Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932

by Francine Prose

  Mama died last Thursday. It would be awful to think of you going about your day, living your normal life without knowing. I hate to imagine the additional pain, when you finally find out. Though now, as I write this, I ask myself: who really would it hurt for my son to go on believing that his Mama is alive? I just had to stop writing for a moment. Tears filled my eyes when I realized that this is the first time I have used the singular possessive, my instead of our, to describe you, my son.

  She was seventy. But we’d recently agreed that seventy didn’t seem so ancient. Maybe you would have thought we looked old. So much time had passed since we saw you, so much has happened, perhaps I can be excused for failing to notice the subtle alterations that age and hardship made in Mama’s beautiful face. And will it seem strange if I say that, however calmly we talked about death—speculating over which of us might die first, and how the survivor would cope—we both believed in our secret hearts that we would live together forever?

  One day, on the way to the market, she sat down in the street. If only she hadn’t insisted on shopping! There was never any food to buy. But she would go from habit. I suppose she still met her friends there, though, unluckily, none of them were nearby that day.

  I cannot imagine what she went through for the twenty minutes (or so they told me) until they came for me, and I arrived. Sometimes one is lucky not to live in a city like Paris, where no one might have known who Mama was. It could have taken me days to find her.

  She was barely conscious, but she knew I was there. She smiled. We brought her home. I moved a bed into the living room and hired a nurse. After that, she failed rapidly, first one thing, then another. Your Uncle Ferenc explained that with the body, it’s like falling off a cliff. Once you fall there’s no way to climb back up. He made Mama’s death sound like a natural process and not a crime that could have been prevented. Though you could say it was one. The constant lack of food and fuel hadn’t exactly prolonged her life. I know that resignation would be healthier for me than anger. That’s what your mother would have said. I am trying to resign myself. If I were religious, I would say that it was God’s will. That it was your Mama’s time. There was nothing we could do. But as you know, we were not religious, nor, I gather, are you.

  I could fill this letter and a million more with the horrors that ended for her only with her death, and that continue for me without her here to console me. The violence against the Jews was hard for your tenderhearted Mama. There was one incident . . . I’ll spare you the details except to say that it involved the kosher butcher you may remember. His shop was just off Karolyi Square. He was forced to butcher a pig and wash down his counters with its blood. Your mother flew into a rage. It was so unlike her! I remember that her speech sounded a tiny bit slurred that evening. Stupidly, I wondered if she might have exceeded her usual sip of sherry before dinner.

  Did the assault on the butcher cause Mama’s first attack, a warning no one heeded? To think so would make me angrier, but also proud to have spent my life with a woman with such compassion and such a strong moral sense. What was happening made her sick. Literally sick. I only hope you will find a woman as empathetic as she was.

  Your Mama and I were blessed to fall in love, doubly blessed to marry and have you. Perhaps your parents were too close. Perhaps we made you feel shut out—an exclusion that led to the long separation that must (and should) have been easier for you than for us. Mama and I always understood we would pay a price for our closeness. Would it help either of us if I went on about the shocks I experience now, several times daily? My footsteps echoing through the house, the icy chill of the sheets.

  I want to say something about your mother to help you keep her spirit alive, after she is gone. She loved you unconditionally. She thought you were the handsomest, kindest, most gifted boy in the world. Modern thinking suggests there should be more space between a mother and her child. Maybe you thought something like that and insured that distance by staying in Paris. But you never stopped being her darling. She was connected to you in almost supernatural ways.

  When insomnia tormented you, she stopped sleeping. Later in life, she’d blamed it on her change, but it had begun long before. I told her your insomnia might be a blessing in disguise. It sent you out into the streets of Paris where so much of your best work was done. It was not a blessing for Mama, in our bedroom at home, where she lay with her eyes wide open, imagining the worst.

  The thought of her boy out late, alone, in the dark dangerous Paris streets so terrified her that every time I drifted off to sleep, I heard her sighing and tossing. I told her that, knowing you, you probably weren’t alone, besides which Paris was not so dangerous nor (unlike our town) so dark. In the morning she’d go to the pharmacist and buy one money-wasting potion after another. She would experiment on herself and send you the ones that tricked her into sleep.

  Since the war began we tried not to talk about you as much as before. It was too painful not to know how you were. But we couldn’t help ourselves. We spoke about the past—your work, your book, our visit. We marveled at your generosity and your kindness. How we never once got a letter in which you didn’t say how much you missed us and how much you wished you could come home, though it was never clear to us why you couldn’t return for a visit.

  From your infancy Mama knew you were destined for greatness. Sometimes I would ask why it was taking you so long to find your way. Sometimes it seemed you did nothing but go to cafés, nightclubs, and even, God help us, brothels. She would remind me to have faith in you and your talent.

  After your book came out, we talked about what a great artist you were, especially when we woke in the middle of the night, as old people do, both fearing some version of what has now occurred. The thought of you would comfort us, and we would fall back asleep.

  Your Mama was right about everything. You should feel only satisfaction at how proud you made her. My only hope, and I know hers would be too, is that you find someone who adores you half as much as we do.

