Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  The photographer Brassaï had also vanished and temporarily abandoned his work at Picasso’s studio. He, too, had had to flee his home and stay with friends, with fake identity papers he had obtained through acquaintances. As a former officer in the Austro-Hungarian army, he had received a mobilization order. A foreigner and a deserter in Paris in 1944 could never be too cautious. He had found a warm shelter from the absurdity of life at La Grande Chaumière15 and had been going there almost every day since Christmas. Since its opening in 1904, this art school offered free drawing and sketching sessions with live models in heated rooms. Who could ask for anything more in Paris in 1944?

  When Brassaï knocked again at 7 rue des Grands Augustins, on Tuesday, April 27, Picasso himself opened the door, half awake, unshaven, and still in his slippers. Just before Brassaï’s arrival, the sprightly Jean Marais had woken Pablo up, arriving with his dog, a broomstick, and an urgent request: “Can you make a sumptuous scepter out of this stick?” Marais was rehearsing the part of Pyrrhus in Racine’s Andromaque at the Théâtre Édouard VII. He had planned to appear on stage almost naked, with just a leopard skin around his waist and a scepter to show his rank. “I need it to be truly barbarous and spectacular, and I need it for tomorrow. Is this possible, Pablo?” Picasso was still contemplating the broomstick when Françoise Gilot, now officially introduced to his friends as his new love, the actor Alain Cuny, and Jean Cocteau arrived together.

  Cocteau and Picasso had known each other for twenty-eight years. Cocteau had been coming to see him more often lately. The old friends frequently had lunch at Le Catalan; they were a constant source of inspiration to each other. They also bickered. Picasso complained that “Cocteau was always trying to imitate me,” while Cocteau often pointed out that “Picasso was trying his hand at metaphysics, but knew nothing about it.”16 However, Cocteau understood that, like him and their friend Apollinaire, Picasso, too, was a poet—but one who, unlike Cocteau, had not compromised himself during the war.

  Cocteau had a great weakness and a great strength: he refused to take the war seriously, at least in public. He smoked opium on perhaps too regular a basis and often seemed oblivious. He continued going to openings and high-society events without any concern as to where the invitation came from or from whom, Otto Abetz, Gerhard Heller, or the résistant Jean Paulhan. To him it was irrelevant. He metaphorically and literally lived in a bubble, on the first floor of 36 rue Montpensier, giving onto the Palais Royal gardens with their arcades and candelabra dating back to Cardinal Richelieu.

  The collaborationist press hated Cocteau for his homosexuality, and he had been beaten up more than once by young collaborator thugs as he walked down the streets. His lover Jean Marais had even slapped the face of Alain Laubreaux, the theater reviewer of the pro-Nazi weekly newspaper Je Suis Partout, who had trashed Cocteau’s play La machine à écrire (The Typewriter) without even seeing it. This was brave of Marais: Laubreaux had powerful connections with the Gestapo.

  That Tuesday, April 27, 1944, the fifty-five-year-old Cocteau looked as slender and young as ever, without a silver thread in his hair. He was gearing up to direct a film, which the eccentric genius Christian Bérard would design and in which Marais would take the lead role. He was thinking of calling it La belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast). Picasso liked the sound of it. After the morning visitors had gone, Brassaï could go back to photographing Picasso’s war production, a seemingly endless task.

  Gerhard Heller was right to fear for his friend Jean Paulhan’s safety. Serving as a private sentinel, posted at the little entrance of the Roman arena just opposite his front door, he was now also able to keep an eye on a nearby building at 7 rue de Navarre, where the writer Jean Blanzat was hiding the high priest of French letters François Mauriac. In fact, with his panoramic view Heller was guarding three résistant French writers at once. On May 6, a letter of denunciation accusing Jean Paulhan of being Jewish proved enough for the SD to act. Alerted in time by Heller, Paulhan fled over the rooftops.17

  Three weeks exactly after Paulhan escaped torture and deportation to Germany, Sartre’s Huis clos opened at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier. Set in hell—that is to say, in a hotel room—two women and a man discover the bitter experience of being judged by others. Sartre’s most famous play intended to show that our acts in life define who we are and how others look at us. The three characters expected hell to be a torture chamber, but they soon realize that they are each other’s hell. The older woman is attracted to the younger woman, who in turn is attracted to the young man, who is in no mood, at first, for seduction games. In real life, the young Russian-born actor Michel Vitold was Simone de Beauvoir’s lover and the young actress Gaby Sylvia the theater director’s wife.

