A Dangerous Woman

by Susan Ronald

  * * *

  Steffens was probably not Florence’s lover, but rather someone tasked by the Nazis to discover the fate of the fifteenth-century tapestries that Florence had secured through Bullitt at the American embassy in Paris before the occupation. In a rather confusing story told after the war, Florence maintained that Maynard Barnes, a U.S. representative at Vichy, placed the tapestries in the already mothballed American embassy in Paris. This was a physical impossibility. Interestingly however, Steffens failed to report on the tapestries’ whereabouts, and seemed unduly concerned about the Gould relationship with Admiral Leahy, the U.S. ambassador to Vichy, who was living in the Gould mansion in the town. Florence told Steffens repeatedly that Leahy was just an old friend of her husband’s.21 Frank, meanwhile, remained at Juan-les-Pins, with Magdeleine Homo, Cécile Tellier, and Florence’s sister, Isabelle.

  Steffens was no freewheeler, out to get the Gould art for himself. He was asking on behalf of his greedy masters for the purposes of “safeguarding” the tapestries and the rest of the valuable Gould collections. Frank had a fine medieval collection in his own right, acquired since the beginning of the century. While Florence’s newer purchases were mainly Impressionist works, Göring and others had already traded works by Renoir, Monet, and Gauguin for their preferred Renaissance artists, or, if need be, in foreign exchange to buy armaments.

  In Florence’s dizzying, revolving door of German men between 1940 and 1942, only one remained constant: Ludwig Vogel. He traveled with Florence several times to the south of France to see Frank, and steadied the tiller through the rough waters of the early occupation, allowing Florence to continue to live exactly how she wanted. They were both like-minded individuals who held a strong attraction to one another.

  Still, was it an honest relationship? Deeply buried in the archives of the DGER in Paris, Source D, as he is called in the OSS documents, states that Vogel was a Gestapo agent. Was Florence taken in by a handsome opportunist, or was she aware, as the DGER claimed later, that she conveniently aided the Germans until 1943 in partnership with Vogel, then began helping the Allies when the outcome of the war was more certain?22 Honesty and occupation are never easy travel companions.

  Nonetheless, from October 1941, Florence and Vogel would become virtually inseparable. Florence, certainly, was deeply attached to him. He often stayed at Hôtel Bristol when Florence feared detention or arrest. Steffens warned her that year of several threats to the Gould businesses and to her personally. At Vogel’s behest, she decamped to the Riviera for a month that spring.23 Often she would tell her friends that she was visiting her husband at Juan-les-Pins when, in fact, she was staying with Vogel in his apartment at 133 avenue Malakoff.24

  Vogel had his other attractions, too. As an “approved” black marketeer of the Luftwaffe, he could lay his hands on virtually anything. Unbelievably, when Göring put a stop to the laissez-faire activities of Germans who were impeding the war effort with their greed, Vogel survived. How? He was part of Organization Otto, which would be tasked by Hermann Göring to head up all black markets throughout France after June 13, 1942. His direct superior and good friend, Dr. Colonel Bosse, was responsible for the section called MUNIMIM (MUNItions-MInisteriuM), located at 33 avenue Champs-Élysées. Its purchases were designated as metals, tools, machine tools, cables, milk products, butter, eggs, canned goods, and fresh vegetables.25 Florence had chosen her lover well.

  * * *

  Toward the end of 1941, many Parisians had grown accustomed to the “new normal” of food and fuel shortages. They dreaded another cold winter without coal or wood. France was paying 400 million francs a day to Germany for “maintaining” the occupation, for which the Germans exported crucial manufactured goods and foodstuffs without payment.

  It had been eighteen months since anyone outside Florence’s circle of friends had seen chocolate. A blend of roasted barley and chicory passed as coffee in cafés and at home. The ration of bread was a mere three-quarters of a pound a day; children had less than two pints a day of milk and adults had no milk; and butter was limited to six ounces per week, which made baking pastries a thing of the past. Stocks were low, and always outstripped by demand. Jean Guéhenno wrote in his book about the occupation, On vit mal (Life Is Hard), “A kilo of butter costs a thousand francs. A kilo of peas forty-five francs. A kilo of potatoes forty francs. Still, one must find them.” By 1942, there was no coffee, chocolate, confectionary, or cooking fats available—even on the black market.

