Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

When Inge appeared, she and Bonnet regarded each other with such avid interest that it would have seemed rude not to introduce them. When Bonnet shook Inge’s hand, he pretended he’d absentmindedly forgotten to put his handkerchief away.

  Bonnet said, “The Inge Wallser? The famous auto racer?”

  Inge flashed him her public smile, perfected in the glare of flashbulbs. “The Bonnet?”

  Bonnet said, “His unworthy nephew.” Then he asked Inge a question in surprisingly good German. Inge glared at Lou, as if she should know the answer. Bonnet chuckled and said something else. This time Inge smiled. What was Lou supposed to do? Break up the intimate German tête-à-tête between her customer and her girlfriend?

  She said, “Friday evening at six, you can collect your car.”

  Bonnet thanked her and told Inge, in French, that it had been a pleasure to meet her.

  Bonnet’s sedan had barely left the curb when Inge exploded.

  Lou didn’t understand why she was behaving like the injured victim. Inge had been the one flirting with Bonnet.

  It was unbearable, Inge shouted, she simply couldn’t endure it! Apparently Bonnet had said he couldn’t understand why he hadn’t run into Inge at any of the fabulous parties that Ambassador Abetz was giving on the rue de Lille, or the Luftwaffe General Hanesse’s marvelous soirees in the former Rothschild mansion. Inge was too ashamed to say she hadn’t been invited. She’d let him think she was too busy. But she wasn’t busy! She never went anywhere or did anything. And all because of Lou!

  No wonder they had no social life! Who would want to spend time with a not very bright, not very pretty, alcoholic mechanic in filthy coveralls? A bore with only one story, which she told over and over, about how she was almost a champion until her racing career crashed and burned because of her gender and how she dressed. Who wanted to hear that? Whenever Lou got really drunk, she’d maunder on about the dead crazy brother. Had no one informed her about the Führer’s views on the insane and feebleminded? These vampire parasites could not be allowed to continue sucking vital energy from the healthy population. Hadn’t Lou heard Hitler’s plan? After the Olympics were permanently relocated to Berlin, only German athletes would be allowed to compete, and only after they’d passed a blood test establishing the Aryan purity of every drop of blood in their veins.

  Inge lit a cigarette and flipped the match onto the floor.

  Lou said, “Darling, be careful, please, don’t smoke in the garage.”

  Inge started ranting again, this time on the subject of France. Didn’t Lou know that the Führer had called the French a Negroid, Yiddified race? Or that he’d sworn the two countries would never in a million years merge under the flag of the thousand-year Reich?

  Lou felt something she’d never felt before, not when she’d fought the boxer in the shed in Amiens, not when she’d punched the referee in Louvain. She wanted to smash Inge’s face in, just until she stopped talking. An animal impulse to silence a sound: a sound attached to a person.

  When, in my research, I realized this, I allowed myself to hope that I had found a major clue to the mystery of Lou Villars. Isn’t wanting to smash someone’s face another step along the path that would take Lou from one circle of hell to another, until she ended up smashing faces in the infernal headquarters of the Gestapo? Yet as I continued writing, certain events too personal to be mentioned here made me begin to think that no normal woman does what Lou Villars did just because of a failed romance. Besides, she’d already committed what were arguably her most serious (indeed historic) crimes when she and Inge were still in love—or anyway, so Lou thought.

  Inge left Paris, presumably for Berlin. That evening when Lou returned to her flat, she found that Inge had taken all her possessions and quite a few of Lou’s.

  The next days were among the saddest yet. Lou was lonely, underemployed, worried (along with everyone else) about getting enough to eat. It didn’t help to remind herself that she’d weathered hard times before, to recall the day when Chanac had forced her to clean library paste off his upholstery, or how blue she’d been just before she was invited to the Olympics. Once more God had abandoned the lowliest of his creatures, an auto mechanic in a city whose residents rode bikes. How could she convince herself that life would improve when she could still recall every cruel, true word that Inge had said?

