Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  Breker was standing close enough to hear him breathing and had a spine-tingling sense of history in the making. He listened for the words that would mark the timeless meeting of the two great leaders. An audible whisper left the Führer’s lips as he turned to Giesler and said, ‘You shall build my tomb.’ Then, no longer whispering, he elaborated on the project, saying that the painted dome would be replaced by the vaulted heavens, from which, through an oculus similar to that of the Pantheon in Rome, the rain and light of the universe would pour down on the indestructible sarcophagus. The sarcophagus would bear these two words: ‘Adolf Hitler’.

  The Führer chose this solemn moment to announce his ‘gift to France’: the remains of Napoleon’s son, the Duc de Reichstadt, would be taken from Vienna and placed in Les Invalides beside his father’s tomb. It would be another mark of his respect for the people of France and their glorious past.

  7.15 A.M.–SUNLIGHT WAS RUSHING along the Seine as they passed the Palais Bourbon and turned to the east. A quarter past seven struck from a tower. Here and there, a concierge had ventured out with rag and broom to begin the daily purging of the doorstep. Dogs liberated from their owners’ apartments were going about their morning business. On the Boulevard Saint-Germain, they stopped briefly in front of the German embassy while the Führer gave instructions for the renovation of the building. Then, hurrying through the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, they passed in front of Saint-Sulpice, the Luxembourg Palace and the Greek columns of the Odéon theatre. Two policemen saw them head along the Boulevard Saint-Michel and turn into the Rue Soufflot. Earlier that morning, a telephone call had woken the Préfet de Police, who was already accustomed to the sudden whims of his new masters. The gendarmerie of the fifth arrondissement had told him that the caretaker of the Panthéon had been roused from sleep by German soldiers carrying sub-machine-guns and ordered to have the iron gates open at seven sharp.

  At about half-past seven, the Führer was seen marching briskly into the mausoleum and emerging a few moments later with a scowl on his face. He had been disgusted by the sculptures (‘cancerous growths’, he called them) and by the wretched coldness of the place, which affected him like a personal insult: ‘By God!’, he snarled, ‘It doesn’t deserve the name Pantheon, when you think of the one in Rome!’ Breker was familiar with the Führer’s views on sculpture and architecture, but he found it interesting to hear them applied to actual examples. According to the Führer, a piece of sculpture that deformed the human body was an insult to the Creator. He must have been thinking of the choir of the Panthéon and of Sicard’s tumultuous monument to the Convention Nationale, with its craggy, weather-worn soldiers and its defiant motto, ‘VIVRE LIBRE OU MOURIR’. A true artist, according to the Führer, did not use art to express his own personality; he took no interest in politics. Unlike the Jew, he felt no need to twist everything out of shape and to make it frivolous and ironic. Art and architecture were the work of human hands, like boots, except that a pair of boots was good for the rubbish heap after a year or two of wear and tear, whereas a work of art endured for centuries.

  There was something in this public display of personal sentiment that inspired Arno Breker with feelings of filial gratitude. He realized that, while encouraging ‘his artists’ to believe that they were his guides to Paris, the Führer was in fact showing them the city as it ought to be seen and preparing them for the daunting task ahead. As they drove away from the Panthéon, the Führer turned in his seat and looked ‘Lieutenant’ Breker up and down with a sly smile on his face. Then he said, as if to console him for his ludicrous appearance, ‘No true artist is a soldier…’, and expressed a wish to see the quartier where the young Breker had begun his heroic struggle with the muse. ‘I, too, love Paris, and, like you, I would have studied here if fate had not driven me into politics, for my aspirations before the First World War were entirely artistic.’

  Since there was nothing of architectural note in that part of Paris, the Führer’s request seemed all the more considerate. They drove along the Boulevard du Montparnasse and saw the famous café called the Closerie des Lilas, and Carpeaux’s fountain of ‘The Four Continents’, which confirmed the Führer’s high regard for Carpeaux’s work. Then they returned to the Boulevard Saint-Michel and drove swiftly down towards the river. There was still so much to see, but time was running out, and they were now a long way from the point of exit.

