Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  Despite the hunger and the cold, Brassaï could see that Picasso was somehow energized by a new presence in his life. And he was not entirely surprised to bump into the young Françoise Gilot one morning. Brassaï knew her. He had met her three years earlier at another painter’s studio, that of the Hungarian Jew Endre Rozsda, where her fervent admiration for both painting and painters was obvious. “She made me think of Bettina Brentano, the eighteen-year-old madly in love with Goethe, who lived only for poetry and poets. Bettina had the devil in the flesh.”46 To Brassaï it seemed that it was Françoise Gilot who seduced Picasso as much as Picasso who seduced her. Everything in her fascinated and attracted Picasso: her pouting lips, her Greek nose, the mole on her cheek, her asymmetric green eyes, her arched eyebrows, and her tiny waist. He may still have lunch with Dora Maar, who lived a hundred yards away at 6 rue de Savoie, but it was both the end and the beginning for Picasso. Françoise heralded a new phase in his art. And as the terrible year 1943 drew to a close, Paris and Parisians, too, were waiting for an end and a beginning.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE FIGHT

  LIVING RECKLESSLY

  Early one freezing morning in January 1944, Jacques Jaujard walked over the Pont des Arts toward the Louvre gardens, transformed three and a half years earlier into vegetable plots1 to feed Parisian schoolchildren, and mulled over the telephone conversation he had had the night before with Quartus.

  Quartus was a well-chosen nom de résistance for the forty-three-year-old Alexandre Parodi. Just like Quartus, the first-century Athenian martyr, Parodi was a child of the elite, the son of a professor of philosophy and himself a high civil servant. Parodi had immediately rejected the armistice of June 1940 and gathered trusted French civil servants around him. Together they set up the Comité Général d’Études under Jean Moulin, the emblematic figure of the French Resistance. This committee of experts and lawmakers, thinking ahead, were devising the legislation of the future liberated France and of a new French republic. After Moulin was arrested, tortured, and killed by the Gestapo in July 1943, Alexandre Parodi became the head of the clandestine Free French administration in occupied France.

  The protection of France’s art collections was as dear to Charles de Gaulle and Alexandre Parodi as it was to Jaujard, who had tirelessly fought to save them from Nazi greed. It had not been easy. The most valuable artworks had to be moved from castle to castle and from the cellars of small provincial museums to other secret depots more than once, especially after November 1942 and the invasion of North Africa by the Allied forces and the subsequent end to the Free Zone in the south of France. Jaujard had managed to send not only hydrometric measuring equipment but also water pumps, fire extinguishers, and electric heaters to every place that stored the most fragile artworks of the national collections. With the agreement of his unlikely ally Count Wolff Metternich, who covered his activities as much as he possibly could, Jaujard had ordered that all the Rubenses, Tintorettos, Delacroix, Titians, Poussins, and the Mona Lisa leave the Ingres Museum at Montauban, where they had recently arrived, to be dispatched farther north and divided up among small castles in the Périgord region. The Mona Lisa had arrived at the Château de la Treyne, where André Chamson, an archivist-paleographer by training, a novelist by métier, and an improvised keeper of France’s treasures by force of circumstance, lived with his family.

  By now Jacques Jaujard was feeling exhausted and beleaguered. The brutal dismissal of his silent ally Count Wolff Metternich in September 1942 had made his personal mission even more difficult and dangerous. A month before the count’s removal, Marshal Pétain had personally authorized a Nazi commando to take from the Pau Museum the priceless polyptych Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, a masterpiece of Flemish primitive art that Belgium had entrusted to France for safekeeping during the war. Jaujard and Metternich had immediately protested to their respective hierarchies. Metternich, relieved from his post at once, had been sent on the first train back to Bonn and to his art history teaching, while Pétain’s culture minister, the collaborator Abel Bonnard, had told Jaujard on the phone: “I’ll make you crawl and one day I’ll make you disappear. Do you understand what I am saying?”2

  Jaujard could, however, rely on the complete loyalty and abnegation of his thousands of employees posted throughout France guarding some of the world’s most valuable treasures with their lives, which was the subject of his phone call with Quartus. Allied bombing was going to intensify in the next weeks and months (in preparation for the D-Day landings), and Jaujard and his employees had to clearly mark the different places where paintings and sculpture were hidden so that the Allied bombers could spare them. Quartus did not say more; he said that one of his agents, with the nom de guerre Mozart, would soon make contact with Jaujard directly.

