Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  French journalism was more interested in understanding and influencing the world than in simply reporting the facts, and this would, from now on, be its greatest asset and greatest liability, proving joyfully and viciously partisan. Communist newspapers such as Ce Soir, edited by the résistant, novelist, and poet Louis Aragon, and L’Humanité, the Communist Party publication, used all their might to promote their ideology and to attack all those who did not think like them, including Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir.

  Like Camus, many writers and philosophers had become journalists. The French press was filled with editorialized pieces rather than plain reportage. This made news highly politicized, cerebral, intelligent, literary, and often personal, which Parisians welcomed. Newspapers might have been limited to one sheet for lack of paper, but in the little space they had, they went right to the point. Mostly written by résistants who had risked their lives to keep the country informed during the war, the French press was highly regarded, not only at home but also abroad. “Everything Camus writes today in Combat is incised with meaning,” wrote Janet Flanner. “The new Republic has started off with something the old did not have—the most intelligent, courageous and amateur press which venal, literate France has ever known. The new press of Paris alone lives up to the Resistance slogan ‘Les Durs.’ It is indeed hard, and pure.”10

  Albert Camus’ editorials and partisan journalism infuriated as many readers as they attracted. Using the collective and unanimous “we,” he would write: “What did we want? A virile, clear-sighted and respectable press.” For him, journalism could never be impartial and should not claim to be. “Information cannot be passed on without a critical analysis.” Camus demanded a personal tone and style of his journalists. It was right to distinguish between opinion pieces and reportage; however, one should know that objectivity did not exist. In his eyes, a journalist was nothing less than a day-to-day historian. In the first weeks of Combat, Camus set out clear ethical and moral principles for his team of journalists.11 He now rejected Marxism. What he wished for France was both a collectivist economy and liberal policies. He did not explain, though, how the two systems could work together.

  Édith Thomas, too, had embraced journalism. Her comrades had asked her to become the editor of Femmes françaises, a Communist weekly aimed at French women readers. Like the good soldier she was, Édith had accepted her new mission without a word. But the truth, which she confided to her diary, was that she did not believe men and women should have different publications, nor should they be addressed differently. As a Communist and résistante, she found the gender differentiation old-fashioned and condescending to women. First, she started to hire good writers, whatever their political inclination. She asked Jean Paulhan, who had gone back to his tiny office at Gallimard, to recommend someone for the review section. He replied: “Dominique Aury is the woman you need.” In the autumn of 1944, the thirty-seven-year-old Aury was on the editorial committee of Gallimard; she was a writer mostly interested in religious history and seventeenth-century poetry. With Jean Paulhan, she shared a passion for the Marquis de Sade. Like Paulhan, but unlike Édith, the demure-looking thirty-seven-year-old woman was viscerally anti-Communist. Édith did not mind as long as she was talented. And she was. Édith assigned her to write the magazine’s literary reviews. There were, however, many submissive minds on Édith’s editorial committee, wives of eminent Party members who did not know anything about journalism and were more interested in criticizing Édith’s eclectic editorial choices than anything else. “Too much mediocrity, too much suspicion, too many lies,”12 Édith wrote in her diary on a damp and cold December evening. The day after, she quit her job and was hired almost immediately at Le Parisien Libéré, a non-Communist daily newspaper edited by résistants. Édith kept seeing Dominique Aury, though. Dominique had resigned from Femmes françaises on the same day as Édith, out of solidarity.

  Apart from the feverish preparations for Sartre’s trip to New York and Beauvoir’s trip to Portugal and Spain, scheduled a few weeks later, Christmas 1944 was a little dull for the Sartre and Beauvoir family, and New Year’s Eve at Albert Camus’ apartment was somewhat subdued. Camus’ wife, the beautiful Francine, had finally returned from Algiers, and things were not going very well between them. Camus was as passionately in love with Maria Casarès as ever and was not going to give her up. Sartre was drinking heavily, while Francine played Bach on the piano until two in the morning. As the party drew to an end, Albert walked toward Simone with a warm smile and a book with a red and black cover in his hand. He wanted her to read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, which had appeared in the United States in 1940 but had not yet been published in French. Back in her room at the Hôtel La Louisiane, as the first light of the new year filtered through the curtains, she put Koestler’s book on her small bedside table. After a few hours of sleep, she started reading. “I did not put it down until I had reached the end. I read it in one breath.”13

