Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  At first, the Wehrmacht agreed to enter the city peacefully. However, the shooting of German officers by French patriots near the Porte Saint-Denis, outside Paris, enraged General Georg von Küchler, the German 18th Army commander, also known as the “Butcher of Rotterdam” for having demolished that Dutch city just a few weeks earlier. He ordered as retaliation an all-out air and artillery assault on Paris at eight o’clock the following morning. There were only a few hours left for Bullitt to save Paris from the fate shared by Rotterdam and another capital city, Warsaw. Bullitt managed to persuade two French officials to meet their German counterparts at Écouen, twelve miles north of Paris, to settle terms for the handover. With the document signed, von Küchler called off the bombardment of Paris. An American had saved the City of Light.

  While the city was being spared Nazi barbarism, pigeons had taken over all the great open spaces, and in the deadly silence their cooing filled the ears of the few remaining Parisians. Posters had been pasted up on the walls to advise its 2.8 million inhabitants to stay right there. There were few left to read them. On June 14, at dawn, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier looked out their small windows toward the Carrefour de l’Odéon and saw German army trucks roaring down the boulevard Saint-Germain. They had entered Paris. One minute they weren’t there, the next Paris was swarming with them. One minute Jean-Paul Sartre was a philosophy teacher in Paris and Jacques-Laurent Bost was his student; the next, Sartre and Cartier-Bresson were prisoners of war and le petit Bost badly wounded.

  “THE CITY WITHOUT EYES”

  German cars, trucks, wagons, and cavalry poured through the streets, while giant swastika banners started draping public buildings. “The deadly silence of a dead city had given way to the ear-splitting roar of Nazi planes flying very low over the city, day and night, throwing vulture shadows into every room. The avenues became autostradas for German officers in high-powered cars. The feldgrau was everywhere.”28

  Parisians watched the Germans with blank stares. The Germans did not understand at first; they felt ignored, as if they were transparent. They soon called Paris “the city without eyes.”29 Paris’s spirit had disappeared just as the Germans thought they had caught it in their steely embrace. They had turned Paris and its inhabitants to stone.30

  In Vichy, the French writer Valery Larbaud, whose work had inspired James Joyce’s Ulysses with its interior monologues, kindly helped Beckett out and gave him cash. Beckett and Suzanne then set off on foot and slept in barns and on shop floors on their way to Arcachon, where their American friend Mary Reynolds, Duchamp’s mistress, had a house and, they hoped, could accommodate them for a few days. They found her house was more than full with Peggy Guggenheim and other friends. Dalí and Gala’s villa was also crowded with artists and writers, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp among them, but Beckett and Suzanne eventually managed to rent a room in a boardinghouse, the Villa Saint George, 135 bis boulevard de la Plage. Duchamp and Beckett, fanatical chess players, spent much of the time playing the game in a seafront café.

  On June 18, in an address broadcast by the BBC, Charles de Gaulle, a French general unknown to the majority of French people, called for France to continue the fight, urging all young men and women to join him in résistance from London. Four days later, though, Marshal Pétain capitulated and signed an armistice with Adolf Hitler. As A. J. Liebling wrote the same day: “De Gaulle had spoken for France; Pétain always seemed to speak against her, reproachful with the cruelty of the impotent.”31

  On June 22, while armistice negotiations were finalized at Compiègne, Henri Cartier-Bresson was taken prisoner and sent to Stalag VA in Ludwigsburg in Germany with the identification number KG 845, along with another twenty-three thousand French prisoners. Jean-Paul Sartre had been captured the day before, his thirty-fifth birthday, and was to be transferred to Stalag XIID near Trier. In Arcachon, getting some fresh air on the seafront, Samuel Beckett and Marcel Duchamp overheard a fat lady with gold rings on every finger welcoming the armistice: “Ah, we’re going to be able to eat cakes again.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE CHOICE

  LIVING WITH THE OCCUPANTS

  Adolf Hitler could not resist visiting his most spectacular new possession and came to Paris on a special sightseeing tour on June 23. A heroic music piece especially composed for the occasion was broadcast on Berlin radio as the Führer posed for the photographers in front of the Eiffel Tower. The image nailed down the new reality.