  Les Halles, with the largest wholesale meat market in Paris, could no longer afford to display chicken, turkey, or even rabbit at any price. Two days before Christmas in 1940, Les Halles had been without any meat whatsoever for three days.26 Yet Florence’s table never lacked a thing. Nor did the restaurants like Le Tour d’Argent or Maxim’s, frequented by le Tout-Paris and their Nazi masters.

  Worse came that winter. With coal production more than halved, Paris froze. Florence and her lover Ludwig Vogel, however, prospered.

  22

  IN THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS

  Happiness depends more upon the internal frame of a person’s own mind than the externals of the world.

  —GEORGE WASHINGTON

  As France braced for its second winter under the occupation, Florence began to see the light. Blind eyes, including Florence’s, were averted from Jews made stateless by the occupier’s laws of October 1940. Jews alone, she believed, would have their possessions Aryanized, with German or French Catholic managers put in their places.

  Within two months of the fall of France, art gallery owners fell like nine pins before the roaring Nazi machinery of state. The Bernheim-Jeune gallery was sold for a few pennies on the dollar to a known collaborationist. Daniel Kahnweiler made his gallery over to his Catholic sister-in-law, Louise Leiris. Paul Rosenberg’s gallery became the headquarters for the Institut d’Études des Questions Juive (IEQJ), the French arm that instituted and enforced its heinous restrictions on Jews. Private collectors like Alphonse Kann, Adolphe Schloss, the Rothschild cousins, and hundreds of others fled, in extreme haste, trying to protect their art as best they could. Only Florence’s great friend and art dealer, Daniel Wildenstein, managed to negotiate when and how his establishment would be Aryanized, entrusting the business to his loyal employee Roger Dequoy. The deal reached was agreed to with Hitler’s art dealer of long standing, Karl Haberstock, in a “4 to 5 day” period at Aix-en-Provence.1 Madeleine Manigler remained safe, working for Dequoy, while Wildenstein sat out the occupation in New York.

  Florence was seen after September 1940, bidding for “degenerate” Impressionist art at the auctions, taking advantage of the sudden influx of otherwise unavailable modern masterpieces. Manigler and Dequoy continued to advise Florence in Daniel Wildenstein’s enforced absence, and she did well out of the auctions. Still, Vogel warned her that sooner or later, the United States was expected to join the British against the Reich, and she may have to prepare herself for an Aryanization of her property. As long as America remained neutral, however, she need not fear. When the attack on Pearl Harbor took the United States by surprise on December 7, 1941, Vogel’s suspicions became a reality. War on Japan was declared the following day. The inevitable declaration of war on the Third Reich came on December 11.

  Florence spent Christmas 1941 with Frank in Juan-les-Pins, discussing once again if they should leave. Frank repeated that he was too ill to travel, despite Vogel’s offer to fly him to safety in a private plane.2 Frank insisted on remaining; however, he told Florence she could do as she wished. At last, even the Goulds were compelled to face up to reality: holding on to their French empire required Florence’s contacts within the German occupying forces. Without her complicity, all would be lost. For a man who had been seriously ill for over twenty years, facing such a future had to be a daunting prospect, even with reassurances from his multitalented wife and her lover, Vogel. That is, if Frank could reason clearly after years of memory problems brought on by Korsakoff Syndrome.
Still, the three of them knew that it could only be a matter of months, if that, before the occupiers would come after the Gould fortune. If Florence hoped for René de Chambrun’s advice, she would have been disappointed. Chambrun’s father-in-law and Vichy’s prime minister, Pierre Laval, had been arrested on December 13, 1941, on the orders of Pétain.

  * * *

  Early in 1942, Florence returned to Paris, still living at Hôtel Bristol or with Vogel at 133 avenue Malakoff, when time and circumstances permitted. Then Vogel arranged “vacant possession” of a huge eight-room apartment in the neighboring building, at number 129 avenue Malakoff, for Florence. Who had lived there before is unknown, but since Vogel’s apartment belonged to a Jewish family, it is reasonably safe to assume that Florence’s was owned by a Jewish family, too. Both buildings had been requisitioned by the Nazis, but only Jewish families and a select group of “politically incorrect” owners had been forced out.3

  The chosen address was not only convenient to Vogel’s apartment, but was also a familiar one for Florence. It faced the “pink palace” originally built by Anna Gould for her marriage to Boni de Castellane.* The rent on Florence’s new apartment was reported variously as 30,000 and 60,000 francs annually.4 No matter the cost, she determined she would not be hounded out of her place in society, or her world, or let external considerations intrude on it.