  On the Place Saint-Michel, the Führer returned the salute of two policemen. They crossed to the island and turned along the lifeless quai towards Notre-Dame. Here, at least, Paris still exuded its mysterious charm. The walls of the Préfecture de Police slid away to the left like a curtain and the Gothic towers rose in the grey light like the backdrop of a Romantic drama. They drove past without stopping. They saw the Palais de Justice and the Sainte-Chapelle, which made no impression on the Führer, who noticed instead the dome on the other side of the street and said to Breker, ‘Isn’t that the dome of the Chambre de Commerce?’, at which Breker shook his head and answered, ‘No, it’s the dome of the Institut, I think.’ But when they drew level with the entrance, the Führer jerked his head and said to Breker, in great amusement, ‘See what’s written there?…Chambre de Commerce!’

  7.50 A.M.–THEY CROSSED the Pont d’Arcole to the Hôtel de Ville, passed by the Carnavalet museum and the shuttered shop windows of the Jewish quarter to the Place des Vosges. Trees masked the cream and pink facades, and the Führer looked positively bored. The twittering sparrows, the leafy garden for nannies and well-heeled children and the cosy arcades gave off an intolerable air of bourgeois self-satisfaction. He did not become animated again until they were heading back along the Rue de Rivoli. This was the sort of nobility that he had in mind for Berlin: the endless row of identical house-fronts, the unmistakeable evidence of a grand design, and the invincible peace and happiness of a great imperial capital.

  To the right were the dingy streets that led to Les Halles. Even here, the city seemed quite dead. There were no earthy vegetables blocking the roads, no traders massacring the French language, no smells of coffee and caporal. But then, penetrating the morning stillness, they heard the cry of a newsvendor. It sounded like the stranded relic of an earlier age. The owner of the voice was approaching from a side-street with his sing-song cry, ‘Le Matin! Le Matin!’ He saw the column of sedans and came running up, waving a copy of the paper, coming to the car in front and yelling, until the words stuck in his throat, ‘Le Matin!’ Staring in mute terror at the blue eyes that stared back at him, he fled, dropping his papers on the pavement. A little further on, a group of market women, slovenly and self-confident like all the women of Les Halles, stood talking in loud voices. The loudest and fattest of them peered at the convoy as it came along the street, and began to wave her arms about, pointing at Hitler and saying, ‘C’est lui–oh, c’est lui!’ Then, with a speed that belied their corpulence, they scattered in all directions.

  ‘I have no hesitation’, said the Führer, as the monumental facade of the Louvre hove into view, ‘in pronouncing this grandiose edifice one of the greatest works of genius in the history of architecture.’ A few moments later, he was just as impressed by the Place Vendôme, which, despite the vandalism of anarchists, still proclaimed the undying glory of the Emperor.

  Soon, they were back at the Opéra, to see–as the Führer had intended–the gorgeous facade in the full light of day. Without stopping, they accelerated up the Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin and the Rue de Clichy, veered right on the square and followed the boulevards past the Moulin Rouge, as silent as ever on a Sunday morning, to Place Pigalle, but without seeing any of those Parisian women whose lipstick was said to be made from the grease of the Paris sewers.

  Changing gear in rapid succession, the Benz sedans surged up the steep incline, threaded their way through the provincial streets and came out on the Parvis du Sacré-Cœur. They walked to the edge of the square. With their backs to the basilica, they looked out over the city. Church-goers w
ere entering and leaving the building; some of them recognized Hitler but ignored him. He leaned on the balustrade, searching for the lines that would reveal the master plan of Baron Haussmann. At that height, the beauties of Paris were swamped by homes and factories and other utilitarian buildings; almost everything was washed away by the distance and the haze. Paris was an impression, a muddy watercolour, and the sturdy monuments they had seen at close quarters were like little buoys drifting in a grey sea.

