Secret Protocols

by Peter Vansittart

  ‘Fabien?’

  ‘Colonel Fabien. Reverenced for killing an unarmed Nazi youth in 1941, thus causing the shooting of forty French hostages.’

  Silenced, I looked around at the glittering traffic: all as usual, though last week eleven Algerian militants had been found dead in Canal Saint-Martin, and a demonstration was planned, to commemorate Philippe Henriot, radio propagandist murdered by de Gaulle’s partisans in the last months of the war. The protean nature of Paris. Of Europe.

  Wilfrid led me to historic cafés, some with names familiarized since the Revolution: Coupole, Flore, Lapin Agile, Fouquet’s, Pro-cope, Tortini’s, Closerie des Lilas, l’Eléphant; the celebrities argued on the Dôme terrace, at the Rotunda and Deux Magots, sometimes with greetings tossed at him too rapidly for me to translate. More cafés on sunlit boulevard des Italiens, more bookstalls at rue de Montpellier, where he bought me Rilke’s Späte Gedichte, which, while banishing my poetic flounderings, stuck like a dart thrown by a friendly hand, and retrieved an overworld, illimitable, of gardens, wistful animals, some visible though imaginary, grave children, woodland pools, a gleaming, barely reachable Villa d’Este, fruitful dissonances, exacting harmonies, nuanced silence.

  Music! Breathing of statues, perhaps,

  stillness of pictures.

  Like Father, he enlarged me by tact. ‘I would like your opinion of this …’ A biography of Rosa Luxemburg. ‘You might find this encouraging …’ Thomas Mann. ‘This may be worth a glance …’ Feurbach, on the Individual in History.

  He liked to walk unhurriedly to some Seine inn or unfashionable Section, through Maupassant insets: card players at an outside table, children breathless before falsetto puppets, laundry-women quarrelling. He particularly favoured a small Gascon restaurant near rue Hachette, its tiny garden shaded by a plane tree and trellised vines. The burly patron and his wife greeted him like a generous uncle, with whom to converse, not swap chat. Ordering a bottle, requesting a sauce, he was always tentative, then very grateful. A bill was never presented, a bottle always slipped into his briefcase.

  In a new, modish gallery, jittery with embraces and compliments, smiles as if painted, a small, dapper gentleman squeaked recognition, greedily swallowed Wilfrid’s studied felicitations on his latest poem. ‘A mishap,’ Wilfrid murmured, on leaving, ‘Laval’s cousin, with a record, at best, unhygienic. Of considerable talent, though the question is …’

  The question remained unspoken.

  His company induced sensations of being in a movie, where taxis arrive at a beckon, the choicest table is readily available, theatre tickets are unnecessary. Ever solicitous, he tolerated my anecdotes of Mirabeau, Desmoulins, Brissot, indeed encouraged them. ‘Can you tell me, Erich …?’ ‘Is it true that …?’ rarely and apologetically, as if risking affront to my omniscience. Patient, respectful as he might be to Bergson, Proust, Maritain, he would demur with accomplished diffidence. ‘But would you not also agree … ?’ his humour so self-deprecatory that his sudden, barely controlled laugh was always a shock.

  Hearing of Father’s repugnance for Hegel, he said nothing but, finding a book, showed me ‘The Function of the Authentic State is to behave as if the Individual does not Exist.’

  He knew the antique shops, lovingly studying a curved Siamese blade that Malraux could have identified or stolen, a secretaire at which Zola or Flaubert could have sat, a mirror topped with glass centaurs that, perhaps, had reflected Manon Roland, Josephine Beauharnais, Madame Tallien. One painting appealed to me, a sunset, fête galante, autumnal, with an empty swing, satined courtiers departing through glades, a satyr leering through decayed leaves. A vanished European imagination delicately preserved. I dared not, however, show feelings, for Wilfrid, with generosity never ostentatious but a matter of course, would have bought it for me, together with an equivalent purchase for Marc-Henri, who would take it only to keep level with myself.

  In a small cinema near rue des Archives, I was introduced to pre-war movies of Clair, Duvivier, Ophuls, Carné, Lubitch, the tender and lyrical rescued from sentimentality by witty ironies, sceptical undertones, an occasional hint of foreboding. We might end in the Vieux-Colombier night club.Wilfrid attentive to jazz and girls, once, very dispassionately, dancing with a heavily made-up, blonde ex-star, long workless from flaunting her wartime liaison with a Gestapo chief. I could not penetrate the motives prompting this gesture but suspected that he liked, as it were, to make typical the untypical.

