Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  The eleven-foot-tall Winged Victory of Samothrace was the last piece to go into hiding, at three o’clock on the afternoon of September 3, the precise time that France declared war on Germany. Then, in the next few weeks, the entire national public collection was taken to safety. Every museum in the country used the plan of evacuation Jaujard had used for the Louvre, each work being treated in order of artistic and historical importance. By autumn 1939, every single artwork of significance had been put in safekeeping. The news, quite inevitably, filtered out. Raymond Lécuyer, in Le Figaro, wrote of “the exodus of paintings,” praised the dedication of the national museums’ keepers, many of them retired veterans from the Great War, and apologized to his readers for being elusive about the whole operation. He could not be specific, nor could he give names, dates, or places, but he wrote: “May [it] be, however, a comfort for you to know that the world’s art heritage is safe from the scientific enterprises of German barbarism.”8

  Having fulfilled his duty to history, Jaujard retreated to his office in the Louvre overlooking the Tuileries Gardens. He was now bracing himself for the inevitable. It might take months, but the Germans would soon be in Paris, he was certain of that. Jaujard may have been ready but, unfortunately, the French army was not.

  TWILIGHT

  Instead of immediately fulfilling their duty of assistance to Poland, Britain and France bided their time and did not engage in offensive military operations, allowing the German army to concentrate on invading and crushing Poland without having to fight on two fronts at once. There was something decidedly strange about this war. The French called it the “Drôle de guerre,” the Americans and the British the “Phony War.” If the French army had attacked head-on, immediately after the declaration of war, the German army could not have held out for more than one or two weeks—at least that is what the German general Siegfried Westphal stated years later during the Nuremberg trials. In September 1939, Britain and France had a combined 110 divisions to Germany’s 23.

  Both France and Britain, however, were busier making life difficult for the German and Austrian citizens living on their soil, such as Arthur Koestler in France and Stefan Zweig in Britain, than confronting Hitler on the ground. In October, the Hungarian-born antifascist intellectual Koestler was arrested and interned at the Le Vernet detention camp in the French Pyrenees,9 while the celebrated Austrian author Zweig, now a UK resident, was forbidden to travel more than five miles from his home in Bath.

  Some Parisians left immediately after the war was declared. Janet Flanner, the formidable Paris correspondent of the New Yorker since 1925, a lesbian who was as well known for her beautiful lovers as for her steely writing, decided to go back to the United States. She told her French lover Noeline, or Noel Haskins Murphy, as she was officially known, that she would write and come back soon. Noeline, a six-foot-tall “stunning woman with high cheekbones and hay-coloured hair, a veritable Viking, a blend of Garbo and Dietrich,”10 would look the shadow of herself when they next met in December 1944.

  The fifty-eight-year-old Pablo Picasso, horrified by the bombings of Guernica in April 1937, left Paris on September 2 for Royan, a seaside resort in southwestern France, sixty-one miles north of Bordeaux. He rented a villa11 for his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter and their daughter, Maya, about to turn four, and lived with his new love, the photographer Dora Maar, at the Hôtel du Tigre. He soon rented a studio space on the third floor of the Villa les Voiliers with a beautiful sea view. Royan failed to inspire him, though. Picasso was no wildlife or landscape artist. He may have felt relieved at first to be away from Paris, but the vivid light of the Poitou region did not suit him. He kept busy sketching and even writing to fight his anxiety about the war. The seafood at the local market inspired a few paintings, but he drove back to Paris regularly to get supplies of brushes, paints, canvases, and sketchbooks. The November 15 opening of his first American retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, called “Forty Years of His Art,” which should have been a great satisfaction, felt very far away, almost unimportant.12

  Others had decided to wait and see, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who had remained in Paris, teaching, and occasionally changing hotels, their lovers and students in tow.