  On the night after Inge left, Lou headed for the Chameleon Club without having decided what to do when she got there. The sounds of laughter and conversation drifted across the street. Lou pulled up her collar and hurried off, afraid that someone might see her.

  The only people she talked to that week were Carburetor Sammy and Marcel the Manifold, whom she found playing a melancholy game of double solitaire at the Le Hippo, where she’d gone to find the parts for Bonnet’s Mercedes. Even the gangsters had run out of alcohol and tobacco, so that the business transaction was brief, subdued, and to the point.

  That Friday, dreading the weekend ahead, she was preparing to close the garage when Jean-Claude Bonnet returned to pick up his car. Lou showed him how the engine purred when she turned on the ignition, but Bonnet seemed distracted and asked if they could speak in private.

  Lou took Bonnet to her office behind the garage. On the wall was a calendar on which a young woman wearing only an ermine hat and collar was ice-skating, balancing on one leg, the other knee cocked behind her, looking back over her shoulder with a devilish smile

  Lou would have liked to offer Bonnet a drink, but on account of the shortages . . . Bonnet said that the shortages were something they could discuss. He hoped he wasn’t presuming if he said he thought it was a pity that a woman with Lou’s talents should be working (or not working) as an ordinary mechanic. Not to undervalue the importance of mechanics! When something went wrong with your car, you needed a mechanic more than a movie star or a champion athlete or even (dare he say) a military or political leader. But an individual with Lou’s experience and skills . . . Again Bonnet didn’t mean to pry. But could he ask how Lou’s business was doing?

  Lou said she had no complaints.

  Bonnet said he was glad to hear that; he disliked complainers. “So perhaps we should get to the point. I have been appointed deputy minister of information and public relations. I report directly to the German ambassador, Herr Otto Abetz, a civilized fellow whom I know from the world of journalism, long before the war.

  “We want you to work for us. You were among our most resourceful and valuable agents. We know you worked with a German citizen. But you were the heart and soul of the operation.”

  Lou had been the heart and soul of her partnership with Inge. No one had ever said that before. No one had ever noticed.

  Once more, Lou’s private disaster had turned out to have a bright side. Doubtless, meeting Inge in the garage had made Bonnet suspect that there might be more to Lou than was visible on the surface. He must have done some research and unearthed certain facts that, Lou hoped, would be harder for an ordinary person to discover.

  Bonnet said, “The Führer has not forgotten you. He is grateful for your support.”

  An hour before, Lou had been feeling as if she had disappeared from the surface of the earth. And all that time she’d been present in the mind and heart of the Führer!

  Bonnet explained that he was putting together a team of community liaison workers. And because of Lou’s connections in the auto business, the athletic community, the racing world, and (to be frank) the underworld, she was perfect for this program, which had a budget large enough to let Lou live modestly, but well. And she might find the job interesting. Most of Bonnet’s team did.

  Her information-gathering duties would resemble the work she had done with Inge. The Occupation forces—the temporary Occupation forces—would find it helpful to know who had cars. Who went for a drive in the country. Who was trying to sell an automobile. Who was looking to buy one. Who had money. Who was offering what goods, for how much, on the black market. Who possessed more gasoline ration cards than th
ey should.

  Bonnet assured her that no one would get in trouble as a result of Lou’s reports. On the contrary, she would be helping to maintain the peace. The idea that she was saving lives enabled her to overcome her disdain for snitches, along with the suspicion that she was being asked to be one.

  In the absence of diaries, firsthand sources, or reliable informants, no one will ever know what Lou Villars told herself or what she thought she was doing. She was not, as she’d always feared, a stupid woman. She was, however, limited. Subtleties enraged her, and anything ambiguous seemed to conceal a possible insult. Also she was resentful. Life had not gone her way.

  Bonnet asked if she knew Louis Renault, the auto manufacturer. Lou said she’d met him briefly when she worked for the Rossignols. Bonnet said that was perfect.

  Her first assignment would be fun. At least he hoped she would think so. He wanted Lou to approach Louis Renault and say she needed his help. His advice. A group of German archaeologists were planning an expedition to the basin of the Tigris. They needed the latest technologies for making rubber tires for the vehicles that would transport them to the ruins of ancient civilizations.