  A state of general recklessness and audacity permeated those first months of 1944: everyone could feel that momentous events were being carefully planned but did not know exactly when they would occur, death could strike at any moment, the German occupants were restless and crueler still, everyone lacked essentials, everyone was hungry, cold, and yet hopeful.

  One afternoon, Mozart knocked at the door of Jaujard’s office. At the sight of the liaison agent, Jaujard froze. Mozart was a forty-year-old platinum blonde, a 1930s movie star named Jeanne Boitel. She asked questions in order to gather information and report back to Quartus and left Jaujard in a daze for the rest of the day. In his diary that night he wrote: “Man has a brain, a heart, a sex and a stomach. They do not necessarily get along well, and the brain is not always the dominant organ.”3 Jaujard was not the only one struck by the encounter—within a few days Jeanne and Jacques were lovers. As résistants and as lovers (Jaujard was married and had children), they both led double “double lives.” And they were by no means the only ones in Paris.

  * * *

  Albert Camus’ plays Le malentendu (The Misunderstanding) and Caligula, about to be published by Gallimard, were doing the rounds of celebrated theater directors in Paris. L’étranger (The Outsider), published in 1942, closely followed by Le mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), had established Camus, barely thirty, as a rival to the thirty-nine-year-old Jean-Paul Sartre. Marcel Herrand, an actor-director who was currently filming in Les enfants du paradis, organized a reading of Le malentendu at his home. The twenty-two-year-old actress Maria Casarès, who had one of the supporting roles in Les enfants du paradis, was in attendance. A mesmerizing Spanish beauty whose Republican parents had found refuge in France, Casarès already had strings of male admirers. Camus came to the reading alone. His wife, Francine Faure, a concert pianist, lived far away, in the safety of their hometown, Algiers, in North Africa.

  During the reading, Camus and Casarès looked at each other from across the room. “Both were foreign conquerors. And she had the charm of a sorceress.”4 There was no courtship. They became lovers a few hours after their encounter and would spend as much time together as they could. At night either she walked to his place, 1 bis rue Vaneau, where he stayed unknown to the police and the Gestapo at the novelist André Gide’s empty flat, or he walked to hers, at 148 rue de Vaugirard.

  Sonderführer Gerhard Heller, the German censor of French literature, had stopped wearing a military uniform, to his great relief. Now invisible in the Parisian crowd, he enjoyed walking in Paris at night, to purge himself of his own double “double life.” Heller walked for long hours to chase away his rising anxiety and to fight a profound existential malaise. Here was a young man whom the tragic caprices of history had brought to where he had always wanted to be, Paris, living among writers he venerated. Not only was he living among them, he also exerted the ultimate power over their writings. He had, too, the ability to protect them from the Gestapo and, sometimes, from certain death.

  Heller never officially met Camus, and had he bumped into him he would not have introduced himself. Somebody else would later tell Camus that Heller had read the manuscript of The Outsider in January 1942, starting in the afternoo
n and not putting it down until four o’clock in the morning, and that a few hours later he had phoned Gaston Gallimard’s secretary to approve its publication, granting as much paper as needed and offering to help smooth any difficulties that might arise.5

  Sometimes his compatriot Ernst Jünger joined him in his aimless wandering. Heller and Jünger were “good German officers” in morally untenable positions. A celebrated novelist, a Francophile opposed to Hitler and yet an army captain in the Wehrmacht, Jünger worked for the chief of military staff, Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel. Among his tasks: the translation into German of the farewell letters written by the thousands of civilian hostages executed by the Germans in retaliation for the French Resistance’s actions. After such dreary work, Ernst Jünger would set out in the streets of Paris to chase rare editions at the bouquinistes, those secondhand booksellers whose stalls line the Seine, and then go and have dinner with Parisian friends such as Jean Cocteau.

