Kitabı oku: «Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44»

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: 14 June 1940

1 The American Mayor of Paris

2 The Bookseller

3 The Countess from Ohio

4 All Blood Runs Red

5 Le Millionnaire américain

6 The Yankee Doctor

PART TWO: 1940

7 Bookshop Row

8 Americans at Vichy

9 Back to Paris

10 In Love with Love

11 A French Prisoner with the Americans

12 American Grandees

13 Polly’s Paris

14 Rugged Individualists

15 Germany’s Confidential American Agent

PART THREE: 1941

16 The Coldest Winter

17 Time to Go?

18 New Perils in Paris

19 Utopia in Les Landes

20 To Resist, to Collaborate or to Endure

21 Enemy Aliens

PART FOUR: 1942

22 First Round-up

23 The Vichy Web

24 The Second Round-up

25 ‘Inturned’

26 Uniting Africa

27 Americans Go to War

28 Murphy Forgets a Friend

29 Alone at Vittel

30 The Bedaux Dossier

PART FIVE: 1943

31 Murphy versus Bedaux

32 Sylvia’s War

33 German Agents?

34 A Hospital at War

35 The Adolescent Spy

36 Clara under Suspicion

37 Calumnies

PART SIX: 1944

38 The Trial of Citizen Bedaux

39 The Underground Railway

40 Conspiracies

41 Springtime in Paris

42 The Maquis to Arms!

43 Résistants Unmasked

44 Via Dolorosa

45 Schwarze Kappelle

46 Slaves of the Reich

47 One Family Now

48 The Paris Front

49 Tout Mourir

PART SEVEN: 24–26 August 1944

50 Liberating the Rooftops

51 Libération, not Liberation

EPILOGUE

ENDNOTES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

IN THE PLAZA WHERE THE Boulevard Saint-Michel approaches the River Seine, water cascades down stone blocks of a vast monumental tribute to those who endured the four-year German occupation of Paris. The Archangel Michael stands guard above an old memorial that was rededicated after the Second World War, above all, to the civilians killed nearby when the people of Paris finally rose against their oppressors in the summer of 1944. Reading the inscriptions and looking at the stone lions beside the shallow pool, I used to imagine life during the fifty months from 14 June 1940, when the Germans marched proudly into Paris, and 25 August 1944, when they retreated in shame. I wondered how I would have behaved while the Wehrmacht ruled the cultural capital of Europe. Many books and films on the period depicted French behaviour that varied from self-sacrifice and heroism to treason and complicity in genocide. But what would I, as an American, have done? Was it possible to survive until liberation day, 26 August 1944, without compromising or collaborating? Would I have risked my life, or the lives of my family, by fighting for the Resistance? Or would I have waited patiently with the majority of Parisians for the German retreat?

Nearly 30,000 Americans lived in or near Paris before the Second World War. Those who refused to leave were, paraphrasing Dickens, the best and the worst of America. Like the French, some collaborated, others resisted. The Germans forced some into slave labour. At least one was taken back to the United States to face a trial for treason. Americans in Paris under the occupation were among the most eccentric, original and disparate collection of their countrymen anywhere – tested as few others have been before or since. This is their story.

When Britain and France declared war on Germany for invading Poland in September 1939, American Ambassador William Bullitt advised United States citizens without vital business to leave France immediately. At least 5,000 ignored him and stayed. While many had professional and family ties to Paris, the majority had a peculiarly American love for the city that had its origins in the debt the young United States owed to the Frenchmen who volunteered with the Marquis de Lafayette to fight for American independence after 1776. The American love affair with Paris, where the United States opened its first diplomatic mission, was shared by Benjamin Franklin, John Adams (whose wife, Abigail, famously said, ‘No one leaves Paris without a feeling of tristesse’), Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Monroe and generations of writers, artists, musicians, diplomats, journalists, socialites and financiers. It was with a certain pride that Walt Whitman wrote, ‘I am a real Parisian.’ A year or two in Paris was a vital component in the education of any socially acceptable young American.

Where the rich led, poorer painters, writers, singers and vagabonds followed. An African-American soldier expressed this love better than most, as his troopship from France cruised into New York harbour after the First World War. An officer asked him why he was saluting the Statue of Liberty, and he answered, ‘Because France gave her to us.’ The thousands of Americans who stood with the French during the humiliation of German rule from 1940 to 1944 found their relationships to Paris and America expressed in the famed lyrics of Josephine Baker, the quintessential American Parisian, ‘J’ai deux amours, mon pays et Paris.’(‘I have two loves, my country and Paris.’)