  ‘There is,’ he once announced, ‘a special picture we might inspect.’ Braque? Poussin? But no. In a ‘particular reservation’ we were soon watching a Judy Garland musical through which, save for that rare but disconcerting hoot of laughter, he sat rigid, in devotion to blazing tunes, Garland’s bouncy fling, the bizarre troupes and montages. Afterwards, the manager, as if pleading, beckoned him away for a few minutes behind a door sternly closed.

  He had his foibles: one, a distaste for bowler hats, derived, he maintained, from connoisseurship of the œuvre of Laurel and Hardy.

  In gracious parks we sauntered between chestnuts, hedges, sculpture, fountains, many still unrepaired from wartime depredations. Down an alley a cart waited, stocked with tools, pans, cutlery, caged pigeons, while blue-shirted men, probably, Wilfrid considered, on leave from the National Assembly, disputed with expletives older than Richelieu. As if in afterthought, he led me to the fragments of the medieval Episcopal palace in Cour de Rohan where a new restaurant was everywhere advertised though not yet built.We paced the cobbles of narrow rue Saint-André-des-Arts, its peace unimpaired by Cadillacs and buses. Under the spire of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, we heard the bells that tolled the Bartholomew Massacre and, at Thermidor, had summoned the virtuous to rescue Robespierre and Saint-Just.

  Later, he crossed an avenue to indicate polished windows and an intricately wrought balcony.

  ‘Behind them dwells in some state M. René Bousquet.’

  ‘An artist?’

  ‘In his way, I suppose.’ He was more resigned than enthusiastic. ‘Courageous, versatile. Lawyer, first class. Economist. Currently, he heads the Banque d’Indo-Chine, no starting post for the lame. Le Monde is praising him as the best-dressed gentleman in Paris.’

  He continued to gaze upwards, like an actor – Jouvet, Gabin, Brasseur, Barrault – savouring a key line before delivering it.

  ‘In July 1942, during the Vichy Collaboration, defined by M. Laval as the Politics of Understanding, Bousquet was Pétain’s police secrétaire générale. Eichmann sent him notice that all Jews must be deported, but for the while he would be content with only the adults. Bousquet was obliging enough to add, on his own initiative, ten thousand children. He was forecast as a future Premier of France, one of the custodians of Western civilization, by Laval, Heydrich and Himmler.’

  ‘But surely …’

  ‘Yes. Last year he was belatedly denounced and indeed tried. He admitted all charges, rather eloquently, with the further, gratuitous, information that he had extended his searches into the Unoccupied Zone.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The judges committed the impertinence of sentencing him to five years’ imprisonment, but he was immediately released on his further plea of services to the Resistance, though in sad truth he had already repaired, I think, to Stuttgart.You must, if you care for a sight of this notable product of La Belle France, wait until after dark.’

  In English-style blazer, white, with plum-coloured edges, and blue, carelessly knotted ‘flare’, he attracted many glances, curious, respectful, though, as if unaware of them, he was already moving from the pastel-hued apartment block and gracious limes. ‘I think, Erich, that as an antidote to coarser subjects, and before our friend accepts his Nobel Peace Prize, we should allow ourselves an instant of respect to another humanitarian, in whom you must have specialized information.’

  Gambetta? Jaurès? Pasteur? Curie? Rolland?

  We were soon facing a nondescript triangular house, neglected or unoccupied, with barred windo
ws, padlocked gate, on the corner of Cour de Commerce and rue d’Ancienne Comédie.

  ‘The home, Erich, of one of your natural subjects. A minor specimen. Guillotin. Dr Joseph Ignace Guillotin. He congratulated himself, sincerely and, I judge, correctly, on his recipe to cure intolerable and needless pain.’

  Returning, he said little. I, too, was thoughtful, my optimism chastened. Yet, after all, so much was stable and reassuring. The poplars rustled unchanged, a fountain purled as it might have done for Lully and Racine, a girl in a green hat, perennial gamine, thinking herself unobserved, put out her tongue at the sky, a tramp with drunken dignity rebuked a commissionaire braided and tasselled as an Italian admiral, the copper beech glistened immemorially against gold-tipped gates. Feudal and classical emblems emblazoning porticoes were imperturbable. My misgivings had already shifted to desire, not for political enlightenment but for girls, Calypsos from ‘Ogygia’ with men at their finger-tips.