  * * *

  While everyone in Western Europe was adjusting to this “phony war,” the largest army in the world, as the French army was described in newspapers at home and abroad, was utterly unprepared, a victim of traditionalism, ignorance, arrogance, and paralysis. One eyewitness account of the time clearly understood the collapse of French soldiers’ morale, the total failure of the French high command, the demented military strategies focused on the Maginot Line and the so-called “impenetrability” of the forest of the Ardennes, and the fantasy worlds inhabited by the French bourgeoisie and the working class. Marc Bloch was a veteran of the Great War, a professor of medieval history at the Sorbonne and founder of the Annales School.13 He volunteered to serve in 1939 at the age of fifty-three. The French high command’s utter incompetence and inability to adapt to modern times was not the only cause of the fall of France, wrote Bloch in 1946’s Strange Defeat, published posthumously. The way in which the state, its government, and France’s political parties relayed the most inane optimistic messages to the country, hinting that defeat was inconceivable, while acting in the most timid way toward Hitler, prevented a clear and cool-headed look at reality. He accused the working class of coward pacifism while the bourgeoisie only sought egotistical pleasures in life. What Marc Bloch described was the complete moral collapse of an entire country—as Renoir had done a few months earlier in his film La règle du jeu, showing the unbearable lightness of the French elite, an innate insouciance shared by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

  Immigrants, and foreign Jews in particular, like Arthur Koestler, could not afford the luxury of insouciance. Having been released in early 1940 from the internment camp at Le Vernet thanks to the tireless campaigning of his lover, the sculptor Daphne Hardy, who alerted the British authorities, Koestler first tried to get French papers in Paris in order to stay in France. On May 1, thinking ahead, he also sent a manuscript to a London publisher. His novel, translated from German by Hardy, was called Darkness at Noon, and it told the story of an old Bolshevik tried for treason by the very government he had helped create. In Paris, Koestler stayed at the homes of different friends. One of them was the fifty-three-year-old Sylvia Beach, owner of the celebrated Shakespeare and Company bookshop at 12 rue de l’Odéon in the 6th arrondissement.14

  Beach, a friend of the writers Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and André Gide, had improvised as a publisher in 1922 in order to bring James Joyce’s Ulysses into the world. She still lived above her bookshop, just like Adrienne Monnier, her former lover and best friend, and the owner of the bookshop just opposite hers, at 7 rue de l’Odéon. Sylvia and Adrienne were the souls of what some of their friends called “Odeonia,” a kingdom of culture, international fraternity, and tolerance. They belonged to a bygone era, and in May 1940 Odeonia felt like a besieged city. Adrienne was seeing Gisèle Freund, a thirty-two-year-old from Berlin who had done her PhD thesis at the Sorbonne on photography in France in the nineteenth century. Freund busied herself taking portraits of all the writers still passing through Odeonia; of Jewish descent, she was also seriously considering fleeing to Argentina, where she had friends and family.

  The few American writers still in Paris in 1940, such as Henry Miller, as well as the artist Man Ray, were starting to flee to the south, and from there to safer countries. Arthur Koestler was clinging to the hope of getting French papers. At Sylvia Beach’s flat, “he was reading Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black) when a four-leaf clover resting on an upper shelf ‘fell right between his eyes.’ Adrienne kissed his eyes and assured him it was an omen that he would be safe.”15

  LA DÉBCLE

  “The new phase of the war”—the euphemism used by some—began at daybreak
on Friday, May 10, 1940. German tanks had entered Belgium and the Battle of France had begun. However, French newspapers had dedicated their headlines to the governmental crisis in London, which would soon bring Winston Churchill to power. With dawn came the air raid sirens, startling a city that had heard no daytime alert since the first weeks of the “Phony War” eight months earlier. The rubicund, jolly, and overweight A. J. Liebling, a special reporter for the New Yorker who had replaced his colleague Janet Flanner, looked out from his hotel room on the Square Louvois, opposite the French National Library. He stood there alongside his French neighbors, all spectators, framed in the opened windows of every building. Everyone stood in their nightshirts or stark naked, looking up at the sky. A few hours later that day, Corporal Henri Cartier-Bresson, stationed in Metz with the Third Army in the Photographic and Film Unit, had just enough time to bury his Leica in the courtyard of a farm in the Vosges region before being sent on a mission.

