. It was a strange experience to see the soldiers salute him as he passed. When he entered the mess, dressed up as an officer and walking like a civilian, gales of laughter erupted from the Führer’s table.

  Dinner was served by soldiers in white jackets. There was meat for anyone who did not wish to share the Führer’s vegetarian meal, but the only drinks were water and fruit juice. After nightfall, they heard the sound of thunder. Shortly afterwards, they went to bed. The storm had passed, and the only sounds outside were the hum of a generator and the tramp of a guard’s boots.

  HE WAS STILL WAITING for sleep when an orderly came to wake him at three in the morning. He pulled on his uniform and walked out into the darkness. An hour later, he was back in the air, trying to remember the route he had submitted, and remembering instead his first days in Paris in 1927: his landlady had taken him to the Galeries Barbès to buy a double bed (she had insisted on a double), and at the Bal des Quat’z Arts, a beautiful negress had engaged him in a discussion about Nietzsche. He thought of his little studio at Gentilly, twenty-five minutes by Métro from the cafés of Montparnasse, where vegetable plots and hen-houses were guarded by dogs of mixed race.

  The Condor had proper seats with windows. When the light began to colour the fields, he looked down and saw sheep and cattle but no other signs of life. The centipedal lines of refugees with their wheelbarrows and prams had passed away to the south. All around him, he heard cheerful conversations, and wondered why he seemed to be the only one who knew that they were embarked on a dangerous mission.

  Paris, Sunday 23 June 1940

  5.45 A.M.–THE ENORMOUS CLOUD of smoke that had filled the streets for several days, and that was said to have rained soot over the south coast of England, had finally drifted off. It had come and gone without explanation, and taken with it all the life of Paris. The city seemed to have been prepared for a grand occasion to which no one was invited. Two guardsmen at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier peered through the low, dawn mist along the Champs-É lysées and saw nothing move except the swastika flags and the grey pigeons.

  Six miles across the city, at the far end of the Rue La Fayette, a car appeared from the direction of Le Bourget. It was followed by another, and then by three more, forming a little convoy of five sedans. The leather roofs had been rolled back, and as the cars rumbled across the cobbles, the heads bobbed about in perfect synchrony.

  It was an interminable suburban street masquerading as an avenue with no particular destination. The buildings on either side amplified the noise of the engines. All of them seemed empty, their windows either shuttered or daubed with blue paint. In one of the cars, a man was standing up, holding a movie camera. Though the morning haze still clung to the ground, and the city showed itself only in outline, the day promised to be ideal for filming.

  Orders were shouted out as they passed a concrete road-block. The Führer sat next to the chauffeur in the second car, with Breker, Giesler and Speer on the jump seats behind. He had been silent since the airport, and when Breker looked round from the fleeing doorways to the man in the passenger seat, he saw the Führer tightly clenched, almost cowering in his grey coat. He seemed depressed by the ghostly spectacle. It was a sign, thought Breker, of his extraordinary sensitivity, and his unerring ability to concentrate on the essential and to consign the rest to oblivion.

  The armistice had yet to come into effect. At any moment, from one of a thousand windows, a sniper might have aimed the barrel of a machine-gun. Perhaps the route had been chosen because in no other part of Paris was it possible to travel so far towards the centre without passing anything of interest. Almost two miles of apartment blocks had gone by before the rear pediment of the Opéra rose unexpectedly above the roof tops.

  It struck Breker all at once that this was not the route he had planned, and that the Führer must have studied the document he had submitted at Brûly-de-Pesche and cast it aside. They approached the building from behind, between two corner blocks, and drove along its eastern flank, as though to take it by surprise. Swerving into the empty square, they saw two German officers waiting on the steps. The Führer leapt out and ran into the building.

  Inside, all the lights were blazing. Golden reflections danced off the marble and the gilt, and made the floor look as treacherous as ice. A white-haired janitor led them up the monumental staircase.

  The man who had sat hunched in his car seat a moment before was almost unrecognizable: the Führer was literally shaking with excitement. ‘Wonderful, uniquely beautiful proportions!’ he shouted, waving his arms like a conductor. ‘And such pomp!’ The janitor stood silently by with the expressionless rigidity of a man about to suffer a heart attack.

  ‘You must imagine’, said the Führer, ‘the ladies in their ball-gowns descending the staircase between lines of men in uniform.–We must build something like this in Berlin, Herr Speer!’ At the top of the staircase, he turned and addressed the men who were still ascending. ‘Ignore that Belle Époque showiness, and the eclectic architecture, and the Baroque excess, and you still have a theatre with its own very distinctive character. Its architectural importance’, he explained, ‘consists in its beautiful proportions.’

  They entered the auditorium and waited while the janitor threw switches and awakened the fairy-tale spectacle. The Führer swivelled on his heel, taking in the whole glorious scene, and cried out to the empty seats, ‘This is the most beautiful theatre in the world!’

