Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  French exiles in New York could find solace from the bleak world events by going to the movies and to the opera in Manhattan. In December 1942, while movie theaters were starting to show Casablanca,28 a film that “makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap,”29 according to the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, the Metropolitan Opera was putting on a rather special production30 of Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment.31 Every night, on stage, the French-born soprano Lily Pons waved the French Resistance’s Cross of Lorraine instead of the Tricolor and, in a scene that did not belong in Donizetti, sang “La Marseillaise.” A few bars into “Allons enfants de la patrie,” the young baritone Wilfred Engelman, in the small part of a corporal, would step forward holding high the flag of the United States next to the Free French banner. The New York audience, surprised at first, erupted in wild cheers every night.

  TAKING RISKS

  In Paris, the mood in cinemas—the ones not exclusively reserved for German officers—was more subdued. However, a film had just been released on December 3 whose subtext left nobody indifferent. Les visiteurs du soir, directed by Marcel Carné and scripted by the poet Jacques Prévert, was set in medieval France in order to pass German censorship, but the allegory with occupied France was striking. The French star Arletty and a newcomer from the stage, the thirty-four-year-old Alain Cuny, played the parts of the devil’s envoys, sent as minstrels, to ruin the nuptials of a baron’s daughter to a local warlord. While minstrel Arletty seduced the groom, minstrel Cuny lured the bride. But love struck the bride and the minstrel. The enraged devil turned the two lovers into statues. Beneath the stone, however, one could hear their hearts beat, like France under German rule.

  Marcel Carné, the most famous French film director at the time, had chosen to stay in Vichy France and to continue to make films. His choice had raised many eyebrows, especially among the French actors and film directors who had fled to Hollywood, including Jean Gabin, Jean-Pierre Aumont, and Jean Renoir. Carné had to abide by all sorts of restrictions and, of course, German censorship. However, he also continually bypassed them. Carné used Arletty, a huge star who attracted crowds and was in a very public relationship with a German officer, as a front, much as the publisher Gallimard used Drieu La Rochelle. Carné needed all the help he could get in case his set designer, Alexandre Trauner, and his music composer, Joseph Kosma, both Jewish and banned from their jobs, were discovered working for him under pseudonyms. Carné and Jacques Prévert did not hesitate to hire aspiring actors spending their days at the Café de Flore, most of whom did not have any legal papers, along with Communists wanted by the Gestapo or résistants in hiding. Simone Signoret got a small part that way—a gypsy in Les visiteurs du soir.32

  Les visiteurs du soir drew large crowds and quietly galvanized the French in their third year of Nazi occupation. After the invasion of North Africa by the U.S. Army in November 1942, France was completely occupied, and the mirage of the so-called Free France under Vichy rule had disappeared once and for all.

  In fact, Paris was now seething with underground activity.

  The CNE, the Comité National des Écrivains, the résistant writers’ group, had been dissolved after the Gestapo had executed its leader, Jacques Décour, in May 1942. Claude Morgan had been asked to restart it, and he contacted the thirty-year-old Édith Thomas, who had enjoyed a moment of fame when Gallimard had simultaneously published her first two novels in 1934.33 By September 1942, Édith was working by day at the National Archives, where she had landed the “absurd” task of compiling long-forgotten documents for future improbable studies that would never see the light of day, while by night she opened her flat to the recomposed Comité National des Écrivains. Every week, French writers arrived two by two, on foot or by bicycle, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, François Mauriac, Paul Éluard, Jean Paulhan, Claude Morgan, and Raymond Queneau. From her window, she watched them approach 15 rue Pierre Nicole in the 5th arrondissement, a very quiet street off the rue Saint-Jacques. Her flat was on the first floor, and luckily there was no concierge, so people could come and go much more discreetly than in other Parisian buildings. For Édith, every one of these meetings proved a miracle: “Those writers were Catholic, atheist, Communist, liberal, Existentialist, and yet they all trusted each other intimately. There never were any traitors among us.”34

  Of the great names of French literature who gathered in her home every week, Édith Thomas had a particular fondness for the poet Paul Éluard. “Serene, gentle, handsome with a medieval face,”35 a close friend of Pablo Picasso and André Breton, Éluard was a poet whose talent, a little like Picasso’s painting, always transcended categorization, fashions, and eras. His twenty-one-quatrain poem “Liberté”36 had reached London and New York, where it had been published to great acclaim. The Royal Air Force was dropping tens of thousands of copies of it over France during its nightly raids.