  With Hitler came the first German high dignitaries, Paris’s new rulers. The best Parisian hotels were requisitioned to accommodate them.1 One of the dignitaries settling in Paris in his new quarters was Count Franz Wolff Metternich, a forty-seven-year-old aristocrat and a scholar of Renaissance art and architecture. Appointed head of Kunstschutz (art protection) for the Rhineland and occupied France, he soon made his way to the Louvre to meet Jacques Jaujard. On August 16, a black chauffeured limousine bearing Nazi Germany’s insignia slowly approached the main entrance. The knock at the door Jaujard had been expecting for exactly a year had finally come. Metternich was ushered into Jaujard’s grand office. The two men looked at each other in silence, Jaujard keeping his hands behind his back. They looked similar—both very tall and thin, both in their midforties, both patriots. Each man weighed the other. Perhaps they had more in common than they realized. Jaujard wrote in his diary that Metternich, on learning that the Louvre was empty, had looked almost relieved.2 Jaujard then told Metternich that France’s entire art collection had been taken to safety and showed him his books. He had decided that transparency was probably the best way to deal with Count Metternich. Like many Prussian aristocrats, Metternich was not a Nazi Party member. His task was to protect art in occupied France, and this was precisely, and quite literally, what he intended to do. There would be little he could do to safeguard private collections, especially those of French Jews like the Rothschilds, but he would try to shield France’s public collections from looting and from the irrepressible envy of his superiors for as long as he could, and he would offer cover for everyone who, like Jaujard, had the protection of art at heart. On this August morning, Jaujard and France had made an unlikely alliance. Neither man needed to speak. Their duty was to art and mankind only.

  When Pablo Picasso saw the German soldiers enter Royan in the summer of 1940, he realized that there was no reason for him to stay; he might as well be in the eye of the storm and face the devil. It would have been easy for him to go abroad to the United States, Britain, or Latin America, where he had many friends and admirers, but he went home, to Paris. From August 25, he started doing what everyone else did, queuing for food, and walking instead of waiting for the irregular and always crowded bus and métro services. There was no fuel for his Hispano-Suiza car, so he stored it in his garage, and there was very little coal to heat his huge Left Bank studio at 7 rue des Grands Augustins, so he wore extra layers. Every morning he walked the two and half miles from his home, 23 rue de la Boétie, which he had shared with his now estranged wife, Olga, to his studio and back in the evening before the midnight curfew, after a meal at the Café de Flore.

  Whether under the bombs in London or in occupied Paris, young men and women had to adapt to the Nazi Occupation while trying to keep on living. Simone Signoret, born Kaminker, was desperate to find a job. In September 1940, Simone was nineteen and the family breadwinner, with two young brothers and a father who had “disappeared,” probably to London. Her mother could not support the family on her own. When Corinne, a former classmate and the eldest daughter of the celebrated journalist Jean Luchaire, heard that Simone was looking for a job, she kindly asked her papa. Corinne had left school at fifteen and had become a movie star, but she was always helpful. Papa Luchaire, a handsome thirty-nine-year-old with sleek black hair, offered Simone a job as his personal assistant—he had just been appointed editor in chief of a new daily newspaper, Les Nouveaux Temps.

  * * *

  In her new job, with a monthly salary of 1,400 francs,3 S
imone had to answer the phone and filter calls. A lot of people were asking Luchaire for help in those days, but there was one caller she was ordered to put through immediately: Otto Abetz, Hitler’s ambassador in Paris and an old personal acquaintance of Luchaire’s. Otto spoke to his friend every day. Jean Luchaire had chosen to “collaborate” with France’s occupants even before Marshal Pétain officially asked the French to do so in an address on October 30, 1940. However, he also regularly called Otto to get someone out of prison, obtain new papers for another, facilitate an escape to Marseille and then to New York via Lisbon or Casablanca, or give people jobs without asking questions. He knew that Simone’s father was Jewish and had in all likelihood fled to fight with de Gaulle in London, but nonetheless he took her on.

  In the 1920s, in what already seemed like another life, Luchaire had been a highly regarded journalist, the artisan of Franco-German rapprochement, an ardent pacifist, and a supporter of the socialist Front Populaire. He had founded the progressive daily Les Temps in 1927. Thirteen years later, however, Luchaire, or “Louche Herr,” as he had been derisively nicknamed, found himself on a darker side of history, deliberately choosing to satisfy the occupying force’s every whim, while simultaneously helping those he could.

