Unwilling to endure more false cordiality, Herriot objected to his arrest. He had come to Paris in good faith and with German assurances to preside over the National Assembly. Now, he was being linked to the Vichy government, whose actions he had always opposed. He demanded not to be sent to Germany. ‘Abetz looked very much embarrassed, ’ Josée recalled, ‘as he had just received orders to the contrary and had so notified Herriot before the luncheon.’ While the conversation proceeded, more armed Gestapo guards surrounded the Hôtel Matignon. Jeanne Laval appealed to Abetz, ‘Mr. Ambassador, this departure, under these conditions, is an outrage. See for yourself the painful situation it puts us all in.’ Herriot interjected, ‘Please, listen to her, Mr. Ambassador. This is the voice of France.’ Jeanne Laval said it was significant that her husband and Herriot, old political opponents, had come together. ‘You cannot condone an action that would make it appear as if my husband had instigated unscrupulous tactics resulting in Monsieur Herriot’s being forced to undergo the same fate as ours, under duress.’ The lunch party lingered till after four o’clock, making small talk, in Josée’s words, ‘anecdotes and reminiscences–the Duke of Windsor, Anthony Eden, the League of Nations, the Ethiopian crisis, etc.’. At four thirty, Abetz took the Herriots back to the Hôtel de Ville under arrest.
René followed his wife and her father upstairs to the Lavals’ apartment. Josée, near tears, told her father, ‘I’ll go alone with you.’ When René heard his wife offer to accompany him to Germany, he said, ‘I’ll go too.’ Laval gave René what he called a ‘heavy look’, and Josée backed down. ‘Alors,’ she said, ‘I’ll stay in Paris.’
René and Josée returned home to the Place du Palais Bourbon, but René went out again on the pretext of bringing Herriot some cigars and books. It was five thirty when he drove up to the Hôtel de Ville. The Prefect of the Seine led him past Gestapo guards to Herriot’s quarters. René offered the old man an escape route. He whispered, ‘There is a side exit that is not watched, and I propose, with the prefect’s agreement, that you escape with me through the sewers. I will hide you in Passy in a little flat that an American let me have in case of need.’ The American was his friend Seymour Weller, who ran Bordeaux’s famed Château Haut-Brion vineyards and had avoided German internment through various ruses to remain in Paris. While René waited for an answer, Herriot ‘alternately raised and lowered his right and left hands, as if weighing the pros and cons’. Coming to a decision, he said to René in a low voice, ‘I must follow my fate.’ He then embraced René, who left disappointed.
When all her guests had left the long lunch, Jeanne Laval called Clara de Chambrun. Pierre, she said, had been arrested and was about to be deported. She refused to be separated from her husband and would accompany him to Germany. ‘I hurried to Matignon,’ Clara wrote, ‘where I found her, as always in moments of calamity, in complete possession of her presence of mind and will, and of that extraordinary psychic power of divination which is almost like second sight.’ Jeanne Laval worried about the children, René and Josée. When the Resistance came into the open, it would keep its promise to deal with collaborators. She urged Clara, ‘They must get to the country and work with their hands, for Josée cannot live and think without her father and without me. We three have always formed one unity.’ Clara recalled, ‘She knew that I would never see her husband again and begged me to ask the General to come from the hospital that night to say farewell.’
Clara left through the courtyard, passing a throng of prefects, presidents of municipal councils, chiefs of police and mayors of the Paris region, who had come to see Laval. Laval issued them a letter requesting their support for two prefects, René Bouffet and Amédée Bussière, ‘in whose hands I am placing the fate of Paris’. Clara waited at home in the rue de Vaugirard for Aldebert. He arrived from Neuilly just after nine o’clock, and they went together to the Hôtel Matignon. ‘The German police were already on the spot and were arresting all the cabinet members,’ Clara wrote. ‘Under the cover of darkness and confusion Laval recommended to two of them to disappear and hide themselves, which they accomplished to the fury of the police, who assumed a very threatening aspect towards the President. With his characteristic form of humor he said, “I don’t see why you complain to me. I am the aggrieved one. I told them to bring me back two cartons of cigarettes and they have gone off with my change.”’