  In his memoirs, written almost thirty years later, Heller tried to explain the unexplainable.

  It is difficult to understand, and certainly to accept that we lived happily when, right next to us, people were famished, hostages executed, Jewish children sent to concentration camps. I knew all this but I didn’t have the power nor enough conviction and courage to resist such atrocities directly. I was simply trying, in my capacity, to protect as best as I could what I believed were France’s true values and talents whose existence depended partly on me. I lived in a kind of blessed island, in the middle of an ocean of mud and blood.6

  During his night walks, Heller also had what he later called “brief encounters.” He admitted to two,7 one with a charming fifteen-year-old gamine he called Reinette whom he met regularly for months until one day in the summer of 1943 she disappeared without a word. A young Frenchman, Jacques, also about fifteen, soon replaced Reinette in Heller’s heart. “We looked at each other, and we smiled. I invited him to walk with me.” Heller took the working-class teenager, who had a job as a delivery boy, to the opera on Christmas Day 1943. They attended a performance of Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. Their hand holding and kissing were Gerhard’s secret life. During the day, though, he sat in his office at the German Institute, 57 rue Saint-Dominique, with his secretary and German fiancée, Marie-Louise, who was typing his correspondence and reports in the little room next door.

  Like Camus, Sartre would later learn that his play The Flies had been able to run in Paris thanks only to Heller’s intervention. When his colleagues from the Propagandastaffel pointed to the controversial nature and rebellious spirit of Sartre’s play, Heller wrote a report to reassure them that it had “nothing to do with the Resistance but was a play about ancient Greece,” nothing more. However, neither Heller nor clandestine résistant newspapers and the collaborationist press were fooled: Sartre’s play was heard as a call for insurrection.

  Heller increasingly spent time walking up and down the rue des Arènes in the 5th arrondissement where Gallimard publisher and in-house résistant Jean Paulhan, a man he deeply admired, lived at number 5. Jean Paulhan’s house was a very distinctive and striking neo-Gothic building on one of the oldest streets in Paris, winding around the Roman arena, les Arènes de Lutèce. Paulhan’s front door stood directly opposite a discreet portal into the arena and its gardens and could offer both the perfect escape route for a résistant and an efficient observation post for the Gestapo. Heller had strong suspicions that his leather-clad colleagues might arrest Paulhan. Heller would walk down the rue des Arènes most mornings and evenings to check that there was no agent from the Sicherheitsdienst waiting to ambush his friend. Like Paul Éluard, in hiding with other résistants in the psychiatric asylum of Saint Alban, 350 miles south of Paris, Jean Paulhan would soon need to go to a safe place. Too many people knew of his clandestine activities.

  HIDING, DISAPPEARING, AND FLEEING

  Samuel Beckett and his partner Suzanne had spent the last eighteen months at the Hôtel Escoffier in Roussillon-en-Provence, a little Provençal village where Madame Escoffier was catering for a full house of refugees. Beckett had quickly found work as a farm laborer and handyman. It paid for their hotel and food bill. In this forced retreat, and rather boring and uncomfortable life, Samuel Beckett had at last found his voice. He had written Watt, “a book which broke a silence.” And “for the first time, Beckett achieved his characteristic style, a syntax full of reservations and uncertainties, denials and admissions that something else might be the case, with a superb use of the comma.”8 His only link to the events that were shaking the world was the radio in Madame Escoffier’s kitchen. The whole village would drop by to listen to the news from London.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1944, the tide of history was clearly starting to turn, and collaborationist writers flocked to the German Institute and Heller’s office in the rue Saint-Dominique. They needed ausweise and visas. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a virulent anti-Semite and a literary genius, a radical pessimist as he called himself, or simply a nihilist, knew he would need to flee but when he visited Heller, he said loudly, for everyone to hear: “Heller, you’re an agent of Gallimard and the private secretary of the résistant Jean Paulhan. Everybody in Paris knows that!”9 This did not make Heller’s life any easier with his stern colleagues from the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, the much-feared Nazi Party’s security service).

