31. Liebling, The Road Back to Paris, p. 155.
2. The Choice
1. The Crillon on the place de la Concorde; the Ritz Hotel on the place Vendôme; the Majestic, on the avenue Kléber; the Raphael, rue de la Pérouse; and the George V, avenue George V, all of them a stone’s throw from Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe. Some small satisfaction: William Bullitt had beaten the Germans to the Hôtel Le Bristol (as the old American embassy had been requisitioned by the Germans).
2. As reported in the documentary film Illustre et inconnu, by Jean-Pierre Devillers and Pierre Pochart (Ladybird Films, France 3).
3. The equivalent of 460€ today, or $565, or £360.
4. Signoret, La Nostalgie n’est plus ce qu’elle était.
5. Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, p. 319.
6. Agnès Humbert, Notre Guerre: Souvenirs de résistance (Éditions Emile-Paul Frères, 1946; reissued by Tallandier, 2004), published in English as Résistance: Memoirs of Occupied France (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009).
7. Cronin, Samuel Beckett, The Last Modernist, p. 322.
8. Herbert R. Lottman, The Left Bank (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1981).
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 141.
11. Musée de l’Homme resistance group, etc.
12. Paulhan hid the Musée de l’Homme resistance group’s duplicating machine, according to Lottman, Left Bank, p. 147.
13. Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, pp. 322–23.
14. Signoret, La Nostalgie n’est plus ce qu’elle était.
15. Their intimate knowledge of this particularly treacherous mountainous region allowed them to keep tricking the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht.
16. Lottman, Left Bank, p. 180.
17. Ginette Guitard-Auviste, Jacques Chardonne (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000), p. 193.
18. Lottman, Left Bank, p. 180.
19. Ibid., p. 181.
20. Today the antiquarian bookseller Scheler is still standing, only Thomas has replaced Lucien.
21. Published by Viking Press in March 1942.
22. Ibid., p. 210.
23. “Contraband coffee cost $8 a pound, eggs $2 a dozen, chickens $5 each and cigarettes about $2 a pack—almost 10 times their pre-war prices. Average bottle of wine 60 cents instead of 8 cents.” Glass, Americans in Paris, p. 217.
24. Glass, Americans in Paris, p. 234.
25. Ibid., p. 90.
26. Ibid., p. 93.
27. In Conversations avec le vieil Harold Kaplan. Un américain peu ordinaire. À voix nue avec Harold Kaplan, a series of interviews with Philippe Meyer broadcast on October 27, 28, 29, and 30, 2010, on France Culture Radio. Those interviews were published verbatim in the magazine Commentaire, nos. 129 and 130, summer 2010.
28. The premiere took place on November 26, 1942, at the fifteen-hundred-seat Hollywood Theatre in New York City.
29. New York Times, November 27, 1942. Bosley Crowther finished his article with “Casablanca is one of the year’s most exciting and trenchant films. It certainly will not make Vichy happy—but that’s just another point for it.”
30. Opening night on November 23, 1942, at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York.
31. As reported by Oscar Thompson in his review published in the Musical America of November 25, 1942.
32. Released in the United States in 1942 as The Devil’s Envoys.
33. La Mort de Marie (Paris: Gallimard, 1934) and L’Homme criminel (Paris: Gallimard, 1934).
34. Édith Thomas, Le Témoin compromis (Paris: Viviane Hamy, 1995), p. 112.
35. As described by the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent Janet Flanner, in her letter dated November 9, 1952.
36. Paul Eluard, “Liberté” in Au rendez-vous allemand (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1945). “Liberté” was subsequently learned by heart by generations of French schoolchildren, forever ingrained alongside poems by Ronsard, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Prévert.
37. After one of his former student-lovers, Olga, had asked him to write her a part so she could establish herself as an actress.
38. The French title comes from Voltaire’s translation of Hamlet’s soliloquy “To be or not to be”:
Demeure, il faut choisir
Et passer à l’instant
De la vie à la mort
Et de l’être au néant.
(Lettres philosophiques, letter 18, 1734.)
39. Dan Franck, Minuit: Les aventuriers de l’art moderne (1940–1944) (Paris: Livre de poche, 2012), pp. 446–47.
40. This was the former Sarah Bernhardt Theatre, whose name had been changed because of the famous tragedian’s Jewish origins.
41. Ingrid Galster, Le théâtre de Jean-Paul Sartre devant ses premiers critiques, vol. 1 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001).