  While the apartment was made ready with its art deco furnishings, Persian rugs, and dark blue silk sofas, modern lighting, Middle Eastern glass objets d’art that Frank had bought, and Oriental-style black lacquered tables for the dining room, Florence received her writer friends at Hôtel Bristol for sumptuous lunches, dinners, and even high teas.5 Hungry writers queued up to be on the invitation list, save the Café Flore habitués like Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre and the virulent anti-Semitic writer Dr. Louis-Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, better known under his penname, Céline. Drieu de la Rochelle kept his distance, too. Yet Gerhard Heller, censor extraordinaire, attended these lunches with the publisher Jean Fayard.6

  At forty-six, Florence retained all her sex appeal and allure. “She was pretty, tall, with dark blonde hair,” Heller described Florence in his biography, “a woman of thirty years of age, and terribly attractive; a woman who knew everyone; and had a tremendous love of literature … her dinner table knew no bounds.”7 While his was a flattering portrait of the middle-aged Florence, she readily admitted she knew little about books. Instead she prided herself that she knew a great deal about authors, who were, after all, for the most part men. The legend created by Marie-Louise Bousquet and Florence during one of Bousquet’s salons was that Bousquet suggested that Florence start her own literary salon. What no one else knew was that Florence had already begun to fit out her first proper salon for writers that February at 129 avenue Malakoff. But the project was put on hold, slightly delayed due to a fractured leg.

  In trying to attract the “big names” in French literature for her first salon, Florence had asked Pierre Benoit to attend. How could a man who wrote the line “I could not resist the desire to speak to you, to write your name.… It is terrible, you know, to have a power like yours,” say no to her?8 What Benoit did not voice was that all great writers—even the “Immortals”—were required to be the obeying subjects of the world of high society and their individual patrons. After all, without patrons, who could afford the extortionate cost of becoming an “Immortal”?

  One “Immortal” who did manage to say no was Céline. No amount of pleading, cajoling, tears, sexual prowess, or taunts of easing his penury could persuade Céline to enter Florence’s circle. Even Céline’s long-term relationship with Dr. Verne’s Institut Prophylactique at 32 rue d’Assas, which treated prostitutes for venereal diseases and was financed by Gould money, couldn’t make him budge. In desperation, Florence arrived at Céline’s home one evening with actress Marie Bell in a horse-drawn buggy, armed with dinner and oodles of champagne. Céline was outraged. “I who never entertain anyone was forced to receive them,” he ranted. “She said she wanted to buy my manuscripts, but I wasn’t interested. I refuse to owe anything to an American millionaire.” Florence was already drunk by the time Céline made himself clear. Céline admitted that she wasn’t disagreeable or foolish, but was instead an unmitigated snob. Eventually, he showed her the door, and she stumbled down the stairs, breaking her leg.9 He refused to visit her during her convalescence.

  * * *

  On March 28, 1942, while still living at the Hôtel Bristol, Florence received Gerhard Heller and Marcel Jouhandeau at her avenue Malakoff apartment. Heller thought she’d be pleased to meet his new friend, Ernst Jünger, the dashing World War I flying ace who had been decorated with the legendary Blue Max for his bravery. Jünger was also a fine writer, world-famous for his Storm of Steel and more recently On the Marble Cliffs, published in 1939. Heller had gauged Florence’s love of handsome men well, particularly handsome writers. “All writers are cocottes,”* she often said, laughing.

  Jünger, attached to the military headquarters based at the Hôtel Majestic, had been working on intelligence-related matters for Operation Sea Lion for the invasion of the United Kingdom. Once Sea Lion was canceled in February 1942, Jünger was at a bit of a loose end. Provisionally he was reassigned to censorship of private letters, but the assignment held little job satisfaction, nor did it make good use of his talents. So Jünger, an arch-observer, became a flâneur, or promenader, through Paris, leaving us with his reflections on the occupation. While he was amorously involved with a lady doctor in Paris prior to meeting Florence, he was entranced by Madame Gould. Jünger’s first remarks about her in his Paris diary are about her intellect. “She made some excellent reflections,” he wrote, “among others that the experience of death is one of the rare things that anyone wishes to snatch away from us.”

