Left Bank

by Agnès Poirier

  Simone and her friends passed just below Janet Flanner’s hotel room windows at 1 rue Scribe. From her observation post, Janet would see, later that day, the Parisians “filling avenues from curb to curb.” Some had brought the little food they had at home for improvised frugal picnics, but the marching Parisians were mainly living “on air and emotion.” Neither Janet nor Simone mentioned in her diary whether she had heard the French-born soprano Lily Pons25 sing the French national anthem from the balcony of the Opéra for the crowds that night. Lily Pons, the New York Metropolitan Opera’s star soprano since 1931, had deeply moved New Yorkers in December 1942 when she sang “La Marseillaise” during the performances of Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment, waving a flag with the Cross of Lorraine. Pons was, along with Marlene Dietrich, among the few artists who had put their careers on hold for the whole of 1944 in order to tour France, Europe, and the Middle East entertaining Allied troops.

  After writing down her impressions of the day, Janet went out again around midnight and walked toward the Champs-Élysées. The crowds had thinned and only the young remained, “long lines of boys and girls, arms high and holding hands, like long lines of noctambulistic paper dolls.”26 The young dominated the day and night. “It was the new post-war generation, running free, celebrating peace with a fine freedom which their parents, young in 1918, had certainly not known.”27 Looking at her much younger companions, Simone de Beauvoir noted: “The war is finished but it remains in our arms like a cumbersome and big corpse and it seems that there is nowhere we can bury it.”28

  The morning after, Beauvoir, still in bed, started contemplating the newspapers spread on the floor in front of her. She had bought all the now historic editions she could lay her hands on. While the Paris Herald Tribune had chosen the one-word headline VICTORY, French newspapers seemed instead to be focusing on the demise of the Nazi enemy. The Gaullist Les Nouvelles du matin dedicated its whole front page to a drawing of a female figure symbolic of France with wings, laurels, and Allied flags under the headline LA GUERRE EST FINIE. As for the satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné, it could not help celebrating the victory with a cartoon of Hitler, dead and at heaven’s gates, pinning a Star of David on God’s chest to start a New Order.

  CROSS-FERTILIZATION

  With the end of the war, the urge to travel, discover, understand, and embrace a new free world brought a fresh wave of foreign artists and writers to Paris. A cross-fertilization began to take place, transcending all kinds of boundaries and connecting philosophy and journalism, intellectuals of different nationalities and artists of different disciplines. Christian Zervos, the arts editor and founder of Cahiers d’Art, was hoping to relaunch his magazine with a bang: Picasso had promised a double cover,29 but the painter was playing hard to get. Zervos, from his office and art gallery at 14 rue du Dragon, was nonetheless plowing on, relying as always on his personal flair to commission articles and art reviews from unlikely people and yet-unknown talents. He was interested in a couple of Dutch painters, the brothers Bram and Geer van Velde, and had asked an Irishman named Samuel Beckett to write a text on them. Beckett liked a new challenge and he particularly loved the van Veldes’ art, especially Bram van Velde’s. Eleven years older than Beckett, Bram was “a painter almost as unsuccessful and devoid of support from the exhibiting establishment as Beckett himself was from the publishing.”30 He and Bram even resembled each other: tall, thin, bony, and taciturn. The brothers had their paintings exhibited at both the Édouard Loeb art gallery and Galérie Maeght, and Zervos was hoping to interest the public, or at least the connoisseurs, in their art. Beckett called his essay “La peinture des van Velde ou le monde et le pantalon” [The Painting of the van Veldes or the world and the pair of trousers].31 The title referred to a joke he would use again in 1957 in his play Endgame about the tailor who unfavorably compares the botched job God made of the world in seven days with the perfect pair of trousers he crafted in a somewhat longer period.

  His art review was not an art review. His opening line said it all: “To start with, let’s talk about something else.” And what about? The doubts of the art amateur, and the mistakes of art critics. “There is no painting, just canvases. And those canvases, not being sausages, are neither good nor bad,” wrote Beckett, before adding, “what you will ever know of a painting is how much you love it, and perhaps, if it interests you, why you love it.” Beckett unusually mentioned politics in his essay, saying that the van Veldes were more interested in the human condition than in painting.