  Everyone knew that this was not about archaeology but about the invasion of whatever desert country the Germans were planning to invade next. Lou didn’t say this to Renault, and she didn’t have to. Everyone knew that his factories would be requisitioned if he refused.

  Arguably, Louis Renault wasn’t nearly so guilty as the manufacturers of Zyklon B or the V-2 rocket. Or for that matter, Lou. But even if the crimes he was being asked to commit were relatively minor, no one wanted to tell Louis Renault that the Germans needed tracks for their tanks.

  They sent Lou. She said archaeology. She said ancient civilizations. Everyone went home happy. Except Monsieur Renault.

  Lou had a good laugh at that. Archaeology meant invasion. The Germans were translating French into something better than French. You had to admire their nerve.

  Bonnet gave Lou his solemn word: no one would know about their work. He would continue to bring his Mercedes in for repairs, a cover for their debriefings. Secrecy was a matter of life and death, considering that Lou would be reporting on the activities of the Gasparu-Chanac gang. Lou was tickled to have found a way of revenging herself on Chanac—and getting paid for it. Though for now she thought it best not to probe too deeply into what the gang was doing, aside from fencing auto parts. She wasn’t getting paid enough to cross them.

  Bonnet brought his Mercedes into the shop whenever something went wrong. Something was always going wrong. As promised, he helped Lou deal with the shortage of basic goods. He made sure she had extra ration cards for food and coupons for whiskey, which he viewed as a work-related expense. A drink now and then would help her deal with the stress of taking on an additional job.

  Sheltered from prying eyes by the raised hood of the Mercedes, Lou told Bonnet that a grocer had brought in a Citroën with bullet holes in the passenger door. Why did Bonnet think a museum curator would ask a gangster if he could procure explosives? A nervous stranger had come in with a decommissioned military ambulance. Could Lou build some storage space underneath the chassis?

  Even as Lou’s downward slide was gathering momentum, she prided herself on maintaining certain standards and on not losing touch, as so many of her neighbors were, with basic human decency and compassion. She was slow to come on board with the measures against the Jews, however much she personally disliked them. She knew that harsh tactics were sometimes required. She’d waited on line at the Palais Berlitz to see an informative exhibition entitled “The Jew and France,” where a display confirmed what she’d long suspected: behind every historic scandal lurked a Jew. Still, she didn’t enjoy seeing children herded through the streets at gunpoint. Once she was almost hurt by some idiot cops hurling crockery down from an apartment at a terrified Jewish family being loaded into a van.

  At the same time, she believed that an elastic adaptability was one hallmark of adulthood—of being a French adult. And so she acclimated herself to disturbing sights. She was relieved and frankly glad when the Jew who owned her garage was forced to sign it over to her and subsequently deported.

  Lou became a good citizen of Nazi-occupied Paris, working for the Ministry of Information, glad that she was no longer an obscure garage mechanic but a person of importance with a respectable, if secret, position. No longer did she look in the mirror and see a former champion reduced to rotating tires. The philosophers can say what they want about the banality of evil. But for Lou Villars, obtaining information, eventually with violence, was in every way less banal than replacing a radiator hose.

  Picasso and Me

  With a preface and photos by Gabor Tsenyi

  (Revised for the 1970 edition)

  THROUGH THE WORST of the Occupation, publishers survived. There was never enough toilet paper to wipe the asses of Paris, but books were still printed and sold to a fortunate few. Early in 1942, the director of Editions du Nord commissioned me to take the photographs for a volume of Picasso’s work.

  Like everyone but a few artistic rivals and disgruntled former mistresses, I idolized Picasso, the genius of our age. I’d met him in cafés, and several times at the home of my friend the baroness Lily de Rossignol. But not until we began working together did Picasso and I ever have a serious talk about art.

  We’d had one brief, unsatisfactory exchange, which was already our little joke. That was in the late 1920s. Picasso was already famous. But it would be years before my first book, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 established my reputation.