  It began:

  On my schoolboy’s copy-books

  On my desk and the trees

  On the sand on the snow

  I write your name

  and ended:

  On the steps of death

  I write your name

  On health returned

  On danger averted

  On hope without memory

  I write your name

  And by the power of one word

  I start again my life

  I was born to know you

  To name you

  Liberty.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson, a prisoner of war for almost three years, caught one of those flying “Liberté” poems dropped by the RAF as he crossed the French-German border at night, after his third escape attempt. He walked along the Moselle canal into France, stole civilian clothes, managed to get a train ticket and fake identity papers, and went into hiding for three months in a farm near Loches, twenty-six miles southeast of Tours.

  Paul Éluard was one of those résistants who was often completely oblivious to danger but who always seemed to have luck on his side. Many others were less fortunate, executed after just one small act of defiance. Others, following in the steps of Gallimard and Marcel Carné, resorted to cultivating ties with collaborationists in order to help their underground activities. Such was the case of the twenty-nine-year-old aspiring writer Marguerite Duras, a civil servant at the Book Committee by day and a conspirator by night. She had found a flat at 5 rue Saint Benoît, right at the corner of the boulevard Saint-Germain at the Café de Flore, where she settled with her husband, Robert Antelme, a civil servant at the Préfecture de Police. One of her neighbors, who lived in the flat two floors above hers, was the pro-Hitler collaborationist Ramon Fernandez. He and his wife held a salon on Sundays where people like Drieu La Rochelle and Gerhard Heller were regular visitors. She sometimes went. However, her flat, with a bed in every room, often all occupied by visiting friends in need of a hiding place, became a hub for Communist résistants on the move.

  By the spring of 1943 the Allies’ attacks on factories all around Paris were gathering pace. On April 4, 1943, more than a hundred American B-17s bombed Paris in daylight for the first time, targeting the Renault car factory, which was producing tanks and armored vehicles for the Wehrmacht.

  Jean-Paul Sartre was working furiously on his second play, Les mouches (The Flies),37 while finishing his major philosophy treatise L’être et le néant38 (Being and Nothingness). Jean Paulhan had convinced Gallimard to publish the 700-page essay even if the commercial prospects were extremely limited. However, three weeks after it came out in early August, sales took off. Gallimard was intrigued to see so many women buying L’être et le néant. It turned out that since the book weighed exactly one kilogram, people were simply using it as a weight, as the usual copper weights had disappeared to be sold on the black market or melted down to make ammunition.39 Les mouches opened at the Théâtre de la Cité.40 Both in his play and in his philosophical essay, Sartre was developing the idea of libre-arbitre, free choice and free will, one’s freedom and respons
ibility. Like Prévert and Carné had in Les visiteurs du soir, Sartre had transposed the action to a faraway time and place. He had chosen ancient Greece. Through a reworking of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sartre had managed to talk about occupied France. At the opening of the play, a handsome thirty-year-old, a sort of Gallic Humphrey Bogart, introduced himself to Sartre. His name was Albert Camus. Like Simone de Beauvoir seated a few rows down, Camus could feel the audience gasp when the word liberté was uttered on stage. The clandestine Communist-leaning Les Lettres françaises saw in Les mouches a satire of Vichy and an apologia for freedom, while the theater reviewer for the Berlin newspaper Das Reich called the play an incredible affront and “defiance.”41

  A few weeks later, Gallimard finally published Simone de Beauvoir’s first novel, L’invitée (She Came to Stay), with its scandalous story of a love triangle. Set in contemporary occupied Paris, it told the slightly fictionalized, or semiautobiographical, account of Beauvoir’s relationship with Sartre and the Kosakiewicz sisters, Olga and Wanda. Causing tremendous gossip, the novel seeded Sartre and Beauvoir’s legend.