  On Wednesday, May 15, the day the Germans made a decisive thrust that would split the Allied armies a few days later, Samuel Beckett volunteered to drive an ambulance. Ireland was a neutral country in the war but he wanted to participate in the way other foreign writers had done in previous conflicts, just like Ernest Hemingway, who had enlisted to go to the Italian front as a Red Cross ambulance driver in World War I at the age of eighteen. “Beckett took out a heavy vehicle licence, but heard nothing.”16 In truth he wanted to join his best friend, Alfred Péron, now in Brittany, who had been posted as a liaison officer with a British ambulance unit.

  On Thursday, May 16, panic hit the correspondents of Paris’s foreign newspapers and French politicians. That night, Liebling saw slick-haired, sullen young men in pullovers speeding through the night on fast motorcycles. “They had the air of conquerors.”17 Probably German spies on reconnaissance missions.

  On Saturday, May 18, the seventy-three-year-old General Weygand replaced General Gamelin as the French army’s supreme commander, while the eighty-four-year-old Marshal Pétain was invited to join the government. Though both were arch-right-wingers, royalists, ardent Catholics, and antiparliamentarians, they canceled each other out in strategic and military terms. As A. J. Liebling described it to his American readers, Pétain was “incapable of conceiving any operation bolder than orderly retreat,” while “Weygand believed in unremitting attack.”18

  On Tuesday, May 21, the head of the French government, Paul Reynaud, announced to the Senate that the Germans had reached the northern town of Arras and that “France was in danger.” A week later, Belgium’s King Leopold III capitulated, leaving the British and French armies in a worse position still. Winston Churchill was stung: “Without prior consultation and upon his own personal act, the Belgian King surrendered his Army, and exposed our whole flank and means of retreat.”19 Operation Dynamo, better known as the evacuation of Dunkirk, had started. Britain needed to get its troops back. It started very badly, but disaster turned into “triumph” when almost 338,000 soldiers (among them 26,500 French soldiers) were evacuated by June 4. That day Winston Churchill rejoiced, but he also warned the British public: “Wars are not won by evacuations.”20

  On June 6, taxis became scarce, hotels were deserted, telephone services restricted, and restaurants and cafés lowered their metal shutters. Communication with the outside world was breaking down, making life difficult—especially for foreigners. Samuel Beckett could no longer draw money from his Irish account at the bank, nor could he get the papers he wanted.21 A. J. Liebling, though, managed to obtain a safe-conduct.

  On June 10, Mussolini’s Italy declared war on France and Britain. The French and British governments had been hoping the fascist dictator would stay neutral after they had wooed him with territorial concessions in Africa to expand Italy’s colonial empire. In Paris, the American ambassador to Paris, the forty-nine-year-old William C. Bullitt, was seen laying a wreath of roses at the statue of Joan of Arc at the place des Pyramides, in view of Jacques Jaujard’s office in the Louvre.

  William Christian Bullitt Jr.—a former news correspondent in Europe, Yale graduate, man of the world with a taste for beautiful women, talented writer, and ambassador to the Soviet Union between 1933 and 1936—was also an ardent European and a keen Francophile. His mother, a German Jew named Horowitz, had made sure that her son was perfectly trilingual, as fluent in German and French as in American English—a gift that soon came in handy.

  His friend President Franklin D. Roosevelt, to whom Bullitt spoke every day on the phone since he had been appointed the president’s man in Paris in 1936, asked him to leave the city. Bullitt cabled the White House in Washington: NO AMERICAN AMBASSADOR IN PARIS HAS EVER RUN AWAY FROM ANYTHING AND THAT, I THINK, IS THE BEST TRADITION WE HAVE IN THE AMERICAN DIPLOMATIC SERVICE. Indeed, Gouverneur Morris stayed throughout the French Revolution, Elihu B. Washburne braved the Prussian occupation of Paris during the Commune in 1870, and, although within range of the kaiser’s artillery, Myron T. Herrick did not flee Paris in 1914. Bullitt was not alone in wanting to stay: five thousand of the thirty thousand U.S. citizens who lived in or near Paris, the largest American community in Europe, also refused to leave.22