  “We never were freer than during the German occupation,” Sartre wrote a few months later. “Since the Nazi venom was poisoning our very own thinking, every free thought was a victory. The circumstances, often atrocious, of our fight allowed us to live openly this torn and unbearable situation one calls the Human Condition.”18

  PARIS WHEN IT SIZZLES

  In the early hours of June 6, 1944, Albert Camus and Maria were braving the midnight curfew, cycling downhill somewhat drunkenly after leaving the flat of the celebrated theater director Charles Dullin in Pigalle, where there had been another fiesta. “Fiesta” was the term coined in the spring of that year by Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, and a cohort of their friends who now partied all night in the face of the occupants. They could not stand it anymore; something had to give. With Albert on the saddle and Maria on the handlebar, the pair were whizzing through the place de la Concorde in darkness while a 150,000-strong Allied force, led by American, British, and Canadian soldiers, was about to land on the beaches of Normandy. Operation Overlord was under way, the largest air, land, and sea operation ever undertaken. On the boats, young men, most of them still teenagers, carried eighty pounds of equipment on their backs. The majority had never seen Europe’s shores. As the boats approached the beaches, some prayed, others gritted their teeth, but all had learned by heart what was expected of them: as soon as the boat ramps go down, jump, swim, run, and crawl in the sand, up to the cliffs two hundred yards in front of you. Until they reached the relative safety of the cliffs, they had no protection but God’s. Hell was upon them—a different kind of hell from the one that Parisians had known for four years.

  On the same day, Henri Cartier-Bresson, discreetly back in Paris after escaping his prisoner of war camp in Germany a year earlier, had an appointment with Georges Braque. The Alsatian publisher Pierre Braun was starting a series of small monographs on great artists and wanted their portraits taken in the intimacy of their studio. Cartier-Bresson was overjoyed. A few months earlier he had met Matisse in his Vence studio, near Cannes, and had captured the painter “cutting through light,” working hard on a new thing, collages and découpages, paper cutouts, in other words “painting with scissors.”

  Now it was time to shoot Georges Braque, the father of Cubism. Cartier-Bresson arrived around noon at the painter’s studio in the Montsouris area, south of Montparnasse, at 6 rue du Douanier-Rousseau.19 The two men were chatting away, the radio purring in the background, when they suddenly both stopped midsentence. Cartier-Bresson would always remember Braque’s expression at the very instant he realized what he had just heard on the BBC, the default setting of most wireless devices in Paris at the time. The Allies had landed. After a long pause the sixty-two-year-old painter slowly walked to a bookcase from which, according to the historian Pierre Assouline, he pulled a book given to him by Jean Paulhan and handed it to Cartier-Bresson without a word: Zen in the Art of Archery by the German philosopher Eugen Herrigel.20

  A week later, when Le malentendu, Camus’ second play, opened at the Théâtre des Mathurins with Maria Casarès in the leading role, Parisians did not know much about the Allies’ progress on the ground. In Picasso’s studio, Brassaï couldn’t focus on his photography, and morning visitors were too elated to talk
about anything else, but information was scarce, especially with the Germans jamming the BBC radio frequencies. The only certainty was that the towns of Bayeux, Isigny, and Carentan had been liberated and that the Allies’ armies and aviation were firmly holding their ground against the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe. Parisians had even stopped talking about food shortages and power cuts, even though the situation on that front had suddenly become much worse since Paris’s supply lines had been cut by the Allied landings.

  Parisians were now starving and in greater danger than at any time during the Occupation. The archivist-résistante Édith Thomas had stopped receiving the writers from the Comité National des Écrivains in her flat—too many had been arrested. One morning in the first days of July she looked inside her kitchen cupboard and smiled: she had “enough dry noodles and white beans to withstand a long siege.”21 Parisians mostly fed on optimism and hope, though. They had begun flocking to the bird stalls along the banks of the Seine to buy millet and hemp seeds. The birds had almost all been eaten and did not need it anymore.