  He led the way, with the busy step that he always appeared to have in newsreels. The janitor followed as best he could. They saw the dressing rooms and the practice room, where, to Breker’s surprise, the Führer was reminded of the paintings of Edgar Degas. For several minutes, they occupied the stage, chatting among themselves or listening to the Führer’s disquisition. He appeared to know the Opéra in its most intimate details. Breker was asked to tell the janitor that they wished to see the presidential reception room. For some reason, Breker had difficulty formulating the question in French, and when he finally found the words, the janitor looked puzzled and denied that such a thing existed. But the Führer, certain of his knowledge, and exhibiting only the faintest glimmer of impatience, insisted on seeing the hypothetical room, and the man finally remembered that, indeed, there had been an imperial reception room, but that renovations had abolished it.

  ‘Now you see how well I know my way about!’ cried the Führer. Then he added, with an infectious laugh, ‘Gentlemen, observe democracy in action! The democratic republic does not even grant its president his own reception room!’

  As they left the building, the Führer ordered one of the adjutants to give the janitor a fifty-mark note. The janitor politely declined the tip. Then the Führer asked Breker to try, and the man refused once again, saying that he was only doing his job. />
  Outside, Carpeaux’s famous sculpture, La Danse, which had scandalized the bourgeois of the Second Empire, retained the Führer’s full attention for a moment. Hefty nymphs cavorted around a tambourine-playing Bacchus. Despite the trails of black filth that made them look like laughing victims of an axe-murderer, the figures’ pearly stone teeth could be clearly seen. This the Führer proclaimed to be a work of genius: it was an example of the lightness and grace that foreigners found wanting in German architecture.

  With that, they returned to the cars and left the Place de l’Opéra, turning right in front of the deserted Café de la Paix.

  6.10 A.M.–EVEN THE DUMMIES were absent from the windows of the expensive shops along the Boulevard des Capucines. Next stop was La Madeleine, which they approached from the rear. An adjutant leapt out of the car while it was still moving and opened the door. The Führer was on the pavement before anyone else and was trotting up the steps when he stopped so abruptly to look up at the pediment that the others almost ran into the back of him. They spent barely a minute inside–just long enough to see the Judgement scene that turned Napoleon’s monument to the Grande Armée into a Christian temple. The Führer found the building disappointingly pedantic but superbly positioned for the view across the river to the Chambre des Députés. Then they drove down the Rue Royale and into the Place de la Concorde, where the chauffeur was ordered to drive slowly around the obelisk.

  The Führer was standing up in the car, resting one hand on the chrome frame of the windscreen, delivering his observations. The obelisk was too small, and the walls of the square too puny to give it its proper prominence in the city. The radiant vistas, however, were magnificent and allowed the eye to travel unimpeded to different sectors of the city. Two gendarmes in their short capes were standing by a kerb, and the camera fastened on this evidence of human life to give the newsreel an air of normality. ‘Early in the morning’, the commentary would say, ‘the Führer pays a surprise visit to Paris!’ A dark shape was bustling across the road at the entrance to one of the avenues. The Führer glanced in its direction and saw a man in a black hat and robe, his head bent as if on the lookout for pot-holes or–ridiculously in that vast grey expanse–trying to pass unobserved. As the car went by, the camera turned to keep him in the frame. It would be a fleeting tableau of daily life in the French capital–a curé scuttling off to mass like a black beetle hurrying back to its hole.

  Now, with a symphonic sense of architectural arrangements and the motions of the convoy, and as though anticipating the stately march that would accompany the images on the newsreel, the Führer ordered a halt at the entrance to the famous avenue. Slowly, then, they started up the long incline of the Champs-É lysées towards the Arc de Triomphe. The heads in the cars turned to right and left, along the side avenues, recognizing views they had seen in picture-books and on postcards: the Invaliden Dom with the Alexanderbrücke in the foreground, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, the Eiffel-turm in the distance, the fountains of the Rond-Point (but without water), and the terrace of Fouquet’s devoid of people. Cinema posters were still advertising two American movies that had not been seen since the exodus had begun: Going Places and You Can’t Take It With You. High up on the avenue ahead, a row of windows suddenly blazed with sunlight and darkened again as they passed. The Arch itself was a giant magnet, pulling them towards the portal through which triumphal parades traditionally passed in the opposite direction.

  The cameraman filmed until the Arc de Triomphe was too large to fit into the frame. This was no longer the Paris that Arno Breker had known. It was some as yet imperfect dream-vision of the North–South axis of the future Berlin. The Grosse Torbogen, which the Führer had sketched in 1916 as he lay in his hospital bed, would be large enough for the Arc de Triomphe to fit inside with room to spare. The avenue that led up to it would be seventy feet wider than the Champs-É lysées, and it would not be constricted by the miserly segments of bourgeois habitation into which Hittorff had divided the Place de l’É toile. Breker tried to see everything through the Führer’s eyes–a city whose overpowering glories would exist whether or not there were people there to see them.