The three Chambruns waited in the gravel forecourt of the Matignon with Josée. Upstairs, where the only light in blacked-out Paris shone weakly from rows of candles, Laval said farewell to a few friends and fellow politicians. He came down holding his cane and wearing his familiar white tie and dark hat. René watched his father-in-law kiss Josée goodbye as he got into a sleek black Hotchkiss car. A moment later, Laval opened the car door, stepped onto the running board and rushed back to Josée. Giving her another kiss, he said, ‘Toi, encore une fois’ (‘You, one more time’). The palace’s iron gate opened, and the Lavals disappeared into the night. Now, the Chambruns would have to save themselves.
The occupation was ending ignominiously for Count René de Chambrun, who had bound his destiny to Pierre Laval’s. Only later would he admit the possibility of a different life. If he had married an American he loved before he met Josée, he would not have collaborated with Laval. To Josée’s biographer, Yves Pourcher, he confided, ‘I was in love with the daughter of the chief of the Federal Reserve Bank, who was originally Jewish and German. I would not have been happy, because she was so oriented to art, to music. Not me, apart from do-re-me-fa-so . And in Cincinnati they [the Longworth family] were anti-German and anti-Jewish.’ He did not tell Pourcher the name of the woman, whom he had met when he lived in New York between 1930 and 1934. The Federal Reserve chief at the time was Eugene Meyer. Meyer, son of a German-speaking immigrant from Alsace, was the Reserve’s first Jewish head since its founding in 1913. Meyer had two daughters, Katharine and Florence. In 1930, his younger daughter, Katharine, was thirteen, and the elder, Florence, was nineteen. Florence Meyer was undoubtedly René’s first, albeit secret, love. René explained to Pourcher that the Longworths’ objections to her were ‘strictly American’, in that Cincinnati’s large German community had opposed his Uncle Nicholas Longworth in elections. There was also an aversion in conservative, Christian circles to what were called ‘mixed marriages’. If René had married Florence Meyer, the Free French, American and British forces approaching Paris would be celebrating Bunny de Chambrun as the soldier who persuaded his cousin Franklin Roosevelt not to abandon Britain in 1940. Instead, all three reviled him as a collaborator and confidant of the despised Pierre Laval.
After the Gestapo left the Hôtel Matignon with Pierre and Jeanne Laval, René and Josée returned to their magnificent duplex apartment at 6-bis Place du Palais Bourbon. A hundred yards from their front door, German troops in the Chamber of Deputies were digging in and erecting bunkers to defend themselves from the Allies and the Resistance. René reflected that only Laval’s harsh look had prevented Josée and himself from ending up imprisoned at Sigmaringen castle in Germany with Maréchal Pétain, Laval and most of the Vichy regime. Paris would soon be no safer: ‘We had risked spending the last days of the occupation in a German prison, and being transferred at the liberation to a French prison. We had to disappear quickly, which is what we did, the next day, in going to seek refuge in the rue d’Andigné at the house of our American friend, Seymour Weller.’ René had envisioned Weller’s flat as a hiding place for Edouard Herriot, but things happened so quickly that he took it for himself and Josée. While Parisians prepared to welcome their American, British and Free French liberators, the younger Chambruns went underground.
Free French forces landed in the south of France on 15 August, moving north to join the Anglo-American invaders and the French Second Armoured Divison on their way south from Normandy. One of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s officers in the First French Army was an American. William Christian Bullitt, the last American ambassador to Paris, had sp
ent the previous four years in the United States. President Roosevelt denied him a cabinet post but persuaded him to run, unsuccessfully, as a Democrat for mayor of Philadelphia. When 53-year-old Bullitt asked Secretary of War Henry Stimson for a commission in the American army to fight the Nazis, Stimson turned him down. Charles de Gaulle cabled Bullitt from Algiers on 25 May as the Allies were preparing to invade France: ‘Come now! Good and dear American friend. Our ranks are open to you. You will return with us to wounded Paris. Together we will see your star-spangled banners mingled with our tricolors.’ De Gaulle commissioned him as the French equivalent of major, commandant, in the Free French army.