  Walking up the boulevard Saint-Germain, Henri Cartier-Bresson had noticed Beckett coming out of Zervos’s gallery and had thought to himself, “good face, funny walk.”32 Cartier-Bresson had not had the heart or the courage to follow his fellow war correspondents and photographers to Germany. Circumstances had made him play at being “war reporter” during the liberation of Paris, but he did not wish to go to the front. He did not view himself as a “tourist in disaster land” or a “voyeur aristocrat”33 like others. He was not interested in war as such. In 1945, he chose to focus on the faces of those who were making or about to make history in Paris: Jean Paulhan, Édith Piaf, Simone de Beauvoir, Christian Dior, Paul Éluard, Pablo Picasso, and Igor Stravinsky, among many others. Cartier-Bresson himself, though only thirty-seven, was going to make headlines. The Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) had thought him dead for months and had planned to organize his life’s retrospective. But Cartier-Bresson was alive and well, and after recovering from the shock of that news, MoMA decided to go ahead anyway and planned the event for 1946. It would be the first of many retrospectives for Cartier-Bresson. Despite his relatively young age, his extensive traveling in the 1930s had made him a veteran photographer who had seen and photographed more than most artists. He had shared a flat with the black poet Langston Hughes in Mexico and dated a Mexican woman, Guadalupe Cervantes. He had lived in New York in Harlem, co-renting with the writer Paul Bowles and dating an African American woman. Everywhere he had gone, he had blended into the landscape and melted into the local crowd, taking pictures all the way. In other words, the Museum of Modern Art had a wealth of material to choose from for the exhibition.

  The world’s greatest chameleon artist, Picasso, the man with seven lives, was yet again reinventing himself and his art. He looked different: he had cut his famous shock of black hair. “One cannot be and have been,”34 said Picasso, greeting his old friend Brassaï on Saturday, May 12, 1945. Picasso now said tu to his friends and sometimes declared, by way of explanation, “We’re all the same age now, are we not?”35

  Young artists who had somehow pupated during the war and were now hungry to act and create, looked up to older artists they felt had not only resisted but had held high the banner of universalism in arts. The twenty-one-year-old dancer and choreographer Roland Petit went to see Prévert with an idea for a three-ballet show called Le rendez-vous. A defector from the Paris Opéra Ballet, Petit had formed a dance company and wanted the very best for his show: Prévert would write the story line, Joseph Kosma would compose the music, Mayo would design the costumes (all three had been among the talents behind Les enfants du paradis), Picasso would create the giant stage curtain, and Roland Petit wanted Brassaï to make three décors with giant reproductions of his black-and-white photographs. Petit, with the impetuousness of youth, gave them three weeks to do it. And so they did. On June 15, Le rendez-vous opened at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt and the young Marina de Berg made a strong impression in the part of “The world’s most beautiful girl.” There were many well-known figures in the stalls: Camus, Sartre, Beauvoir, Cocteau, and Marlene Dietrich all sat in the same row. This was not a coincidence. As Beauvoir explained: “We went out furiously to every opening, every cultural event. The fact that we all met then and there, together, despite our political differences, proved the solidarity that we so ardently wished to continue. Those openings and premières became demonstrations.”36 Fittingly, as Picasso’s beige and mauve curtain went down at
the end of the show, applause, boos, and shouting erupted in equal measure. “Since Picasso had joined the Communist Party on October 5, 1944, his work had the same effect on a certain fringe of the public as the muleta on a bull.”37 Although he had joined the Party out of friendship rather than belief, he was influencing the young generation to do the same. Juliette Gréco, who dreamed of becoming a tragedian, enrolled in the Communist Youth Movement just like tens of thousands of other young people in the country. She immersed herself in the work of authors approved by the Party. Some had talent: Aragon but also Federico García Lorca and that young woman she sometimes bumped into on the rue Saint-Benoît, Marguerite Duras.