  * * *

  In September 1943, Picasso asked the Hungarian photographer Brassaï to come and visit him. They had not seen each other for eleven years. Picasso wanted Brassaï, and Brassaï alone, to take pictures of the works he had done under the Occupation. The Nazis might have banned Picasso from exhibiting, publishing, and selling his work, but he was nonetheless thinking ahead. A timid hope was in the air that fall: the Battle of Stalingrad had stopped the German army once and for all in the east; the Allied armies had won a string of battles in North Africa, had liberated Sicily, and were now advancing in Italy. Mussolini had just surrendered and the RAF was pounding factories, seaports, and major railway yards in France. A ground invasion by the Allies, on either France’s Atlantic coast or the Channel beaches, seemed more and more likely. The question was when.

  Picasso had changed. He had lost almost all his hair, but his eyes were as ever black diamonds. Picasso’s studio, as large as the hold of a ship, with its wooden beams and walkways, contained more than a hundred statues, some of them huge heads of women, once in dazzling white plaster, as Brassaï had seen them before the war, but now cast in bronze. Where on earth had Picasso found bronze in occupied Paris, at a time where the Germans requisitioned every piece of brass to make cannons? “Oh, that, it’s a long story,” Picasso said, evading the question. Sculpture had been occupying all his days and nights. Transforming his bathroom into a sculpture room, he had made Man with a Lamb. Brassaï could go about the studio as he pleased, Picasso told him; he had a hundred fifty sculptures to photograph and no time to lose.

  While Brassaï got to work on Picasso’s sculptures, beginning with a striking bronze skull looking like a monolith with its eyeless sockets, emaciated cheekbones, and chewed nose—a recurrent theme in Picasso’s work during the war—many résistants decided to “disappear” for a while, and collaborators to flee—or not.

  At Gallimard, Drieu La Rochelle, disenchanted by the ways of the world, had deserted his office and given up on editing the NRF, whose last issue had been released in July 1943. Urged by his old friends, and even his new German friends like Gerhard Heller, who offered to supply safe-conducts and visas, to leave the country, Drieu preferred to stay in France, even if the socialist-fascist revolution he had so ardently wished for had not taken place. Drieu had retreated to the solitude of his spacious home on the avenue de Breteuil with its panoramic view over Paris and the Invalides’ golden dome under which Napoleon lay. Drieu was now spending his days reading religious texts on Confucianism, Hinduism, and even Judaism. The world of this dandy who had embraced one political fad after another in the first half of the twentieth century, the same way he had collected women, was a far cry from the world inhabited by Paris teenagers, such as sixteen-year-old Juliette Gréco.

  The young Juliette was not disenchanted with a fantasy world that was not to be after all; she was in a prison cell in the infamous Fresnes Prison just outside Paris. Arrested in the spring of 1943 with her older sister, Charlotte, Juliette was finally released in the autumn, alone. She did not know yet that her sister and her mother, both active in the Resistance, had been sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Without any money, no home to return to, and wearing just the navy blue cotton dress and straw sandals she’d had on the day she was arrested, she stepped out of the prison into one of the coldest autumns on record. She started walking the eight miles back into Paris and thought hard. She suddenly remembered her mother’s friend Hélène Duc, a celebrated theater actress, who lived in a decrepit and discreet boardinghouse at 20 rue Servandoni, near Saint-Sulpice church. Night had fallen and the narrow Servandoni street was plunged in darkness when Juliette knocked at the door. Hélène Duc opened it, looked at Juliette, and understood immediately. After quickly checking to see that nobody else was in the street, she let Gréco in. “I stayed in bed for the next two years,” she said later.42 With nothing to wear, hungry and cold, Juliette Gréco would indeed spend long hours under the covers. Male friends, aspiring actors and art students, gave her some of their clothes. They were far too big, so she rolled them up: shirts, sweaters, jackets, trousers, the lot. In the streets and cafés, heads turned; a new fashion was about to be born.