  THE HOMECOMING

  Among the exiles making their way back to Paris in the winter of 1944–45 were Samuel Beckett and Janet Flanner, the latter taking over for A. J. Liebling as Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, or rather resuming the job she had held for twenty years until the war broke out. Samuel Beckett and his partner Suzanne had opened the door of the flat on the rue des Favorites with a mixture of dread and longing. It had been four long years since the day they left their Paris home in a rush, fleeing the Gestapo. Unsurprisingly, their home had been broken into, and some pieces of furniture, personal effects, and kitchen utensils were missing. Depressed by the sight, Beckett and Suzanne booked themselves into the Hôtel Libéria, 9 rue de la Grande Chaumière, next to the art school and opposite Beckett’s favorite restaurant, Wadja.

  Janet also chose to stay in a hotel, more exactly at the Hôtel Scribe with her fellow foreign correspondents. She knew that she could have a hot bath there every morning between eight and ten, and this alone was incentive enough to live there for a while. The day after her arrival she had bumped into Ernest Hemingway, who confessed breaking the news to her former girlfriend Noeline about Janet’s current Italian lover.14 Noeline, the formerly statuesque blonde, was now a shadow of herself. The war had ravaged her looks. Devoured by regrets, Janet had decided to stay three nights a week with Noeline.

  Paris was rainy, cold, muddy, and hungry. As Janet Flanner typed on her old Remington, “nourished by liberation, warmed by the country’s return to active battle, Paris is still, physically, living largely on vegetables and mostly without heat.”15 A week’s ration for a family of three was half a pound of fresh meat, three-fifths of a pound of butter, and one-third of a pound of sausage. No wonder the attacks against de Gaulle’s cabinet at the Consultative Assembly in November focused on supplies rather than high politics. Eight hundred thousand of the most skilled French factory workers were still slave laborers in Germany and could not fill the now open but empty factories. In Paris, a dozen métro stations were closed for lack of electricity, and gas for cooking was rationed to ninety minutes at lunchtime and an hour at dinnertime—that meant no gas to heat one’s morning ersatz coffee of burnt barley, which explained why everyone went to cafés to get a petit noir. In December 1944, Parisians, in their overcoats, sipped their carrot and parsnip stew, the only vegetables available in any quantity.

  Things were better for the happy few who could get into the restaurant of the Hôtel Scribe. Jacques-Laurent Bost had just come back from Holland and as a war correspondent could take Simone de Beauvoir there for lunch. They had fresh eggs, white bread, jam, and Spam.16 A feast. Simone discreetly filled her pockets with sugar, the new gold. Apart from lunch at the Scribe, spending long hours in bed reading and making love, staying in cafés for hours rubbing shoulders with your neighbors, and drinking slightly more than usual in the evening were the best ways to keep warm and cheat hunger in the first months of 1945. Parisians had never felt colder or hungrier since the Prussian siege of Paris in 1870, when their grandparents ha
d eaten rats, cats, and mice to survive. Paris’s streets were covered with snow; ski clothes, if you had them, had replaced pajamas as nightwear.

  Parisians had been waiting for the return of another kind of exile. In early spring, the Allies had crossed the Rhine; their speed was now breathtaking. They were about to reach many of the concentration camps. War prisoners were slowly making their way back home, soon followed by the first deportees. On April 22, 1945, Janet Flanner took the métro from Opéra to the Gare de Lyon. She had been briefed that the first contingent of women prisoners would arrive later that day by train. There were three hundred of them, who came in exchange for German women held in France. They had been interned at the camp of Ravensbrück, fifty miles north of Berlin. The name did not really ring a bell with Parisians, but it did with the American reporter. Janet took her place among the crowds awaiting their loved ones with timid smiles and welcoming bouquets of lilacs and other spring flowers. Gendarmes were keeping them a few feet away from the entrance to the platform, where Charles de Gaulle was standing. A solitary and commanding figure, he was the incarnation of heroic Free France welcoming back to its bosom all those betrayed by cowardly Vichy France—a poignant task. His own niece, the twenty-four-year-old Geneviève de Gaulle, a résistante from the very first hours of the armistice in 1940, interned at Ravensbrück in 1944, was not part of the convoy. All he knew was that she was still alive. Janet Flanner looked at her watch as the train slowly ground and screeched into the station; it was exactly eleven o’clock in the morning.