Among the few thousand Americans who remained in Paris throughout the war, four had pronounced reactions to the occupation that represented in relief the experiences of the rest of their countrymen. The French-born, naturalized American millionaire Charles Bedaux did business as he had before the war. If he compromised with the occupier, his rationale was that European industry had to be preserved for the post-war world. Sylvia Beach attempted to keep her English language bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, functioning as it had in the 1920s when it was a beacon for American, British and French writers. She preserved her humanity by defying the Germans in small ways and giving moral support to French friends whose resistance was more open and violent. Clara Longworth de Chambrun, whose brother had been America’s Speaker of the House of Representatives and husband to Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice, worked tirelessly for the benefit of the readers at the American Library of Paris – even when this meant dealing with German officials. For her, duty lay in holding firm, obeying a Vichy government that she believed was legitimate and waiting for D-Day to deliver France from its agony. Her relationship to the occupying power was complicated by the fact that her Franco-American son, Count René de Chambrun, was married to the daughter of Vichy France’s prime minister, Pierre Laval. Her husband, Count Aldebert de Chambrun, was a direct descendant of the Marquis de Lafayette and had been born in Washington, DC. The American Hospital of Paris, which the Germans coveted, was kept out of their hands through the deception and conscientious effort of this American citizen and former general of the French Army. The American Hospital’s chief surgeon, Dr Sumner Jackson, took the clearest decision of all: from the first day of the occupation, he resisted. Although he risked his life, and those of his wife and young son, the Yankee physician from Maine never doubted for a moment where duty lay: not in survival, not in cooperation, but in determined resistance to what he saw as the overriding evil of the age.

The Americans in inter-war Paris were young and old, black and white, rich and poor – as diverse a collection of opposed beliefs and backgrounds as in any American metropolis. Among them were communists and fascists, Democrats and Republicans, the apolitical and the apathetic, opportunists and idealists. They were writers, painters, musicians, businessmen, bankers, journalists, clergy, photographers, physicians, lawyers, teachers, diplomats, spies, conmen and gangsters. Until the Germans turned France into a version of their own prison-state, African-Americans, homosexuals, lesbians and bohemians felt freer in Paris than in the socially more repressive United States. German occupation was not enough to send all of them home.

In the spring of 1940, after nine months of the drôle de guerre or phony war, normality was returning to Paris. Parisians of all nationalities had become accustomed to war without battles and shared the illusion that the Germans would never penetrate the ‘impregnable’ Maginot Line. Most, apart from realists like General Charles de Gaulle and Ambassador William Bullitt, did not believe Germany would or could attack France. Restaurants were doing brisk business. Charles Bedaux was throwing lavish parties for European royalty. Josephine Baker reopened on the Champs Elysées with Maurice Chevalier in an extravagant song and dance revue. American Eugene Bullard’s Le Duc jazz club in Montmartre attracted sell-out audiences. Americans in the city led enchanted lives, discussing art and love affairs in cafés, some sending their children to the American school and most preparing for summer in the south. Even as the Germans were approaching in late May, the Runyonesque sports columnist of the Paris Herald Tribune, Sparrow Robinson, wrote, ‘Owing to unsettled conditions, the racing card scheduled for this afternoon at Longchamps has been called off.’

The ‘unsettled conditions’ referred to the Nazi blitzkrieg that conquered Denmark, Holland and Belgium. Refugees from the occupied countries escaped to France. Belgian cars and horse-drawn carts packed with clothing and furniture were the first omens that France would also fall. German Panzer divisions broke into France through the poorly defended Ardennes forest, beginning the Battle of France that Britain and France would lose in three short weeks. This engagement – a swift, merciless advance by Wehrmacht armour and Luftwaffe air power – suddenly altered the balance of power in Europe. The British Expeditionary Force retreated from Dunkirk, and the Germans captured more than a million French soldiers. The way to Paris lay open to Hitler’s armies. Most Parisians, French and foreigners alike, fled the city ahead of the Germans. Escape was a mistake. The Germans bombed refugee columns on the roads, but they did not bomb Paris itself. As fighting raged along the River Meuse, Ambassador Bullitt pleaded with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to provide the French and the British with aircraft to withstand the German invasion. Roosevelt promised surplus planes for shipment from Canada, but it was too late.