  A week later, near the métro exit of Réaumur-Sébastopol, the German police rounded up Albert Camus and Maria Casarès. Men were body-searched while women were only asked to show their papers. Camus had the proofs of the clandestine newspaper Combat in his briefcase. He managed to give them to Casarès just before being searched. They were allowed to go, but it was time to leave Paris and lie low. Camus immediately cycled to Verdelot, a five-and-a-half-hour ride sixty miles east of Paris, and found shelter at a friend’s cottage, where he gorged on his favorite food, Maizena cornstarch.

  Then came Bastille Day, July 14. Patrolling the city or guarding Nazi offices, German soldiers were on edge, their hands firmly holding their rifles but their fingers increasingly febrile around the trigger. They looked mean. In fact, they were frightened. Parisians had decorated their city in their own particular way, as if a silent rallying cry had spread through the city. On the boulevard Saint-Michel, at the crossroads with the rue Soufflot, on a balcony, someone had hung clothes to dry: a navy blue overall, a bright white tablecloth, and a bloodred scarf, all blowing and floating in the air.22 In the bright summer morning light, the vision was startling. Nearby, a florist had only blue delphiniums, white lilies, and red roses to sell. Women had dressed in the same way, wearing only the three national colors, and in workmen’s upper pockets, three pencils, blue, white, and red, were often seen sticking out. For the first time in four years, Parisians started looking at each other again, searching, seeking a sense of fraternity.

  Despite being assured by Roosevelt and Churchill that his provisional government would be France’s next, Charles de Gaulle had been given no guarantee that Allied armies would help liberate Paris. In pure military and strategic terms, de Gaulle knew that Paris was not a priority, even if politically there was no greater stake, even for the Allies. He could not be too sure of Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower’s plans and even less of Roosevelt’s.

  He and the French Resistance were planning ahead, making contingency arrangements in case they received no military help from the Allies. Field hospitals and first aid stations were organized by arrondissement, mobile units made up of doctors, nurses, and stretcher bearers were given supplies so they could operate independently. To think that the Forces Françaises Intérieures23 (FFI) and the Free French army, most notably Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division and its 14,500 men, could defeat the Wehrmacht alone was to believe in miracles and in one’s own destiny. De Gaulle believed in both.

  But the Germans intended to leave with a bang, a big bang. Hitler wanted Paris destroyed, Paris in ruins. General Dietrich von Choltitz, whom Hitler had personally named commander of Gross-Paris on August 7, had instructed army engineers to set demolition charges throughout the city. Tons of dynamite were laid under every one of Paris’s forty-five bridges, its power station and water-pumping plant, and its most famous monuments. The Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, the Élysées Palace, the Opéra, the Hôpital des Invalides with Napoleon’s tomb, the Palais du Luxembourg, and the French Senate were all marked for destruction.24

  That week, Gallimard’s house fascist, Drieu La Rochelle, bumping into a friend on the avenue de Breteuil, near the Invalides, said: “I’ve made my decision, I’m leaving.” A few hours later he was attempting suicide. Gerhard Heller leaped on his bicycle, arrived at his bedside, and whispered in Drieu’s ear: “I’m slipping a passport for you under your pillow.” The passport had a visa for Spain and Switzerland. But Drieu was fixed on a one-way journey to hell. That night, Gerhard Heller packed his Paris diaries of the last four years, together with a manuscript entrusted to him by Ernst Jünger titled “Peace.” He put the documents in a small tin suitcase and set off toward the Invalides, a small shovel in his hand. The air was muggy; Heller could feel the sweat pearling down his brow. He spotted a tree on the esplanade, looked at the distance and angle between the rue de Constantine, rue Saint-Dominique, and rue de Talleyrand, made a mental note, counted his steps, and started digging discreetly. He felt the urge to—literally—bury his Paris life in order to save himself.

  “WHAT IS AN INSURRECTION? IT IS THE PEOPLE IN ARMS”

  Wednesday, August 16, 1944, heralded a week of momentous change, a week of danger and of fraternity, one that would leave its mark on generations. That Wednesday, the journalists and editors of the pro-German publications Pariser Zeitung, Je Suis Partout, and Le Pilori had vanished during the night. Resistance publications had immediately moved into their now empty offices.25 Radio Paris, the notorious pro-German radio station, had also disappeared. The insurrection had already started on the airwaves.