  The women were leaning out the windows of the train. Seeing their faces, the crowd, now allowed on the platform, froze in fear and horror. Their flesh had a gray-greenish halo and all had red-brown circles around eyes that seemed to see but not take anything in. De Gaulle walked toward them and started shaking their hands. The crowd began moving, now anxiously searching for their loved ones among the poor, wretched women. “There was almost no joy; the emotion penetrated beyond that, to something near pain.”17 De Gaulle knew that the Ravensbrück Kommandant had carefully selected these three hundred women because they were the most presentable. Eleven had died en route. “As the lilacs fell from inert hands, the flowers made a purple carpet on the platform and the perfume of trampled flowers mixed with the stench of illness and dirt.”18 Many of the women suffered from dysentery and were covered with typhoid lice.

  This painful homecoming heralded a long series of such returns. As the Allies and the Red Army were about to free the concentration camps one after the other, a whole new horror, the dawning realization of the Holocaust, was about to engulf the free world. Not a day passed without Beauvoir and Picasso thinking about their many dear disappeared friends. Alfred Péron, Samuel Beckett’s best friend, had survived concentration camp life and was now in transit from Mauthausen to Switzerland, looked after by the Red Cross. On May 1, he died of exhaustion.

  The Gaullist administration realized very quickly that the reception facilities of the Gare d’Orsay19 were not up to the task. Deportees were in such poor health, exhausted and disoriented, that they needed a specific reception and accommodation center. De Gaulle requisitioned five luxury hotels on the Left Bank, among them the Hôtel Lutétia, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, an Art Nouveau palace that had been occupied by the Abwehr during the war. It had 350 rooms, which would be used as dormitories, with a total of a thousand beds, for the deportees just back from Germany. Volunteers from different Resistance associations, boy scouts and youth movements, as well as doctors and nurses working extra shifts, ran the deportees’ center at the Hôtel Lutétia night and day. Sometimes coaches arrived in the middle of the night with two thousand deportees at a time. The fittest were registered, asked questions, seen by a doctor, and sprayed with DDT in a nearby bakery that had been repurposed for the task, before being ushered to a room where they could rest. Volunteer teenagers helped the weakest directly from the coach to a room and a bed. The deportees would then be fed in a meticulous way, with the small quantities of food their bodies could stand after years of starvation. Some were extremely contagious. A chambermaid and a teenager looking after the deportees’ clothes died after contracting typhus.

  The eighteen-year-old Juliette Gréco did not volunteer, but she did, like thousands of Parisians, go to the Lutétia every day from the end of April through the summer, in the wild hope of finding her mother and older sister Charlotte, who had disappeared three years earlier, arrested by the Gestapo. Simone de Beauvoir, too, went to the Lutétia, to try to obtain some information about her former students and friends, deported to Germany. So many had died or did not survive their transfer back home. Her petit Bost had returned to the front to report on the liberation of the camps and had entered Dachau an hour after the U.S. Army. He had been unable to file his copy, he wrote to her. He felt completely paralyzed in front of his typewriter. “Once again, I felt ashamed of being alive. Death was haunting us, but I thought, with disgust for myself, that those who do not die accept the unacceptable.”20

  Finally, one afternoon, Juliette Gréco saw both her sister and her mother in the crowd at the Lutétia. None of the women spoke. Juliette took Charlotte by the hand and walked her to her little hotel room on the third floor of 16 rue Servandoni, while their mother was looked after by family friends. “For the first few weeks, I fed my older sister milk and tiny pieces of food the way you do a kitten.”21 Gréco had been told that when they liberated Dachau, U.S. soldiers, thinking they were doing the right thing, had distributed bread, sausages, and Spam to deportees, who had died just after eating them. Getting accustomed again to freedom, life, and its pleasures would take a long time.