  One evening in October 1940, Simone went to the theater for the first time in her life, alone and using a ticket her boss had given her. A handsome young man in a brown duffle coat caught her eye. Simone was not interested in the play, and neither was he. Intriguingly, the tall, beautiful young blond woman who accompanied him kept smiling at her.

  The twenty-four-year-old man was Claude Jaeger, his theater companion Sonia Mossé. Claude wanted to become a film director; Sonia was a poet’s muse. Her height and her blond hair made her look Aryan; in fact she was Jewish. She was the anonymous face in many pictures taken by Dora Maar and Man Ray. At the end of the play they approached Simone, chatted briefly, and all agreed to meet the following day at the Café de Flore, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Simone had never been to the Left Bank: it was another world.

  At the Flore, people introduced themselves only by their first name. They were jobless actors, writers, and sculptors and painters without a gallery. Conversations were not loud; the air was serious, books stood between glasses, and the lighting was decidedly dim. There was not a single German in the café, but all had foreign accents. Men wore corduroy jackets, turtlenecks, dirty trench coats, their hair a little too long, while women wore no makeup. Nobody was dressed fashionably, but everyone had style.

  Simone did not belong to this milieu, yet she immediately felt at home, as she later recalled in her memoirs.4 She also felt torn. A young woman ought not to pass her late afternoons at the Flore among people who were wanted by the Gestapo, many of them Communists or Trotskyites, when she had just spent the rest of her day answering Otto Abetz’s calls, working for the well-known collaborator Jean Luchaire.

  Parisians not only had to learn to live with the occupiers, they had to get used to the many restrictions imposed on them. By autumn 1940, all private cars were prohibited. Buses ran on alcohol or charcoal but not on gasoline. In the métro, Parisians and Germans were packed together. The alternative was to walk or cycle, but bicycles were very rare and an absolute luxury in 1940. Stealing one was the easiest way to get to ride one. The Germans had introduced food rationing for Parisians, limiting their daily intake to 1,300 calories—enough to survive, not enough to rebel. The cafés were open but served only poor imitations of what they used to offer a few months earlier. Meat was already so scarce that traditional French dishes and specialties had disappeared from menus. The famous andouillette at Closerie des Lilas was gone.

  Just like Picasso, Parisians started coming home. In October, Samuel Beckett and Suzanne returned from Arcachon to their spartan one-bedroom flat at 6 rue des Favorites in the 15th arrondissement. They were lucky: there was still heating and hot water in their building. Suzanne, like most Parisian women, became a forager, adept at finding butter here, eggs there, meat, fruits, and vegetables elsewhere. A few days later their Swiss sculptor friend Alberto Giacometti had returned to his studio where he lived in Montparnasse, and Alfred Péron, demobilized from the French army, had resumed his teaching post in the Lycée Buffon, a ten-minute walk along the rue de Vaugirard from Beckett’s flat. They had what passed for lunch several times a week.5

  Marshal Pétain, the leader of Vichy France, which was independent of the occupied zone, had not wasted time in following the Nazi lead. Beginning October 3, 1940, French Jews were banned from holding administrative, financial, and commercial positions. This triggered the formation of resistance groups. Beckett’s friend Alfred Péron decided at once to join the first underground group set up in Paris, made up mostly of academics and intellectuals with a link to the Musée de l’Homme, such as the art historian Agnès Humbert.6 Samuel Beckett helped by collecting information he heard on British radio and passed on useful notes to Péron, who in turn passed them to Agnès Humbert, one of a few behind the first clandestine sheet, Résistance, published beginning December 1940.7

  Simone de Beauvoir was keeping busy teaching, reading, and writing, but politics was still not on her mind. She was missing Sartre, held prisoner in Germany. She taught at the Lycée Duruy next to the Rodin Museum in the morning, studied Hegel at the National Library on the rue de Richelieu in the afternoon, and tirelessly edited her first novel in the evening in warm cafés. She had decided to call it L’invitée (She Came to Stay), the story of a ménage à trois. Her nights were carefully planned: she spent two nights a week with her student Nathalie Sorokine in her room at the Hôtel Chaplain and Saturday nights with Jacques-Laurent Bost, now back in Paris and recovered from his injuries, at the Hôtel du Poirier in Montmartre. The rest of the week, Bost was sharing a room with his new lover Olga, one of the Kosakiewicz sisters, at the Hôtel Chaplain. Such sexual promiscuity may well be partly explained by the freezing temperatures, outside and inside hotel rooms. Beauvoir was working hard to support all three young women and also helped Bost financially.