  It took an entire bottle of wine for me to get up the nerve to invite the great man to visit my studio. I was shocked when he showed up, though, on the chance that he might appear, I had bought a bottle of Spanish brandy, ten times what I could afford.

  He would have loved some brandy but was in a hurry and couldn’t stay. He shuffled through my photos, then glanced at some pencil sketches and told me that, in his opinion, I would be better off sticking to drawing. After he left I sat on the floor and drank all the brandy.

  Later we would laugh about this. He’d blamed it on a bad mood. But this hasty judgment passed by the master on the younger artist’s work was, for several years, a source of uneasiness, even tension, between us.

  But all that had ended long before 1942. The war and the Occupation had put our trivial ego and aesthetic quarrels into perspective. I was flattered because Picasso asked the publishers to hire me. I was, and still am, proud to have helped create the volume that is being reprinted in a handsome new edition.

  My friends were less thrilled by the project. The baroness de Rossignol, and my future wife, Suzanne, both heroines of the Resistance, warned me that I was being used to produce a catalogue from which the Germans could choose what they wanted when they raided Picasso’s studio and took the best pieces, just as they’d cherry-picked the gems from Jewish collections. I told them that if the Germans wanted an inventory of Picasso’s sculptures, they could take their own photos; the pictures would just be worse. If the work was stolen, at least we would have an accurate record of our looted patrimony.

  Opinion was divided about how safe Picasso was. Some people said he was too famous for the Germans to touch, too rich, too well connected. On the other hand, he was a foreigner, a Spaniard who never bothered hiding how much he hated Franco. If Franco demanded his extradition, France might turn him over.

  It was rumored that he gave money to the Resistance and hid refugees in his apartment. And what was this world opinion the Germans didn’t want turning against them? The Allies wouldn’t drop one bomb more or less if a painter was arrested. The Germans preferred to keep him in Paris, to pacify the public and enjoy the sadistic pleasure of making the rebel genius be polite to the Nazis, though he never went that “extra mile,” as many artists did.

  Always in civilian clothes, Germans showed up at Picasso’s studio—once, sometimes twice a week. Picasso was famously pick
y about who he would admit: only friends, friends of friends, sometimes not even lovers. But he let in the Germans. He’d hired a pretty, German-speaking girl whose only job was to follow them around and monitor what they were looking at and saying.

  The whole time we worked together, I was afraid that a Nazi would arrive and force me to watch a human gorilla pawing through pure gold. But it never happened, whether through luck or because we were being watched. They chose their own times to visit.

  Lots of gossip was circulating about Picasso and the Germans, all of which made him look good. There is always one person the dictators allow to thrive, if only to make everyone else feel worse. Some people said these tales of courage were true, some said that Picasso made them up. He gets credit for making them up. We needed them, true or not.

  We liked the story of how the German “guests” asked about Picasso’s Afghan hound, Kazbek, and he claimed that the Afghan was a eugenically purebred dachshund. We laughed about how, when the Luftwaffe officer looked at Guernica and asked Picasso, “Did you do this?” Picasso said, “No, you did.” People said he used to talk about Hitler riding on Mussolini’s shoulders through a swamp of shit.

  We’d say, The Spaniard has balls! We needed him to have balls. No one who wasn’t alive then can understand what those stories meant to us. Humor was in short supply. Picasso’s presence in Paris—like mine, I must say—was a political act. It made it an even greater honor that I was chosen to document his work.

  Although my parents raised me to be as superstitious as only a Hungarian can be, I was by then semirecovered from my Oriental childhood. So I wasn’t entirely paralyzed by a portentous event that happened en route to my first professional visit to Picasso.

  I was passing the Hotel Lutetia, which had been requisitioned as luxury housing for Nazi counterespionage and military intelligence agents. Normally, I went out of my way to avoid the hotel that, in happier times, had let better-dressed artists drink in the bar, on credit. Picasso had stayed there, which may have been the force that drew me, unconsciously, into its evil orbit. So intent was I, so focused on the meeting ahead, that I suddenly looked up and found myself beneath the hotel’s facade, which resembles a palace constructed of melting ice cream.