  Our love for you has sustained us through the dark hours, and this is the darkest. I pray that I will live to see you again on this earth. But for now I send you hugs, and my undying love,

  Your Papa

  From The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars

  BY NATHALIE DUNOIS

  Chapter Fifteen: Nobody’s Idiot

  ONCE MORE, THE possibility that I may have to finance the publication of this book has proved unexpectedly liberating. I can confess, as another biographer might not, that six months have elapsed—six trying months during which I taught my classes and ended yet another disastrous romantic relationship—since I wrote the last chapter.

  This delay is partly a result of my now being compelled to write about a period when Lou Villars’s name began to appear on the lists of the interrogators at the headquarters of the French Gestapo—the so-called Active Group Hesse, informally known as La Carlingue. This was the infamous office at 93 rue Lauriston, where French collaborators and their gangster colleagues presided over a kingdom decorated with exotic flowers, gilded Buddhas, and gleaming parquet floors above a freezing, dripping cellar to which prisoners were brought to be beaten by the torturers who would disappear and return, drying their hands, to rejoin the lavish parties upstairs.

  In the journals of Jean-Claude Bonnet, a desiccated volume flaking away in a private archive in Tours, are a series of notations, always brief and always the same, in a script with which a graphologist would probably have a field day. On a sheet of onionskin is written again and again: Drive country. As per med orders. Driver: Lou Villars.

  Though Bonnet had unlimited access to gasoline, he was understandably wary of getting behind the wheel. Not only had he wrecked his new car and killed a young woman, but he’d also had to order the manufacturer shot. He bought a workhorse Mercedes and hired Lou to drive it. He preferred to ride around at night and to talk—to Lou or to himself—freely, in the darkness.

  For Lou it was almost like driving Arm
and. She loved the sugary opium smell on Bonnet’s breath, but unlike Armand, Bonnet gave up drugs when the pain of his injuries subsided. For a while every loud noise reminded him of his accident, and he would begin to tremble. But eventually he got over it and made a full recovery.

  The ledgers show Lou receiving a wage that grew incrementally over the period during which she worked for Bonnet. She could rehire Marcel to run the garage when Bonnet needed her elsewhere. Yet Bonnet no longer seemed quite so interested in the information she provided.

  She was grateful for the salary. But more was involved than money. Often Bonnet asked Lou’s advice, not only about cars but also about delicate matters at the Ministry of Information. No one had ever consulted Lou about anything important, and Bonnet’s trust inspired in her a loyalty and even a love almost as powerful as any she’d felt for Armand or Inge.

  Without mentioning Inge, they talked about the Führer. Bonnet knew every detail of that dinner in Berlin. He only wished that the Führer had singled him out for such personal attention. Several times he said that if he did get to speak to the Führer in private, he’d tell him about certain weak links at the Paris bureau. He named diplomats and generals, and Lou paid close attention, in case she needed this information later.

  Was Bonnet’s new chattiness a result of the car wreck? An injury to the brain? Given his position, shouldn’t someone know how indiscreet he was when he gossiped? Lou wasn’t about to snitch on him—on principle and for practical reasons. Besides, no one would believe her. Sometimes she just listened; sometimes she gave her opinion.

  The roads were nearly empty but for bicycles, wagons, and donkeys braying in triumph at having outlasted the cars. As Lou and Bonnet left the city for the countryside they both loved, Bonnet complained bitterly about how the atmosphere at the ministry was changing.

  He was surrounded by fanatics obsessed with calibrating how many drops of Jewish blood it took to pollute the French population. He attended meetings at which they discussed who was a secret Israelite. Roosevelt! Churchill! The pope! Hitler had two Jewish grandparents! No rock was too slimy to overturn if a Jewish worm might be lurking beneath it. To be anti-Jewish was to be pro-French. The priests preached love and forgiveness. But in private they said, Don’t forget who murdered Our Lord.

  Bonnet understood not wanting to socialize with Jews. Even if they weren’t naturally greedy, cunning, eager to seduce Christian girls and lower the already low French birthrate by performing abortions, one could hardly tolerate their obnoxious conviction that they were better and smarter than everyone else. Still, didn’t it seem counterproductive for French leaders and politicians to spend every waking moment thinking about the Jews? Wasn’t it a waste of energy to train one’s dog, as several colleagues had, to attack Yids on command? What a waste of resources, when cloth was in such short supply, to make them patch their vulgar clothes with ugly yellow stars!

  Bonnet could understand the obsession with Jewish money. The Jews owned all the best real estate, the most profitable banks, the priciest art collections. They squandered funds their country needed on their ostentatious weddings and bar mitzvahs. But why confuse a perfectly sensible concern about the Jews with all this occult talk about blood and the Elders of Zion?

  At every level of government, it was the only conversation. The Jewish question had to be answered. Send them to Madagascar! They could afford to pay their way. But who, in the middle of a war, could transport several million Jews to an island off the African coast?

  Bonnet told Lou about a series of top secret meetings. The committee had reached a dead end, but they’d agreed to find a solution before they met again. They required a special venue, for something like a mass rally. No one knew where to find such a place in Paris. Perhaps Lou could think of a site they’d overlooked.