  Breker sensed the Führer’s disappointment. This had been Adolf Hitler’s one and only visit to the city he had studied so fervently and had longed to see for so many years. The tour had lasted barely two and a half hours, during which he had neither eaten a meal, nor entered a private house, nor spoken to any Parisian, nor even used a toilet. On the odd moments they had been able to exchange a few words, Speer had been as cynical as usual, calling the Führer ‘le Chef’, by way of a joke. But now, as Breker watched Hitler scanning the space bisected by the Seine and bounded by dark hills, he seemed to see his eyes gleam and moisten. ‘It was the dream of my life’, the Führer was saying, ‘to be permitted to see Paris. I am happy beyond words to see that dream fulfilled.’ Ever mindful of the purpose of the tour, he addressed his artists–Giesler, Breker and Speer–saying, ‘For you, the hard time is now beginning when you must work and strive to create the monuments and cities that are entrusted to you.’ Then, to his secretary, he said, ‘Nothing must be allowed to hinder their work.’

  They stood at the balustrade for what seemed a long time. Finally, turning slowly from the scene, the Führer looked up at the white basilica behind, said, ‘Appalling,’ and then led the way back to the cars.

  THE CONDOR took off from Le Bourget at ten o’clock. The Führer ordered the pilot to circle over the city a few times. They saw the sunlight catch the steel-blue curves of the Seine, which made it possible to work out exactly where everything was in relation to everything else: the islands, Notre-Dame, the Eiffel Tower, Les Invalides.

  Paris fell away for the last time into the summer haze. Now, only forests and fields appeared through the windows. The Führer banged his fist on the armrest and said, ‘That was an experience!’ The satisfaction of having seen the legendary city outweighed the disappointments (he had imagined everything much grander than it was in reality), and its obvious defects in some way enhanced his appreciation and made him look forward to examining the master model of Berlin with a fresh eye. The only sour note came from Hermann Giesler, who told the Führer that he had not really seen Paris at all, because what was a city without its people? He should have visited it during the 1937 Exhibition, when it was alive with people and traffic. The Führer nodded his head in agreement, and said, ‘I can well imagine.’

  Back at the Wolfsschlucht, the Führer shared his thoughts, during walks in the woods, with Giesler, Breker and Speer. While his impressions were still sharp, he made a decision which showed that, even in the absence of its human population, Paris had a powerful effect on anyone who saw it. He had often considered the possibility that the city would have to be annihilated but had now decided not to destroy it after all–for, as he told Speer that evening in the parsonage, ‘When we are finished with Berlin, Paris will be nothing but a shadow, so why should we destroy it?’

  When Professor Breker came to record the notable events of his life in 1971, he found his impressions of the little tour even more vivid than memories of his early days in Montparnasse. That vanishing parade of grey monuments, and the newsreel images of himself standing next to the Führer, were more real to him than his own personal experience of the city. As he told his friends, he was grateful to have had the opportunity to witness an aspect of the Führer that few people ever saw–a Hitler who was, for a few hours, released from the cares of war and the mountains of paperwork under which, according to Breker, his enemies tried to bury his ambitions. Even when the monumental statues and bas-reliefs he had produced at the Führer’s behest lay in rubble, he remembered how brilliantly the architecture of Paris, when it was liberated from the distractions of people and traffic, had expressed the continuity of European civilization. He clung to his memories like a secret treasure, all through the difficult years when, as Speer smilingly predicted when they said farewell to each other in the ruins of Berlin in 1945, ‘even a dog will refuse to take food from your hand’.

  OCCUPATION

  I

  CHILDREN WHO LIVE in cities are said to grow up faster than other children. They see and hear strange things almost every day, and even if they cultivate a spirit of indifference and try to be unobtrusive, their routines and beliefs are always coming under attack. The daily bus-ride can suddenly become a dangerous adventure, and the puzzle of streets between home and school can turn into a haunted labyrinth. A whole quartier can be overshadowed by a misanthropic dog, a friendly beggar, a cellar window, a perplexing caricature on a wall or by any of the million objects and creatures of which a child’s itinerary is composed. Parents might complain about ‘the same old thing, day in, day out’, but every child knows that the city changes all the time, and even the things that don’t change can look different from one day to the next. Parents are not authorities on the teeming life of the metropolis. There are many things that they don’t notice or that they try to ignore, because not even the most sympathetic parent wants to relive the terrors of childhood.