  They parked on the Place de l’É toile. Some of the Arch was under scaffolding, but the Führer was able to read the Napoleonic inscriptions, which he seemed to know by heart. He stood with his hands behind his back, looking all the way down the Champs-É lysées towards the obelisk and the Louvre. Breker saw an expression on his face that he had noticed when the Führer was examining the master model of Berlin, crouching down to enhance the perspective. It was the look of pure excitement that immobilizes a child’s face when it tries to suck the object of its yearning into a mind evacuated of any other thought. When the time came to leave–it was already half-past six–the Führer could barely tear himself away.

  6.35 A.M.–SO MANY AVENUES radiated from the Place de l’É toile that, despite the presence of so many military strategists and connoisseurs of Paris, after circling the Arc de Triomphe a second time, the convoy slowed in confusion, and instead of waiting for the Avenue Victor Hugo or the Avenue Kléber to come around again, took the Avenue Foch and advanced as far as the first junction, where, somewhat indecisively, it turned left into the Avenue Poincaré. The Führer appeared momentarily to have lost interest in the tour: no doubt he was digesting the sights they had seen, assessing (as he had previously explained) the effects of atmosphere and daylight on the monuments he had known only in the abstract.

  A few moments later, they were standing on the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot, gazing across the Seine at the Eiffel Tower. The cameraman was kneeling at the Führer’s feet, trying to fit his head and the top of the tower into the same shot. Meanwhile, the photographer was taking the picture that would prove to the world that Adolf Hitler had been to Paris: Breker, Speer and the Führer standing on the terrace with a papery Eiffel Tower behind them looking like the backdrop of a trick photograph. ‘A view of the Eiffel Tower!’, the newsreel commentator would say, jauntily hinting at holiday photograph-albums. ‘To the left of the Führer: Professor Speer.’ Professor Speer appeared to be suppressing a smirk. The round-shouldered mock-lieutenant with the pallid smile and the ill-fitting cap to the right of the Führer was not deemed worthy of a mention.

  Nine days before, German soldiers, having found the elevators sabotaged, had raced up the one thousand six hundred and sixty-five steps to fly a swastika from the top of the Tower, but the winds had torn it to shreds and the smaller flag that replaced it was invisible in the haze. In the next frames, the Führer was seen turning away from the Tower with an upward glance in the direction of the gilt inscriptions on the Palais de Chaillot, but too briefly to have deciphered them:

  HE WHO PASSES MUST DECIDE WHETHER I BE TOMB OR TREASURE, WHETHER I SPEAK OR REMAIN SILENT…

  –FRIEND, ENTER NOT WITHOUT DESIRE.

  The sun was beginning to burn through the haze. The emptiness of the esplanade and the quais below looked strange and ominous. No barges passed on the river, and no sounds came from the city other than the whispered exhalation of an urban expanse. It was a mark of the Führer’s composure in the face of such unreality that he could think about topography and architectural dimensions. He was becoming quite astonishingly garrulous. He talked of the genius of the architects who had so perfectly aligned the Tower with the Palais de Chaillot and the Champ de Mars. He praised the Tower’s lightness and its impressive verticality. It was the only monument that gave Paris a character of its own; all the others might have been found in any city. He knew, as Breker told him, that the Tower had been built for the Great Exhibition, but it transcended its original purpose: it was the harbinger of the new age when engineers would work hand in hand with artists, and when technology would create structures on a scale previously undreamt of. It heralded a new Classicism of steel and reinforced concrete.

  They crossed the Pont d’Iéna and drove past the foot of the Tower to the other end of the Champ de Mars, where they admire
d the stern facade of the École Militaire and looked back at the terrace on which they had been standing a moment before. Before climbing back into the car, the Führer cast a final, farewell glance at the Eiffel Tower. The day was becoming warmer, and an orderly took the Führer’s trench coat and helped him into a white coat without a belt. It made him look like a chemist or a man in a laboratory.

  As the golden dome of Les Invalides approached along the Avenue de Tourville, they were all acutely aware of the fact that this would be the highpoint of the tour, and a moment of profound emotional significance for the Führer. He came as a conqueror, like Blücher and Bismarck before him, but also as an admirer of Napoleon, his equal, and a representative of the spirit of world history. But when the convoy pulled up on the Place Vauban, he happened to notice, standing proudly on its pedestal, the statue of General Mangin. It was Mangin’s vindictive army that had occupied the Rhineland in 1919. The Führer’s face darkened in an instant, and he was once again the avenger of national humiliation and the defender of German pride. He turned to the soldiers in the car behind and said, ‘Have it blown up. We should not burden the future with memories such as this.’

  On hearing this, Breker reflected on the sad lot of a great leader: even at this special moment, he was forced to tear his mind away from art and to plunge back into the brutal world of politics and war.

  Inside the Church of the Dome, they stood around the gallery of the circular crypt, gazing down on the maroon-coloured porphyry of Napoleon’s tomb. For once, the party was reduced almost to silence, entranced by the unearthly atmosphere and by the sombre light, which was dimmer than usual because of the sandbags that had been heaped against the windows before Paris had been declared an open city and spared the Luftwaffe’s bombs. The faded flags commemorating Napoleon’s most glorious victories hung from the pilasters. The conqueror of Paris gazed on the fifty-ton tomb of his predecessor, his head bowed, his cap held to his heart.