  Sartre had delayed his return from the United States after meeting the beautiful Dolorès Vanetti, a friend of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist working as the French cultural attaché in New York. Vanetti was of Italian Ethiopian origin and had been educated in France before fleeing to New York with her American husband in June 1940.38 The couple were friends of the French exiles André Breton, Fernand Léger, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, and Marcel Duchamp, and also John Dos Passos, among others, and Sartre got to meet them all through her. “Dolorès gave me America,”39 Sartre later wrote. Among Dolorès’s friends he particularly warmed to Alexander Calder, whom he visited at his studio in Roxbury, Connecticut. Sartre was fascinated by the artist’s mobiles and Calder by the philosopher’s wit and ideas.

  Calder so missed Paris, where he had spent his formative years in the late 1920s and early 1930s, that he dreamed of going back and living there with his family. He just needed a Parisian project to make his dream come true. Perhaps Sartre could take part? Marcel Duchamp suggested he put on a show at his friend Louis Carré’s art gallery. No sooner said than done. Calder started producing a series of small-scale works that he could ship via the new international airmail system. On July 16, Calder packed thirty-seven miniature mobiles into six small cartons and sent them to Louis Carré for his consideration. Carré’s appetite whetted, he asked Duchamp and Calder for more in a telegram: WOULD ALSO GLADLY EXHIBIT MOBILE SCULPTURES AVAILABLE ALL SIZES AND COLOURS.40 Thinking ahead, Calder suggested that Sartre might write the catalog, to which Carré replied, “Excellent idea!”

  Calder’s friend Richard Wright was just leaving New York with his family to spend the summer in Montreal, having heard nothing yet about their application for French passports. He wrote in his diary: “Montreal is the closest I can get to Paris.” Richard and his wife, Ellen, had been taking French lessons in Brooklyn twice a week and wanted to put their newly acquired language skills to use. He was receiving mail from his French publishers. Albin Michel was going to publish Native Son and Uncle Tom’s Children, and Gallimard had picked up Black Boy. Three of his books were to hit Paris bookshops within a year. Surely, they would create a stir and trigger some important debates, or so he imagined. Wright was understandably hoping that their success with the French public would pave the way for his triumphal arrival in Paris.

  The Bastille Day celebrations in Paris, the first free July 14 since 1939, lasted three days and three nights. It was Picasso’s favorite day of the year. Seldom a landscape artist, he made an exception for the occasion and painted, on a very small canvas, the riverbank with Notre Dame in the background and French flags floating in the wind. “The extreme smallness of the painting made me think of Hokusai, who masterly painted on rice grains,”41 wrote Brassaï in his diary. Another event earlier that week made Picasso and many Parisians emotional. The Louvre had finally reopened on July 10 with its first postwar exhibition called, simply, “Great Masterpieces.” Its collections were only now completely repatriated from their different hiding places. Not one piece had been damaged, thanks to their savior in chief, Jacques Jaujard, and the thousand anonymous keepers who had guarded them with their lives.

  Three weeks earlier, Georges Salles, the new head of the Louvre Museum, had invited Jacques Jaujard. He wanted his famous predecessor to come and greet an old acquaintance. On Sunday, June 17, the two men walked down to the museum’s warehouse, where a white poplar case marked with three red dots was waiting, surrounded by a close guard of five men and one woman—Louvre workmen, art historians, and curators. Everybody shook hands. Georges Salles looked at Jacques Jaujard and then nodded at the curator Germain Bazin to open the case. Jacques Jaujard squatted down to get a closer look. Waterproof layers of protection were carefully removed, one by one, until the last one, a thin sheet of fire-retardant fabric woven from asbestos fibers, appeared. Germain Bazin stopped and looked up at Jaujard and Salles before tearing it open. Jaujard nodded again. The face of the Mona Lisa slowly appeared. No words were exchanged between the men—the only sound came from the clicking of photographer Pierre Jahan’s camera. Jahan was almost dancing around them and around her, taking the historic picture that would immediately travel the world. La Joconde was finally home.