Bullitt accompanied the First French Army, which he called ‘the only French Army’, as it captured Marseilles and Toulon. His admiration of General de Lattre, a First World War hero who went into battle wielding his grandfather’s Napoleonic era sabre, was unbounded. He wrote to his brother, Orville, ‘He goes into the front line constantly with your humble brother along.’ In the midst of battle, bon vivant Bullitt appreciated Lattre’s ‘superb’ chef and found time to buy ‘a lot of the best wines in Burgundy’. He wanted only two things: to see free Paris again and to defeat the Nazis, whom he had condemned as enemies of America when most Americans wanted to stay on the sidelines.
FORTY-EIGHT
The Paris Front
THE PARTING AT THE HÔTEL MATIGNON had been painful for Clara, who loved both Jeanne and Pierre Laval. She feared she would never see them again, and she had no idea when René and Josée could emerge from hiding. That night, she faced an even more difficult separation, from Aldebert. She wrote, ‘Heartbroken as I was, and feeling the true gravity of what had happened to us and to the country, life had to go on with thought for the morrow. I was obliged to seek courage where best I could find it, for I could no longer rely on my husband’s reserve stock of optimism. His presence at the hospital was essential, and my own duty was clearly at home.’ The American Hospital needed all of 72-year-old General de Chambrun’s energies if it were to remain, in its final hours under occupation, as free of Germans as it had been throughout his stewardship. Just as importantly, his duty was to save it from becoming a battle ground between the Resistance and the German garrison beside the hospital. The loss of the commanding presence of Dr Sumner Jackson made his task all the more difficult. The general worked day and night, helping the hospital to function amid shortages caused by fighting on the roads into Paris and overseeing the treatment of civilian and Resistance wounded. His round-the-clock presence there left Clara alone in the rue de Vaugirard, which was about to face a crisis of its own.
From her balcony, Clara saw over the hedges and iron fence of the Luxembourg Gardens into what had become a Luftwaffe fortress: Inside the gardens, there is a small two-storied villa–perquisite of one of the city engineers taken over by the German air service–and heavily fortified. On the side of the house they had built out a broad-roofed terrace on which they had placed a battery of automatic cannon and machine guns commanding the entire row of windows. At the crossroads dominated by this improvised fortress, the Wehrmacht (after mid-August) had erected a sort of wooden redoubt, lined by a triple row of heavy sandbags, with room enough inside for a large armor-plated tank and its crew to take shelter.
The Luxembourg’s defences threatened Clara’s ‘respectable-looking quarter’, but more ominous were the preparations that Clara could not see. The Germans were laying tons of dynamite beneath the Palais de Luxembourg so that, when the order came, they would destroy the seventeenth-century palace with its Senate chamber and its fabulous collection of paintings. General Dietrich von Choltitz, whom Hitler had personally named commander of Grossparis on 7 August, had instructed army engineers to set demolition charges throughout Paris. ‘Whatever happens,’ General Alfred Jodl, the army’s chief of operations, reminded von Choltitz, ‘the Führer expects you to carry out the widest destruction possible in the area assigned to your command.’ Von Choltitz ordered explosives to be planted under every bridge, electricity station and water-pumping plant as well as the most famous monuments. Marked for destruction were the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Hôpital des Invalides with Napoleon’s tomb and the Palais du Luxembourg. Blowing up the palace would take Clara’s house and much of the rue de Vaugirard with it. The explosion would not spare the apartments of Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier close by in the rue de l’Odéon.
‘Going to and fro was getting too unpleasant,’ Sylvia wrote of her daily walks from Sarah Watson’s student hostel to Adrienne’s flat. With the sudden eruption of street violence in August, the Germans had more important concerns than arresting Sylvia Beach. So, she moved back into her flat in the rue de l’Odéon. German troops patrolled the streets with more fear and hostility than they had before the Normandy landings. ‘In the mornings, towards 11 o’clock,’ Sylvia wrote, ‘the Nazis sallied forth from the Luxembourg with their tanks and went down the Boulevard Saint Michel, shooting here and there. Rather disagreeable for those of us who were lined up at the bakery at the bread hour.’