  THE FIRST FREE SPRING IN FIVE YEARS

  In April 1945 the first rays of sunshine finally heralded a new spring, the first free spring in five years. Seated at café terraces, Parisians could feel the warmth of the sun on their cheeks. The month of April was dazzling, wrote Simone de Beauvoir, returning from her trip to Portugal and Spain. She had brought back in her suitcases a hundred pounds of groceries—ham, chorizo, Algarve cakes, sticky sugar, eggs, tea, real coffee, and real chocolate—and was handing them out generously to friends, lovers, and strangers. She had purchased many clothes, too, folkloric sweaters, Spanish scarves, and multicolored fishermen’s shirts from Faro in Portugal, one for Camus, one for le petit Bost, and one for Michel Vitold, a talented thirty-year-old Russian-born actor and her current lover. She kept for herself the most treasured acquisition: brown crepe-soled shoes. People stopped her in the street, not because they recognized her but because they wanted to know where she had found such wondrous shoes.22

  American films started to reach Paris’s cinemas. Howard Hawks’s 1940 screwball comedy His Girl Friday, with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, gave many Parisians their smile back, at least for an evening. But the film that really struck everyone was the three-hour epic Les enfants du paradis, penned by Prévert, directed by Carné, and interpreted by Arletty, Pierre Brasseur, and the new young stars from the French theater Jean-Louis Barrault and Maria Casarès. Its making and its story embodied perfectly the moral contradictions the French had endured and were still facing.

  Prévert wrote the central part of Garance for Arletty, who was still France’s biggest star even after her scandalous love affair. Garance and Arletty were one and the same woman, the epitome of the Parisian: strong, independent, witty, impudent, mysterious, the kind who casts spells, whose laugh ricochets, the kind who loves life and whom life loves. Prévert’s dialogues were instant classics. At one point, Garance tells the mime artist, Baptiste, who is desperately in love with her: “I am what I am. I love those who love me. That is all. When I feel like saying yes, I do not know how to say no.” The film had such an impact with audiences because it encapsulated the moral maelstrom felt by so many in France. It was easy to see in Garance and Arletty a metaphor for France, a woman who gave herself a little too freely even if her heart remained pure and faithful. How ironic that Arletty had been arrested for sleeping wit
h the enemy. With typical impudence, Arletty had told the young résistants who had interrogated her: “My heart belongs to France but my arse is international!” (“Mon coeur est français, mon cul, lui, est international!”).

  The death of President Roosevelt in April 1945 caused more personal grief among the French than the deaths of their own recent great men. Janet Flanner heard a café waitress “naively touching the sublime” when she said of his death: “C’est ennuyeux pour toute l’humanité” (“It is troublesome for the whole of humanity”).23 The Paris press wrote of the American president with sober magnificence, sincere superlatives, and spirited Gallic headlines: VIVE ROOSEVELT! (Libération-Sud) and “The great voice which directed American political destinies has been silenced, but its echo continues in French souls” (Le Monde).

  Two events improved the general mood considerably. On April 30, Hitler’s death, followed a week later by Germany’s unconditional surrender, triggered scenes of jubilation in the streets of Paris. All those who, like Janet Flanner, had not been lucky enough to witness the elation of the Liberation in August 1944 were determined to experience V-E Day celebrations as intensely and fully as they possibly could. For Janet, it was a way of catching up with history and of being reunited with her French family.

  Janet went first to the place de la Concorde: “The babble and the shuffle of feet drowned out the sound of the stentorian church bells that clanged for peace, and even the cannon firing from the Invalides was muffled by the closer noise of feet and tongues that were never still.” Simone de Beauvoir and a group of a dozen friends were there too. There were two noticeable absentees from Beauvoir’s little troop, though. Sartre was still in the United States and Bost was still in Germany. “We got off the métro at Concorde, there was a human tide, we could hardly walk. We were in fact carried by this human wave. A force seemed to be pushing us all toward Opéra.”24 The tricolor flags were flapping in the wind, and “La Marseillaise” could be heard from every street corner.