  These meetings were bringing Bonnet into contact with Clovis Chanac. Bonnet found Chanac vulgar and coarse, but helpful, along with his gangster friends, in making the city run smoothly. The Gasparu-Chanac gang had become a private army of enforcers for the Reich and the French Gestapo.

  Lou had heard that Arlette had left Chanac and gone back to work for Yvonne. And she worried—needlessly, she told herself—that Chanac might somehow turn Bonnet against her. Clearly, Bonnet liked and trusted her more than Chanac. But still she felt uneasy whenever she knew the two men would be in the same room.

  In her anxiety, she encouraged Bonnet to tell her every detail of the secret meetings. And what she heard would likely have been something like this:

  The Minutes of a Meeting

  Beginning in February 1942, a newly formed emergency advisory committee convened in the Paris office of the minster of the interior. The salon seemed even warmer, more welcoming and brighter when the conferees came in from the wintry chill outside the ministry’s bronze doors.

  After a few sessions the venue was changed—for reasons having to do with safety, security, and comfort—to the Institute for Study of the Jewish Question, located in the former gallery and home of the Jew Rosenberg, who had made a fortune peddling the work of degenerate artists.

  Attending were government officials, politicians, military officers, advisers, economists, engineers, statisticians, as well as experts on the latest genetic and eugenic research. Also present was the police prefect in charge of the Jewish Section of Paris, Vichy dignitaries, the director of the Jewish department, and the deputy director of the Paris bureau, which had the names of every Jew in the city on index cards, color coded by nation of origin. Also certain prominent Parisians, among them the crime boss Clovis Chanac.

  In a five-minute speech, after which he had to leave because of commitments elsewhere, Pierre Laval, the head of the French government, exhorted the committee to transcend party politics and personal differences, and, in the spirit of sacrifice, to reach an effective solution to this problem on which, they must believe him, their nation’s survival depended.

  After Laval left, the gentlemen began by transcending their different opinions of Laval. The point was that the head of state had come to address them in person. The point was that they were saving France. This was the only way to save it, and they were the only ones who could.

  The minister’s chief secretary spoke first. Their esteemed German colleagues, Messieurs Heydrich and Eichmann, were insisting that France contribute 865,000 able-bodied worker Jews to the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. This figure was nonnegotiable, though every attempt had been made to reduce this demanding quota.

  The committee’s task was to decide how this population transfer might be most expeditiously arranged. The urgency of this problem had been highlighted recently when a train left Bordeaux with only a few hundred Jews aboard, an expensive and wasteful trip, consuming precious fuel, leaching time and energy from the Fatherland, all of which so annoyed Eichmann that he’d promised France would pay dearly if anything like that happened again. Apparently Hitler was taking a special interest in the French solution to the Jewish problem.

  A statistician performed some calculations, then shook his head. The editor of a far-right paper asked where the Germans imagined they could find a million Jews capable of doing anything besides making money and whining. Chanac asked if the Germans expected them to pull a million Jews out of their asses?

  The meeting was called to order. The gentlemen observed the rules of procedure. Their proposals were accepted or voted down and replaced with counterproposals. Only rarely did the temperature rise when, like competitive schoolboys, they vied to come up with the most ingenious plan. Among the first successes, which several committee members later claimed and later still denied, was the decision to call the program Operation Spring Breeze.

  Matters of scheduling were discussed. Would they get a credit—that is, a deduction—for the ten thousand Jews deported last year? No, they would not. Besides, ten thousand was a fraction of the figure being named. At the end of the first meeting it was unanimously resolved to table the discussion, pending a report from th
e census experts and statisticians.

  In the interim another meeting was held to rule on acceptable parameters regarding age, gender, health, and so forth. These issues could not be resolved until they heard from the statisticians. Meanwhile the police chiefs from Paris and Vichy began a long dispute about who would assume responsibility for tactical operations that might be awkward for the French cops.

  The original guidelines specified males between sixteen and fifty, 90 percent able-bodied. This seemed reasonable and passed on the first vote, with the proviso that the statisticians and census experts could adjust down to age fifteen and up to fifty-five if it would make a significant difference in meeting the quota. It was respectfully pointed out that the color coding of the index cards was no longer relevant, since the distinction between French Jews and foreign Jews, a division about which Vichy felt strongly, was from a numerical standpoint impractical and would have to be abandoned.

  But the cards would still be useful. Don’t throw them away! Everyone laughed, which lightened the mood a bit.

  Things appeared to be going well, especially when it turned out that the Germans were not really so inflexible about deadlines and numbers. In fact they were open to negotiation, especially when several ministers admitted that the original figures had given a somewhat alarmist picture of the Jewish threat to France.

  The committee applauded when it was announced that the Germans had cut the number of Jews to be deported from Paris to 32,000. Unfortunately, this was followed by bad news from the statisticians, who said that many Jews, tipped off in advance, had already left, and the original estimates of the Jewish population had been wildly, perhaps intentionally inflated. Someone asked if anyone knew who might have done this and why, but the question was ignored. Someone else suggested adding Jews married to Aryans, a group originally exempted. There were quite a few thousand of these, so that would be a help.