  He was equally impressed with her attitude toward politics, and that the key to living with political animals was to “not be afraid.” Jünger asked her to clarify her thoughts on the matter. “One evening when I was in the tropics, I saw a butterfly by the light of a lamp in the garden,” she explained, “alight onto the back of a gecko. It was a symbol of the greatest assurance.” Later, Florence talked of Mirbeau’s depiction of a terrifying landscape, and how it attracted her. “Its charm lay in its power,” Florence said, “perhaps a power that will live on once all the fun and games of the idle rich have been exhausted.”10 It was the beginning of an intimate relationship between Florence and Jünger, Heller claimed.11

  Heller tells the story of his own first encounter with Florence. It was at Marie-Louise Bousquet’s concert featuring Pierre Fournier in the spring of 1941. While standing between Heller and Jouhandeau, Florence announced that she wanted to create a literary salon, intimating that it had been the suggestion of Marie-Louise. More than likely, neither Heller nor Jouhandeau knew of the ladies’ gray mice enterprise, and had no idea that the salon would also expand their network in that field of endeavor. At the time, Heller was preoccupied with the organization of an “artistic exchange” of French writers and artists to Germany. Jouhandeau, already smitten with the rather good-looking Heller, only wanted to find himself in intimate circumstances with the German, and immediately agreed to go. The German censor, meanwhile, claimed to be immune to Florence’s ample charms. It was widely accepted, even in 1941, that “in the past, as in the present [and in the future], Heller did all he could to make people forget who he was.”12

  Florence wanted to make her salon surpass any other. Like the triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted by Hieronymus Bosch around the end of the fifteenth century, Florence’s salon embraced complex, layered notions of creation, heaven, and hell set amid an erotic madness in the minds of her faithful acolytes. Those who took part understood that her Thursdays were more than sumptuous black-market feasts where perhaps literature, business, food, and art were discussed. Florence’s Franco-German literary Thursdays at 129 avenue Malakoff were juxtapositions of love and hate; collab
o and résistant; rampant sexuality and closet homosexuality; French art and literature versus its German counterparts; German master and French supplicant; American money and French poverty; and even nihilism pitted against an ever-elusive hope. Yet despite the incongruity of the participants, these opposing individuals and their belief systems remained attracted to one another, entwined in a macabre cultural dance.

  The first “Thursday” organized by Florence at avenue Malakoff took place in April 1942. The writers present were editor Marie-Louise Bousquet, Pierre Benoit, novelist Marcel Arland, Jean Paulhan, and the high-school teacher and acerbic writer Marcel Jouhandeau, whose sole claim to fame was his anti-Semitic lampoon Le Péril Juif, published in 1938. Since Thursdays were the only days her newfound friend Jouhandeau had free, and Florence had taken a distinct shine to the unprepossessing teacher, who was scrawny and grew a beard to hide his harelip, Thursdays it would be. Others invited were Marie Bell, Arletty, and of course the ubiquitous censor Gerhard Heller. Jouhandeau remained a good friend of Paulhan’s, even though Jouhandeau’s harpy wife, Élise, denounced Paulhan to the occupation authorities that same month, fortunately without dire consequences.* As far as all the attendees were concerned, the first salon chez Florence was a resounding success, replete with fine wines and food they hadn’t seen in ages.

  Each Thursday brought a varied guest list, with Jouhandeau acting as cohost. Though he lived only a block away, Jouhandeau lied to his harridan wife (who had been an intimate of Jean Cocteau and the Jewish poet Max Jacob prior to marrying the bisexual Jouhandeau) that he was going to the popular bistro “Chez Florence” to meet his students. During the occupation, Florence’s literary circle would eventually expand to include writers Colette (by then married to the Jewish journalist Maurice Goudeket) and writer Paul Léautaud; artists like Jean Dubuffet, Marie Laurencin, and Georges Braque; as well as entertainers Sacha Guitry, Arletty, and Marie Bell.