  Jean Paulhan often wrote Heller small notes and letters asking him to intervene and free people from detention, or allow captives to slip through the net. Heller complied and braved more than once his fear of the SD, and argued with them. Why make unnecessary martyrs? Heller asked them. The SD usually let go of Heller’s French friends, but not always.

  Albert Camus was rehearsing Sartre’s latest play, Huis clos (No Exit), which he had agreed not only to direct but also to star in, alongside Wanda Kosakiewicz. It was an important play that would have a formidable impact—Camus was certain of this. However, when Olga Barbezat (née Kechelievitch), the other actress in the cast, was arrested on February 10, Camus refused to go on with the rehearsals. There were considerations for Camus outside of solidarity: he did not feel he was good enough to act or direct. Besides, he was no longer in love with Wanda, and Maria Casarès now occupied all his thoughts (and nights). Sartre accepted Camus’ resignation gracefully and moved forward swiftly. He gave his play to the director of the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, Raymond Rouleau, who read it immediately. A couple of hours later, the play’s rehearsal was scheduled to resume the next morning, this time with a professional cast and metteur-en-scène; rehearsals did not take place in an actress’s hotel room anymore but in the more serious atmosphere of a real theater.

  The Allied bombing of the city’s outskirts and industrial quarters was intensifying. The Germans were arresting people in broad daylight, not only at night, as they had been. On March 8, Hélène Berr was stopped and picked up by the SD as she walked home to the rue de Grenelle, in the 7th arrondissement. The twenty-two-year-old Jewish woman, a student of English literature, had started writing a diary after meeting Paul Valéry two years earlier. She was taken to the transit internment camp of Drancy, along with her parents. On March 27, her twenty-third birthday, they were put on the train to Auschwitz.10 The same day, Nathalie Sorokine, the tall Russian beauty who was a student and occasional lover of Simone de Beauvoir, came rushing back to La Louisiane, where she stayed in a room just below Beauvoir’s. Her Jewish boyfriend, Jean-Pierre Bourla, a former student of Sartre’s, had just been arrested, along with his father and sister, and taken to Drancy. Sonia Mossé11had also disappeared from the Café de Flore, where she was a regular. Her friends learned of her fate only months later.

  The first few months of 1944 were a time of frantic somnambulism. “Everybody was going about their day like sleepwalkers, carrying their fate over their shoulder like a sling bag, toothbrush and soap in one’s pocket, just in case of an arrest. We all lived in transit, between two round-ups, two hostage-takings, and two misunderstand
ings.”12

  This aspect of the Occupation is essential to understanding the spirit of those years, and how it marked and shaped the generations who lived through it. The concept of enemy is real and absolutely clear only when separated from us by “a barrier of fire,” as Sartre wrote. And this was mostly the experience of American and British soldiers. In Paris there was also an enemy, one of the vilest nature, but it was faceless. It was not the German officer who offered his seat on the métro to women and elderly people, it was not the lost German soldier who politely asked his way, it was not the simple German soldiers who had become part of the furniture. Those who actually saw the face of that enemy rarely came back to tell the tale. Sartre compared this faceless enemy to an octopus, which would take away the country’s best men at night and made them disappear, as if guzzled up by an invisible monster. “It seemed that every day around us, people were silently swallowed from beneath the earth.”13 One day you would call a friend and his phone would ring and ring and ring in his empty flat; you would knock at a door but nobody would come to open it. “If the concierge forced the door open, you would find two chairs, close together, in the entrance hall, with German cigarette butts scattered on the floor.”14 Wives and mothers would seek some news at the SD’s torture chambers on the avenue Hoche, where they would be courteously received; but at night, on that same avenue, screams of terror and pain would be heard from the cellars’ air vents giving onto the sidewalks. Everybody in Paris had a friend or a relative who had been arrested, deported, or killed. Yet nobody talked about it much, out of dignity or caution. People would say: “They took him away.”