  Wilfrid, I knew, was deliberately warning me, not against girls but the deceptions of peace.Witty café repartee, volatile students, a Tati film, the songs of Greco and Piaf could induce tourist coma, catch me off-guard, for, though Paris was not Meinnenberg, I had been mistaken in thinking it only Hugo’s City of Light. A Resistance plaque, bullet holes in opulent Hôtel Crillon, anti-Semitic and Stalinist scrawls in a pissoir were running reminders of what had destroyed Mother, Father, the Herr General. I should be more watchful. A dark blue June sky recalled the eyes of the Gutter King.

  Certain words had lost holiday innocence: Camp, Comrade, Cattle Truck, Shed, Fence were short-cuts to horror, as, long ago, had been Rope, Cross, Tumbrel. Certain words also were immovable: Jazz, Rose, Corot.

  3

  The Red Cross was never to discover my parents’ fates, save that Mother had died in Berlin in 1943, ‘in unfavourable circumstances’. Wilfrid’s legal acquaintances eventually divulged that some financial inheritance was secured for me in a London bank, not large but sufficient to allow me independence, a labyrinth preserving me against that never quite credible sha.

  Much remained wavering, uncertain. I had a dream of Mother, incredulous, weeping, desolate, being knifed by the Herr General.

  Journalists now listed him amongst those arraigned at Kiev as a war criminal. Should he have escaped with his life, he would be in some far-north slave camp. About his actual crimes they were silent. Dogged by old loyalties, I did not speak of him to Wilfrid until I joined him in Paris. ‘By your account,’ he said, ‘a gentleman of some irony, rather less of compassion.’

  Loyalties matter, despite my Goethean pretensions of being the temperate, objective European. British and Germans must have perished in the war, all deeming themselves righteous.

  Loyal, of course, to Wilfrid, I often, possibly too often, shrank from straining his patience, to over-impose. He had too many plausible identities – patrician factotum, cool philanthropist, wily ringmaster – for me to completely surrender to his kindness. His dislike of physical contacts, even handshaking – another Robespierre trait – could be forbidding. His activities were presumably charitable: he was reported amongst some prominent figures intervening for homosexuals rescued from the camps yet still interned, the Nazi sexual prohibitions inscrutably retained by the Allied administrators. I never enquired: friends, like inferior novelists, could know too much.

  He was often absent, abroad for several weeks, returning without notice, greeting us as if he had never left. Such intervals were difficult, for Marc-Henri was unflaggingly peevish and aloof, jostling his hair, ungracious, hurriedly disappearing after meals. Virtually silent, I overheard him mutter, ‘I can do it. Myself.’ Wilfrid scrupulously kept balance between us, taking him to expensive restaurants, the Folies, bowling alleys, but failed to appease.

  No matter. I had my labyrinth, winding back into other Paris summers. History was everywhere visible, so vibrant that it hurt. The streets paraded more than the wounds of Resistance and Collaboration. Abruptly confronting me, on the site of his home in the vanished rue des Cordeliers, reared an apparition, one arm upflung, the other protecting a child, a leg thrust forward, a rough, atrocious, defiant face, Danton’s statue. L’Audace. On Pont Neuf at sundown he had exclaimed, ‘Look! All that blood! The waters are turning scarlet!’ Later, instigator of the Revolutionary Tribunal, he had added that he sometimes felt chased by shades of the dead. In Musée Carnavelet, startling as Show Trial or Pact, was exhibited a long table glimmering with worn baize, at which the Committee of General Security had decreed lists for the string-haired Public Prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, whom Lenin admired and, in a manner, Uncle Joe had employed. But I was only obeying orders. On that table, agonized in his last hours, Robespierre had been dumped like rubbish.

  I stood pilgrim in place de la Concorde, where another voyeur had watched the King’s execution, tasted the blood dripping from the scaffold and pronounced it vilely salt. Alongside rue Cassette was the Carmes convent, still revering a pile of skulls, where the September Massacres had gathered pace.

  One afternoon, sultry and overcast, was appropriate décor for a particular mission, in which Marc-Henri would have choked in haste to lose interest. Mist distorted the Sainte-Chapelle almost to crookedness: then the vast blur of Notre Dame, looming as if supernaturally detached from moorings and about to drift down river. Outside, Templars had screamed in the fires of a monstrous frame-up.