42. She confided this during an interview on January 7, 2014, at her home in Saint-Tropez.
43. As reported in Nathalie de Saint Phalle, Hôtels littéraires (Paris: Édition Quai Voltaire, 1991).
44. Brassaï, Conversation avec Picasso (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 138.
45. Ibid., p. 155.
46. Ibid., p. 151.
3. The Fight
1. By the Association du Secours National, first created during the First World War.
2. As reported in the documentary film Illustre et Inconnu, by Jean-Pierre Devillers and Pierre Pochart (Ladybird Films, France 3).
3. Ibid.
4. Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: Une vie (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 479.
5. Gerhard Heller, Un Allemand à Paris (Paris: Le Seuil, 1981), p. 157.
6. Ibid., p. 128.
7. Ibid., pp. 202–6.
8. Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, p. 330.
9. Heller, Un Allemand à Paris, p. 153.
10. Le journal d’Hélène Berr was published in 2008 by Éditions Taillandier in Paris with a preface by Patrick Modiano, and in English as The Journal of Hélène Berr by MacLehose Press, 2009.
11. The Jewish lesbian Surrealist muse whose face would forever be familiar to the world thanks to Man Ray’s 1937 picture of her with Nusch.
12. Marcel Mouloudji, Le petit invité (Paris: Balland, 1989), p. 67.
13. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s short essay “Paris sous l’occupation,” published in London in 1945 as “France Libre” and later edited together with other short essays in Situations III (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).
14. Ibid.
15. La Grande Chaumière has not changed and has not moved, being still located at 14 rue de la Grande Chaumière in the 6th arrondissement; www.grande-chaumiere.fr.
16. Geneviève Laporte in Sunshine at Midnight (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), translated by Douglas Cooper, p. 4.
17. Jean Paulhan hopped on the métro and went straight to 17 rue Marbeau, in the 16th arrondissement, and laid low at Georges Batault’s, a Swiss anti-Semitic writer, a mutual friend of Docteur Le Savoureux who hid many résistants in his house at Châtenay-Malabris, the former home of Chateaubriand, which can be visited today. The homes of well-known collaborators and anti-Semites, who had despite everything remained friends, proved ideal places to hide from the Gestapo. Frédéric Badré, Paulhan, le juste (Paris: Grasset, 1996), p. 218.
18. In an article penned by Jean-Paul Sartre, “La république du silence,” Les Lettres françaises, 1944.
19. Today, 6 rue Georges Braque.
20. Pierre Assouline in his biography of Henri Ca
rtier-Bresson, Cartier-Bresson: L’oeil du siècle (Paris: Plon, 1999). However, Zen in the Art of Archery not having been published until 1948, Assouline might in fact be referring to a shorter essay on the same subject that Eugen Herrigel had published in October 1936, in a German magazine specializing in Japanese studies.
21. Thomas, Témoin compromis, p. 153.
22. Ibid.
23. On February 1, 1944, many secret Resistance organizations merged into the Forces Françaises Intérieures for the sake of efficiency. In June 1944, the FFI represented two hundred thousand members; in October 1944, four hundred thousand. The FFI were key in helping the Allied forces in the D-Day operations and the liberation of Paris. After being disbanded by Charles de Gaulle, a third of the FFI members enrolled in the official French army to keep fighting with the Allied forces in the rest of Europe.
24. Glass, Americans in Paris, p. 386.
25. At 186 rue de Rivoli, opposite the Louvre, and 100 rue Réaumur, just one mile north.
26. Liebling, The Road Back to Paris.
27. Combat, August 21, 1944. “Qu’est-ce qu’une insurrection? C’est le peuple en armes. Qu’est-ce que le peuple? C’est ce qui dans une nation ne veut jamais s’agenouiller.”
28. Robert Doisneau was given the area of Belleville to cover but he disobeyed orders and went straight to where the battles were the fiercest: around Notre Dame and the Latin Quarter. In Paris, libéré, photographié, exposé (Paris: Musée Carnavalet, 2014), p. 216.
29. As the historian Ian Buruma argued in “The Argument That Saved Paris” in the New York Review of Books, October 15, 2014: “Refusing to let Paris burn would be a most effective way to cover up his more sordid past. By making it seem as if only his brave decision saved the city from total destruction, von Choltitz entered the history books as a kind of hero instead of a war criminal.”
30. Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway on War (New York: Scribner, 2004).