  ONE FINAL TRAITOR TO JUDGE

  There was one thing left to do before Parisians could close the chapter of their history that the war had occupied. They had to judge an eighty-nine-year-old fellow Frenchman who had led them collectively to the brink of infamy. His name: Marshal Philippe Pétain. In a dramatic and ironic clash of events, Pétain’s trial opened the day Charles de Gaulle ruled that the French poet Paul Valéry, who had just died, would be given a state funeral, the first for a poet since Victor Hugo in June 1885. Paris-based foreign correspondents found themselves filing copy on two great Frenchmen at once, but two great Frenchmen who had taken very different paths in 1940. The soldier had chosen ignominy while the poet had joined the clandestine Resistance and his fellow littérateurs of the Comité National des Écrivains. While in Vichy, Pétain had dismissed Valéry from his Paris university post. De Gaulle reinstated him.

  Janet Flanner, Anne-Marie Cazalis, and Albert Camus were among the thousands of silent Parisians who lined the streets just before midnight as Paul Valéry’s body was escorted from the church of Saint Honoré d’Eylau near the Arc de Triomphe to the beat of muffled military drums. Valery’s body lay on a torchlit outdoor catafalque wrapped in the French flag and situated between the Trocadéro and the Eiffel Tower. The poet was guarded by his students while Parisians paid their respects. Two huge floodlights at the feet of the Eiffel Tower projected a big V during the night. V for Valéry, V for victory. The man who had been an ambassador for French letters in the world, conveying the image of a Cartesian and classic France, was given a republican apotheosis.

  After a short night, Janet Flanner rushed back to Pétain’s trial at the Court of Justice, ensconced on the Île de la Cité between Notre Dame and the Sainte-Chapelle (holy chapel) built in the 1240s. It had taken her some time to get used to the French justice system’s own peculiar customs and sartorial traditions. “The red and black robes recalled the face cards in the trial scene of Alice in Wonderland, but in the Paris trial scene there was no gentle humor, no awakening from a dream.”42 The courtroom could seat six hundred people, far too few considering the world’s interest. The French Ministry of Information had chosen to resort to a system of allocating tickets to the foreign press by lottery.

  The presiding judge asked all the French politicians present at the trial to answer two crucial questions: “Do you think Marshal Pétain has committed treason and what do you think treason consists of?” For Janet Flanner, “of all the testimony of the big political figures, what Léon Blum had to say against Pétain was the most intellectual, clear (if complex), and unequivocal.”43 And Blum’s definition was best: “An absence of moral confidence was the base of the Vichy government, and that is treason. Treason is the act of selling out.”44

  The trial was in its final stage when the news of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reached Paris. Sartre and Beauvoir were horrified but declined to make their disgust public. Communist newspapers were hardly moved by the events in Japan. Albert Camus was the only French journalist to express the absolute revulsion he felt at the events, in an editorial published on Aug
ust 8 in Combat. “The world is what it is, that is to say not much … Civilization has just reached the ultimate stage of savagery … We will soon have to choose between collective suicide or an intelligent use of science.”

  On August 14, the day the Pétain trial ended, the BBC reported riots in front of the Court of Justice. In fact, all was calm and quiet on the boulevard du Palais. Calm, like any August in Paris. For the first time since 1939, Parisians had been able to resume their summer transhumance, leaving the capital to go back to their families’ bastions in the countryside or at the seaside. Most of them awaited the verdict on the radio. It took seven hours to reach, and when it came, at four in the morning, it seemed to satisfy the country. Death for high treason. Charles de Gaulle commuted the sentence to life imprisonment on the island of Yeu, twelve miles off the Atlantic coast.

  When Alexander Calder heard the news on his transistor radio in his studio in Roxbury, where he was doing some welding for his Paris show, he paused for a moment and thought of Sartre and his Parisian friends. There were a few other bastards in France like Pétain who deserved to be sent far, far away. Thank God for de Gaulle, he thought, and he resumed his welding. Spurred by the restrictions on parcel size imposed by the U.S. Postal Service, he had begun creating large works for Louis Carré’s gallery that were collapsible and could be reassembled upon their arrival in Paris, the place he longed for.45

  PART II

  MODERN TIMES