A straight line of only 500 yards separated Sylvia Beach’s apartment from Clara de Chambrun’s house. For four years of occupation, the two American women had shared the Sixth Arrondissement and a love of books. Yet they inhabited different worlds. Clara, 70 years of age and friend of men she believed had shielded France from the worst of German occupation, distrusted the mobs that were forming to take over Paris when the Germans left. They were, in her eyes, ‘wartime profiteers’, ‘ruffians’ and ‘urchins.’ Sylvia, 57 and a friend of résistants and Jews murdered by the Nazis, saw the same militants as heroes. Negotiating the moral maze of occupation, even Sylvia had thanked a Vichy police minister, Jacques Benoist-Méchin, for her release from internment in 1943. And Clara, whatever her sympathy for Vichy, looked forward to the arrival of the American army and never doubted her loyalty to her native and adopted lands. The Countess from Cincinnati and the publisher from Princeton represented, as well as differing French reactions to occupation, opposing American conceptions of right and wrong. To Sylvia, liberty came first. Clara believed liberty was impossible without order.
Clara and Sylvia watched the same armed men and women erecting roadblocks in their Sixth Arrondissement, not that they saw them in the same way. Clara wrote, ‘Amateurish barricades sprang up at about every six or ten blocks, which embarrassed regular traffic, but which meant nothing to a tank.’ The same barricades symbolized defiance and courage to Sylvia:The children engaged in our defence piled up furniture, stoves, dust-bins, and so on at the foot of the rue de l’Odéon, and behind these barricades youths with F.F.I. [Forces Françaises de l’Intérieure] armbands and a strange assortment of old-fashioned weapons aimed at the Germans stationed on the steps of the theatre at the top of the street. These [German] soldiers were rather dangerous, but the boys in the Resistance were fearless and they played an important part in the Liberation of Paris.
In the midst of the random shooting in late August, Sylvia received heartening news:We heard that ‘they’ were leaving us, and we joined a jolly crowd of Parisians walking down the Boulevard Saint Michel singing and waving w.c. brushes. We were feeling very joyful and liberated. But ‘they’ happened to be leaving at the same moment, pouring down the street with the remnants of their motorized forces. ‘They’ didn’t like the celebration, lost their tempers, and began machine-gunning crowds on the pavements. Like everybody else, Adrienne and I lay flat on our bellies and edged over to the nearest doorway. When the shooting stopped and we got up, we saw blood on the pavements and Red Cross stretchers picking up the casualties.
The jubilation along the boulevard Saint-Michel came too soon. The German units leaving Paris were on their way to engage the Allies north and west of the city. Paris remained a German fortress, and its inhabitants were still prisoners.
Neuilly-sur-Seine was one of the quietest suburbs of Paris. Unlike the working-class districts north of the city, the bourgeois western region lacked communist parti
sans. Few of its citizens attacked German troops. The American Hospital in Neuilly had been unmolested by the German garrison at its Kommandatur headquarters facing the hospital’s main gate in the avenue Victor Hugo. The area commander, an Austrian colonel named Bernhuber, had at his disposal a thousand combat troops with six large and twelve small cannon, five tanks and about eighty trucks. In addition, he told General de Chambrun, his men had machine guns and an unlimited supply of ammunition. The tanks were usually stationed at the traffic roundabouts to command the wide boulevards. Their strength was sufficient, the Germans believed, to keep order in tranquil Neuilly.
Violence had come in the late spring and early summer, when the Allies bombed Neuilly’s Renault factory. The plant, not far from the American Hospital, was manufacturing military vehicles for the German army. No bombs touched the hospital with its large Red Cross on the roof. When Germans parked their military vehicles near the hospital’s main gate for protection, General de Chambrun went to Colonel Bernhuber and said, officer to officer, ‘I ask you to consider that the flag of the Red Cross protects the hospital, not the cars of the Wehrmacht.’ Colonel Bernhuber immediately ordered the vehicles moved away from the hospital.
Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation Page 41