  THE GOOD GERMANS AND THE BAD FRENCH

  German officers with specific missions kept arriving in the French capital. On November 8, the day of his thirty-first birthday, Sonderführer Gerhard Heller boarded the train for Paris. Heller, born in Potsdam, had learned French at school, studied in Pisa and at Toulouse University. He loved languages and literature. Never a fully fledged Nazi Party member, he had not taken the oath to Hitler, whom he found repulsive. However, he liked Otto Abetz, Hitler’s ambassador in Paris. Abetz assigned Heller to the Gruppe Schrifttum (literary section) of the Propagandastaffel (propaganda unit), whose offices were at 52 avenue des Champs-Élysées.

  Heller was responsible for nothing less than all of France’s literary publishing. “The Otto list” drew the red line French publishers were advised not to cross. This list, written up by Abetz, banned a thousand books by antifascist, Jewish, and Communist writers. The works of Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Louis Aragon, and Sigmund Freud disappeared from the shelves of libraries and bookshops. Heller astutely let French publishers carry out their own censorship. In a few months, Heller had struck an implicit deal with Left Bank publishers: do not give my superiors or me any reasons for suspicion and I may occasionally cover you. Heller loved literature more than he loved Hitler and was going to prove it. “In a sense, he had joined the Left Bank literary scene, if in a new and strange manner. If so many literary stars of the pre-war anti-fascist left wing survived the German years unharmed, Heller and the mentality he represented deserve some credit.”8

  * * *

  Before being destroyed, banned books were stored in an old garage on the avenue de la Grande Armée, near the Arc de Triomphe. There Heller saw mountains of the very books he had cherished as a student; their destruction filled him with disgust. “I understood only later the nature of my feeling in this garage full of books about to be burnt, thanks to Jean-Paul Sartre who was himself quoting Karl Marx when he later wrote ‘Sham
e is a revolutionary feeling.’”9

  Meeting Gallimard’s charismatic Jean Paulhan also changed Gerhard Heller. Gallimard, France’s most important and prestigious publishing house, had quickly decided to make a pact with the devil in order to save itself. Always an eclectic house, it had a “house fascist,” Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. Abetz had brought Drieu to Germany as early as 1934; he had played a key role in Nazi propaganda in France. A deal was struck. Gallimard’s influential Nouvelle Revue française, edited by Jean Paulhan, was taken over by Drieu La Rochelle. The review was so influential that it was inevitable that Otto Abetz should want to control it. Abetz had once reportedly declared: “There are three forces in France: Communism, High Finance and the NRF.”10 However, in exchange, Gallimard could continue publishing books under the supervision of Jean Paulhan.

  Jean Paulhan’s tiny office was just next to Drieu La Rochelle’s. Six feet away, while Drieu embraced collaboration with the Nazis, Jean Paulhan was starting to run a résistant cell of writers and planning to publish antifascist novelists, come what may. The charismatic fifty-six-year-old Paulhan even occasionally proposed texts to Drieu La Rochelle’s NRF, and Drieu would accept because, if anything, they shared an absolute passion for literature and poetry. A poem by the Communist sympathizer poet Paul Éluard filled five pages in the February 1941 issue of the NRF, alongside an homage to James Joyce and a tribute to the Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson, who had just died.

  Shrewd old Gaston Gallimard was using Drieu La Rochelle as an acceptable façade for the Germans, and while Gallimard felt compelled to publish anti-Semitic and fascist trash, it also published Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, James Joyce, Paul Claudel, Ivan Turgenev, Raymond Queneau, Paul Morand, and even Louis Aragon, a Communist, a résistant, and the husband of Elsa Triolet, a Jewish antifascist.