  Unlike Drieu La Rochelle, indulging in suicidal thoughts, Juliette Gréco and her generation were simply trying to survive the war. And like the budding actress Simone Signoret, Juliette, who wanted to become a tragedian, was going from audition to audition to obtain small parts in plays and films. Her drama teacher managed to get work for her as an extra at the Comédie-Française. Juliette was there on November 27, 1943, on the opening night of Le soulier de satin (The Satin Slipper), an eleven-hour play by Paul Claudel. Gréco was on stage, hidden, like many other extras, under a huge sheet. They had to rise slowly and then dive and rise again, to create the movement of a giant wave. The celebrated actor Jean-Louis Barrault had reduced the play to a five-hour performance, which enthralled the critics. Such a production in occupied Paris was an almost unheard-of endeavor.

  Jean-Paul Sartre was frantically working on his next play, so much so that he finished Huis clos (No Exit) in just over two weeks. He had written it for Olga’s sister, Wanda, another student lover of his, who wanted to become an actress. There were three characters in the play, two women and one man, and the action took place in hell. Sartre asked the handsome young man who had introduced himself to him a few months earlier at the opening of Les mouches to direct his new play. Albert Camus had never directed a play before, but as soon as he met the beautiful Wanda he accepted. He did not know that Sartre and Wanda were lovers, but did it matter, after all? Camus decided to do the rehearsals in Wanda’s room at the Hôtel Chaplain, 11 bis rue Jules Chaplain, near the Luxembourg Gardens. It was handy, for all kinds of reasons, both practical and amorous.

  Sartre had immediately liked Camus and, thanks to him, the social horizon of both Sartre and Beauvoir expanded. They also befriended the older Surrealist writers Michel Leiris and Raymond Queneau, who in turn introduced them to Picasso. In the winter of 1943, Beauvoir and Sartre often joined the group of friends who visited Picasso in his studio every morning. They now lived very close, having moved hotel again after friends from the Café de Flore recommended the Hôtel La Louisiane, 60 rue de Seine. One of the three large, round rooms with a rooftop view was suddenly available. Beauvoir managed to get it, while Sartre settled into a smaller and rather spartan room with no shelves for his books. Beauvoir was enchanted by her new lodgings: “Never had any of my bowers been so close to my dreams. I was thinking of living there until the day I died.”43

  In the morning, Picasso’s studio turned into a salon, with Brassaï often hovering in the background, arranging and rearranging paintings and sculptures and checking the light for his photography. The poet Jacques Prévert visited often in October and November 1943. He seemed nervous about the shooting of Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise),
which he had scripted for the film director Marcel Carné. Les enfants du paradis, set in Paris in 1828, tells the story of Garance and the four men in her life: mime, actor, swindler, and aristocrat. They all love her but she loves only one. Like all true love stories it ends badly. The cast included Arletty in the leading female role and 1,800 extras, among whom were as many collaborationists imposed by Vichy as résistants in need of a front. The situation of Joseph Kosma and Alexandre Trauner—both Jewish and working on the film under pseudonyms—was getting more precarious with the ever-growing number of people involved in the production of this three-hour epic film. They could be denounced at any time, be arrested, and deported to Germany.

  In the winter of 1943, hunger and cold hit Parisians harder still. Picasso could not obtain any coal, even on the black market, and Brassaï simply could not get his fingers to operate his camera. While Picasso found himself a secondhand leather jacket lined with lamb’s wool at the flea market,44 Brassaï made himself a hut in his own living room. With temperatures dropping to near zero in early December 1943, Parisian interiors were literally freezing. One morning Brassaï found Alfred, his frog, frozen to death in his tank. “I loved Alfred. His ugliness was almost sublime, like the times we were living.” So, in order not to face a similar fate, Brassaï took large photographic reproductions from a past exhibition of his and built himself a little shack in his flat. Inside, he placed an armchair, his typewriter, a small camp stove, a lamp, and a kettle.45