  Later in the day the different branches of the French Resistance met. Allied forces were not on their way to the capital and the communist leaning FFI (Forces Françaises Intérieures) had not agreed on when to start the insurrection. For the Gaullists, Charles de Gaulle’s followers, it was imperative to remain cool-headed and not to risk thousands of civilian casualties and the complete destruction of their capital city. They wanted to wait long enough to give the Free French army the chance to arrive on time and drive away the German occupants.

  Supervising operations from the catacombs below the place Denfert-Rochereau, a stone’s throw from Montparnasse, Resistance commanders, mostly in their early twenties, were restless. Alexandre Parodi, de Gaulle’s right-hand man in Paris, managed to persuade them to wait for at least twenty-four hours. In many different parts of Paris a general strike was starting to bear fruit, enabling thousands of civil servants from the Hôtel de Ville—the town hall—and various administrations to join the ranks of the underground fighters and get their hands on weapons.

  On Friday, August 18, Parisians woke up to see Resistance posters with the crossed French flags pasted on every wall. It was a general mobilization order for all former officers and officer cadets, calling on “all able-bodied men and women to join the ranks” and “strike the Germans and Vichy’s traitors wherever they could be found.” The French Resistance was presenting itself as France’s one and only legitimate army with de Gaulle at its head. The Gaullists were trying to proceed in an orderly manner and gather as many young men with military training and knowledge of firearms as possible before risking the lives of Paris’s civilians. They had managed to rein in the Communists for yet another day.

  The uprising began on Saturday, August 19, at dawn. Around two thousand armed men had locked themselves in at the Préfecture opposite Notre Dame and started shooting at German soldiers and tanks. Almost on cue the people of Paris, resorting to an old tradition, started building barricades. Cobblestones, trees, old bicycles, odd pieces of furniture—everything and anything was used throughout the city. The insurrectionists’ mission was to stop German armored vehicles at all costs. The FFI started occupying key buildings such as Paris’s various arrondissement town halls, ministries, printing works, and newspaper offices. Free French forces and the Paris police were working hand in hand. For Parisians this
was a most welcome but also rather unsettling vision: the Paris police, who had been under German orders for four years, had been responsible for rounding up thirteen thousand French Jews in July 1942, who were eventually deported to concentration camps in Germany.

  The confusion and panic of the twenty-thousand-strong German force was palpable. German snipers posted on rooftops were taking aim at civilians. Bullets whistled and flew over Parisians’ heads—often fatally. Seventy-five years later, the bullet holes are still there on the buildings.

  Pablo Picasso heard a bullet miss him by just a few inches. Fearing for the safety of his nine-year-old daughter, Maya, and her mother, Marie-Thérèse Walter, he left his studio at once. He ran, squatted, took shelter behind trees and in doorways, and looked up at the roofs of the buildings before crossing every street. He finally arrived at 1 boulevard Henri IV, at Marie-Thérèse and Maya’s. He would stay with them and paint. He had taken with him a print of Nicolas Poussin’s The Triumph of Pan.

  On Sunday, August 20, French, American, and British flags could be seen everywhere, but the situation was still critical. Half of Paris was now in the Resistance’s hands, but for how long Parisians would be able to hold their position against German tanks remained uncertain. In the morning, at Allied headquarters in Cherbourg, Charles de Gaulle confronted Eisenhower, who finally had to admit that he had no intention of sending his troops to Paris—it was not a strategic priority for the Allies. Charles de Gaulle threatened to order General Leclerc, commander of the French 2nd Armored Division (known as the 2nd DB) of the Allied forces, to begin his division’s descent on Paris at once. Positioned in Normandy, 130 miles from Paris, General Leclerc had no intention of waiting for the American High Command’s permission and, ready to risk a court martial, he immediately sent a small advance party to reconnoiter.

  Embedded with the 2nd DB was the New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling, still as unfit but as sharp an observer as ever. There was no other place the American reporter wanted to be. From the beginning, Liebling had viewed the Second World War almost exclusively as “a campaign to free France. It was the world of France that Liebling wanted fiercely to restore.”26 For this, he could not have been on a better tank than General Leclerc’s, but time was pressing. How long would it take Leclerc to reach the gates of Paris?