  So many strange things kept happening in Paris in those difficult years that Parisian children must have grown up even faster than usual. They grew up, however, in only one sense. Statistics show that the juvenile population as a whole was actually getting shorter and lighter. The pink vitamin pills and protein-rich ‘Biscuits Pétain’ that were handed out at school had no noticeable effect, and there was little that mothers could do except to disguise the perennial swede as something more enticing, or to serve the bean soup with beans one night and chestnuts the next.

  Boys and girls who lived in a constant state of hunger and gastronomic disappointment were more than usually sensitive to the city’s tricks and transformations. In normal circumstances, they would soon have shrugged off the little miseries of urban life, but an empty stomach lends its ominous rumblings to every minor inconvenience. The booths on the boulevards that used to sell spinning-tops and bonbons sold dreary things such as phrase books and bicycle-repair kits. Almost overnight, the infant economy collapsed. Postage stamps and model cars quickly reached unaffordable prices, and some toy shops closed down and their owners went away. There were so many upsetting rules and restrictions that it was hard to believe that Maréchal Pétain, who was known to be fond of children, had been told what was going on in Paris. The pond of the Palais-Royal was drained of water, and a boy who had always gone there with his boat of sardine tins and bobbins now had to walk all the way to the Tuileries Gardens, where the lake was too big for a little boat. Other children went to the park and found that their favourite climbing-tree had been cut down for firewood. Rationing affected children’s lives in so many ways that no statistic could possibly encapsulate the misery it caused. When shoes wore out, they had to wear uncomfortable wooden soles marked ‘Smelflex’, or clumpy clogs, which made it impossible to run. Dolls were forced to make do with the clothes they already had, and some big dolls even had their clothes taken away from them.

  Children who had never been fussy about their food found that sweet things tasted bitter, as though someone was playing a trick on them. Beautiful cakes and pyramids of fruit in shop windows had notices in front of them saying ‘É talage factice’, which meant that they weren’t real. Nothing was what it seemed any more. New signs appeared all over the city with words on them that meant nothing or that seemed to be misspelled or mixed up with real words, like ‘Gross Paris’ or ‘Soldatenkino’. Some of the words were too long and had to be written in very small letters to fit on the sign. The signs were put up by the Germans, who were also called the Boches, and it was usually the Boches who were blamed for everything bad, though sometimes it
was the English or the Jews. Worst of all, mothers and fathers were nearly always in a bad mood, because they had to queue for everything, or because they kept running out of cigarettes.

  Life under the Boches was probably even harder for older brothers and sisters, who remembered what things had been like before the war. Children who had just started school found some of the new things quite exciting. A boy who lived near Les Invalides saw the statue of a general being blown up with dynamite, and some of the pieces of stone went flying over the neighbouring houses. Some children liked to watch the long lights flailing across the night sky and the red lights coming down in the distance, and they also liked to imitate the sound of the sirens. When the clocks were put forward an hour, everyone had to carry a torch to school, and the bright circles that went dancing along the street looked like a procession in a fairy-tale. Birthdays were often disappointing, but many children who had never been allowed to have pets were given guinea-pigs to look after. Some people even kept rabbits in the bathtub which had to be fed with grass from the park. One girl who lived in an apartment block in Belleville knew a woman whose rabbit ate her food coupons when she wasn’t looking, and the woman said that at least she wouldn’t feel bad when she cut the rabbit’s throat and threw it in a pot with the carrots and the swede.

  ALTHOUGH MOST PARENTS kept saying that life was getting harder all the time, it was only after two years of this that many children–especially those who lived in certain parts of the city–began to feel that things really were getting worse.