  On the evening of June 10, Parisians retreated inside their homes and gathered around the radio. Those who stayed up after midnight heard Roosevelt’s speech, relayed from London, in which he described Italy’s war declaration as a stab in the back. Earlier that day, in Royan, Picasso had painted the head of a woman, looking decidedly somber. A. J. Liebling did not hear Roosevelt’s speech: he had left Paris a few hours earlier. On leaving he was more broken-hearted than scared. It had never occurred to him that Hitler might one day destroy France, “the historical continuity of intelligence and reasonable living,” without which “nothing anywhere can have meaning until it is re-established.” Liebling was angry, too, at French cowardice. There were many cowards in June 1940. Liebling had had lunch that week with a notorious French journalist who wrote for a dozen Parisian newspapers of varying political leanings under a dozen different pseudonyms. He had told his American colleague: “What a terrible mistake to have provoked those people, my dear! What madness to concern ourselves with Poland!” He had cried like a baby while stuffing asparagus into his mouth, then shouted: “Peace, quickly, quickly!”23

  Liebling was not the only one fleeing Paris—thousands of Parisians and refugees from the north of France were also in transit. So was Arthur Koestler, still without any legal papers. Hidden by friends who passed him on in turn, hiding him for one night each, obtaining a travel permit to Limoges for him—Koestler saw no alternative but to enlist in the Foreign Legion, which since 1831 had granted men of all creeds and nationalities a new life and a new identity. Koestler enrolled for five years and legally ceased to exist. He was now Albert Dubert.

  Simone de Beauvoir left too. The father of her student and now ex-lover Bianca Bienenfeld gave her a lift. He dropped Simone off at Poèze, near Angers, at the cottage of a friend, Madame Morel. Simone de Beauvoir admitted later not feeling much connection with the historical events unfolding. She listened to news bulletins on the radio, of course, but she also spent her days reading detective novels and discussing sexuality with Madame Morel. Young women kept falling in love with her, and Madame Morel had called her a “wolf trap”—in other words, a lesbian. Simone had started wearing a headband that looked a little like a turban. Her lover, le petit Bost, had commented on her new hairstyle: “You look like a lesbian, a cocaine addict and a fakir too.”24

  The forty-two-year-old American heiress and art collector Peggy Guggenheim could see the refugees dragging their belongings through Paris, but she was too busy buying paintings from artists desperate to leave Paris before the Nazis reached it to care much. For a quarter of a million dollars, she acquired a collection that would come to be worth more than $40 million.25 After striking many bargains, Guggenheim fled south toward Arcachon, where her friends the Spanish painter Salvador Dalí and his muse and wife, the Russian-born Gala, had r
ented a villa and were welcoming friends “in transit.”

  On the morning of June 11, Samuel Beckett, along with those Parisians who had not yet left, woke up to the smell of soot. Ammunition factories around the capital city, blown up by the French authorities, had been burning through the night. “The high brilliance of the sun had been reduced to a sulphurous glow.”26 The head of the French government, Paul Reynaud, was preparing to flee to Tours on the river Loire with his government. In order to spare France’s capital, Paris was officially declared an “open city,” which meant the French government was abandoning all defensive efforts in the hopes that the German army would respect the international conventions of war by which open cities are protected from bombings. However, one could never be sure with the Nazis. Before leaving, Reynaud went to see his friend the American ambassador Bullitt and asked him to try to persuade the Wehrmacht not to destroy Paris. Bullitt, the last foreign ambassador still present in Paris, was in effect made provisional governor of the city, in the absence of all French authority.

  On June 12, Samuel Beckett and his “French girl,”27 Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, who had decided at the last minute to go with him, boarded a slow, crowded train at the Gare de Lyon toward Vichy, where he knew people who could, he hoped, lend him some money. Nobody was aware yet that Vichy would become the headquarters and capital of unoccupied France. In Royan, Picasso was painting another sinister-looking head of a woman.