  I crossed quai de l’Horloge, past an optician’s exécution rapide, to a glistening heap of old, turreted buildings, to present a card signed by a grandee friend of Wilfrid. This procured reluctant admission to one of those black pockets of history lurking in all great cities, scraps from a séance. I was now within the Conciergerie, its crepuscular heights and depths overcharged with the dusty, inquisitorial stillness, sunless as if stricken by winter. No one escorted me, none was about, though a lesson from Meinnenberg was that I was never unwatched. Those who had suffered here – Corday, Marie-Antoinette, Danton, Chénier, Brissot – were no longer quite real, messy colours drifting into the blind.

  Near by, off a grand staircase, would have been an apartment with sumptuous Gobelins carpets and that long green table, now at the Carnavalet, at which, in another Great Wrath, forerunners of Polit-Bureaux had legislated and argued for the Perfect Society. One ponderous arch opened on to a courtyard, cold, hemmed in by walls looking incomplete in the hanging mist, desolate as Nineveh. From a rusty tap Lucile Desmoulins and the Queen must have drunk. Buried near this chilled, sooty maze was the Tribunal Hall where Fouquier-Tinville had signed away lives. In my most humourless reaches I moved through a miasma of Gothic slabs, narrow steps twisting up to doors iron and padlocked, stone panels, grilled cells, sodden, almost fungoid oubliettes, cobwebbed tunnels lit only from slits. I heard, or thought I heard, a footfall, in a paralysis of time deranged as the Girondins’ last night.

  My trail was not yet finished, so, on another day, in rue Saint-Honoré, between a hairdresser’s and bakery, with crisp, pungent smells, three youths joking over a photograph, I penetrated a drab passage to a yard faintly thickened by liquor and shadowed by old, two-storied houses. Ahead, from behind a faded green door throbbed orientalized jazz, high wails above measured drums. Visible through dirty rectangular glass, dark heads and shoulders of Algerians were ranked at a bar, the establishment bereft of the name that had once spread across Europe. Waiters in soiled white coats were crossing, re-crossing with tall glasses, from the radio the wails were prolonged, then collapsing into fragments of memory, always unresolved, beneath the apartment once owned by a sober, respected cabinet-maker, proud of his lodger, Maximilien Maria Isidore de Robespierre, whose gaze, like a searchlight, had once paralysed a deputy. ‘He’ll be suspecting I am thinking of something.’

  4

  ‘Have you ever thought, Erich, of any of these new arrangements in West Germany? Some seem so exciting.’

  Lisette, polishing silver, had spoken lightly, perhaps too lightly, for there might lurk a hint of reproach in the plump
, motherly face, always so affectionate beneath the dark hair, which Wilfrid told her resembled a bursting bag. I knew that she preferred Marc-Henri to myself and suspected she was scheming to be rid of me, though at once admitting exaggeration of a proposal actually well meant.Yet she persisted.’ Herr Wilfrid has often told me of how you helped in … that place.You told stories, people listened, they were calmed …’

  As if repenting of indiscretion or untoward interference, she gave me another smile, still more motherly, pressed my hand, polished a knife with sufficient energy to recharge a battery.

  True, I was idle, in an era of recovery, rebuilding, rehabilitation, the fresh breath of revival. But Lisette had chosen a bad day.Wilfrid was always receiving parcelled documents, cuttings, transcriptions, some of which he might leave open on a table, certainly not for Marc-Henri, for whom Final Solutions, Pacts, Show Trials were at best worth a shrug. They would frequently be absurd or whimsical. A murderer from Alsace had offered Laval as character reference. An SS lieutenant on trial was pleading that the hanging of gypsies during the Thirty Years War gave legal precedent for his own disposal of four thousand Jews. Wilfrid himself could be tempting me to venture abroad by providing novels by young German writers – Grass, Böll – humane but realistic, harsh to their elders. Certainly, he, very courteous, very grateful, declined my offers to assist him, filing, paraphrasing, carrying messages, as if anxious to spare me tedium best left to the ageing.

  Whether or not trivial, the incident with Lisette troubled me during subsequent weeks.Would I have risked joining the July Plot, joining Stauffenberg in placing the bomb beneath the Führer’s table? Only had Wilfrid ordered it, and a Wilfrid never gives orders. What else had I inherited from Mother? Timidity.

  After too much wine, to test my courage, I attempted to stab my hand but only damaged a table of some value, an action noticed by Marc-Henri. In unwonted verbiage he referred to it as Existentialist Absurdity, Wilfrid annoying me by a nod of agreement.