31. Glass, Americans in Paris, p. 400.
32. Léon Werth, Déposition, journal 1940–1944 (Paris: Viviane Hamy, 1995).
33. Yves Cazaux, Journal secret de la libération (Paris: Albin Michel, 1975).
34. Sartre’s recollection, published in Combat on September 2, 1944.
35. On coming across it, Charles de Gaulle commented, “A hell of a task.”
36. Twenty-eight hundred civilians were killed between August 19 and August 25, 1944, during the liberation of Paris.
37. Glass, Americans in Paris, p. 408.
38. To which Hemingway is famously supposed to have replied: “Oh no, I have to liberate the cellar of the Ritz first.” Glass, Americans in Paris, p. 400.
39. As recalled by Françoise Gilot, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 61.
40. As he recalled in Irwin Shaw and Ronald Searle, Paris! Paris! (Harcourt, 1976), p. 13.
41. Ibid., p. 19.
42. Ibid., p. 20.
43. On the black market, bread cost 35 francs and butter 600 francs a kilogram, ten times their prewar prices.
44. Anne-Marie Cazalis, Les mémoires d’une Anne (Paris: Stock, 1976), p. 33.
45. Albert Camus, “La nuit de la vérité,” Combat, August 25, 1944.
46. In its editorial published on September 4, 1944.
47. Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre (1954–59; repr. Paris: Pocket, 2010).
48. Thomas, Témoin compromis, p. 171.
49. Assouline, Cartier-Bresson, p. 209.
50. Brassaï, Conversation avec Picasso, p. 223.
51. “Nous ne les reverrons plus. C’est fini, ils sont foutus.”
4. The Desire
1. To know more about their life in Sigmaringen: Louis-Ferdinand Céline, D’un château l’autre (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), and Pierre Assouline, Sigmaringen (Paris: Gallimard, 2014).
2. Sartre, “Paris sous l’occupation.”
3. Ibid.
4. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 21.
5. In French, “Le parti des 75.000 fusillés,” literally, “the party of the seventy-five thousand people executed at gunpoint.”
6. Twenty-five thousand French people, of different political affiliations, were executed or deported and killed during the war, according to Stéphane Simonnet, Atlas de la Libération de la France: Des débarquements aux villes libérées (Paris: Autrement, 2004), p. 68.
7. Charles de Gaulle held Brasillach among those responsible for the abduction and assassination of the French politician and résistant Georges Mandel on July 7, 1944.
8. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 30.
9. Ibid., p. 31.
10. Janet Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955 (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1988), January 17, 1945, p. 15.
11. Todd, Albert Camus, pp. 503–8.
12. Thomas, Témoin compromis, p. 175.
13. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 31.
14. The forty-two-year-old Natalia Danesi Murray, an Italian-language broadcaster who spent the war years in New York. In Wineapple, Genêt, p. 170.
15. Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, December 15, 1944, p. 4.
16. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 32.
17. Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, p. 25.
18. Ibid.
19. Today’s Musée d’Orsay.
20. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 51.
21. Juliette Gréco in conversation with Agnès C. Poirier on January 7, 2014, at her home in Saint-Tropez.
22. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 46.
23. Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, p. 23.
24. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 48.
25. She became a naturalized American in 1941.
26. Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, p. 26.
27. Ibid., p. 27.
28. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p. 48.
29. Yvette Szczupak-Thomas, Un Diamant brut (Paris: Points, 2009), p. 332.
30. Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, pp. 340–58.
31. The text has been published by Éditions de Minuit in 1989 as Le monde et le pantalon, followed by another text by Beckett on the van Veldes titled Peintres de l’empêchement.
32. Assouline, Cartier-Bresson.
33. Ibid.
34. Brassaï, Conversation avec Picasso, p. 225.
35. Ibid., p. 263.
36. Beauvoir, La force des choses, vol. 1, p.54.
37. Brassaï, Conversation avec Picasso, p. 265.
38. Her husband was a medical student when she met him at the American Center in Paris; his name was Theodore Ehrenreich. In Manhattan, they settled in a flat at the corner of Fifty-Seventh Street and First Avenue. Dolorès Vanetti continued to live there until she died on July 13, 2008.
39. Annie Cohen-Solal, “Dolorès Vanetti,” Le Monde, July 19, 2008.
40. Archives from the Calder Foundation. Reference: Calder 1966, 188; CF, Carré to Duchamp; CF, Duchamp to Calder, July 3.
41. Brassaï, Conversation avec Picasso, p. 333.
42. Flanner, Paris Journal, 1944–1955, p. 32, and as seen, but in black-and-white newsreel, at http://www.ina.fr/video/AFE86003186.
43. Ibid., p. 38.
44. Ibid.
45. Archives from the Calder Foundation. Reference: Calder 1966, 188. CF, Calder to Carré, August 14; CF, Duchamp to Calder, July 3.
II. MODERN TIMES
Left Bank Page 37