French Premier Paul Reynaud, preparing to flee to Tours with his government, declared Paris an open city and asked Bullitt to persuade the Wehrmacht not to destroy it. Bullitt, a one-time playboy and writer who co-authored with Sigmund Freud a psychological study of President Woodrow Wilson, spent the last nights of May 1940 in his wine cellar to avoid the Luftwaffe bombs. One nearly killed him. Bullitt was as close to France’s senior politicians, especially Prime Minister Reynaud, as he was to his old friend Roosevelt. Bullitt was the only ambassador still in Paris when the Germans arrived on 14 June 1940.

At first, Americans shared the French panic that the Germans would treat Paris as they had Warsaw – raping, killing and destroying as they entered. But the Nazis’ racist ideology accorded a higher place to the French than it did to the Poles. They did not target Americans, who were allowed to stay and work unhindered. The two most important American organizations, the American Hospital of Paris and the American Library of Paris, were open to Americans and French alike. A few courageous American consuls disobeyed State Department orders by issuing passports and visas to Jewish refugees and establishing safe routes to help them reach North and South America.

The African-Americans who stayed were not as lucky as their white countrymen. After Adolf Hitler’s only visit to Paris, on 24 June 1940, the Germans banned concerts by black American musicians. Proclamations published in the Officiel du Spectacle set out to eliminate what the Nazis called ‘degenerate Jewish-Negro jazz.’ A month later, the Germans ordered a census of all foreign nationals in Paris. Black Americans were ordered to report to the police, and the American consulate did not protect them. The famous American jazz trumpeter Arthur Briggs was sent in late June 1940 to a concentration camp at St. Denis, where he formed a classical orchestra with other black musicians from America, Britain and the West Indies. The Germans detained many other African-American performers, including Roberta Dodd Crawford from Chicago. She was a prominent singer, known as Princess Tovalou since her marriage in 1923 to Prince Tovalou of Benin. Another trumpeter, Harry Cooper, was sent to an internment camp. The African-American classical composer and musician Maceo Jefferson escaped Paris – only to be captured outside the city and interned at Frontslag 122. Henry Crowder, whose thirteen year affair with British shipping heiress Nancy Cunard shocked white America more than it did Paris society, was giving a concert in Belgium when the Nazis invaded. He escaped on the last train to Paris, but the Luftwaffe bombed it. Continuing to his beloved Paris on foot, he was taken by the Germans. Thus, the vibrant African-American community that thrived in the 1920s and 1930s was for the most part absent from Paris during the occupation.

Unlike other African-Americans, Josephine Baker was not interned, thanks to her fame in Paris and abroad. An entertainer who had captivated Paris in the 1920s with her topless Danse Sauvage, she was a much-married and much-loved social fixture. Her decision not to abandon France was moral: the Nazis represented an extreme version of the racial hatred she had escaped in the United States. She stayed at her chateau in the country at first and joined the new French Resistance. Her commander was Jacques Abtey, the police officer for whom she had worked spying on Germans in Paris before the war. Miss Baker smuggled documents out of France between the pages of her sheet music and took Resistance leaders disguised as band members to clandestine meetings in Portugal. She made her way to Morocco, where she entertained French and American troops after the North African invasion of November 1942.

The occupation threw up heroes and villains, but more often it produced in the people of Paris a determination to stand fast until the storm passed. In 1940, they did not know who would win the war. They doubted that the United States would give up its cherished neutrality to confront the Nazi menace. Choices were difficult, frequently involving alternatives that were less bad rather than clearly good or evil. When it was all over, the names of the Americans who stayed with their French neighbours for those fifty cruel months are invisibly etched alongside all the others honoured by the monument in the Place Saint-Michel.

PART ONE

14 June 1940

ONE

The American Mayor of Paris

JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON Thursday, 13 June 1940, two men walked out of the American Embassy in Paris into the vast and deserted Place de la Concorde. The French capital’s blacked-out streets presented a strange spectacle to Robert Murphy, the embassy’s counsellor, and naval attaché Commander Roscoe Hillenkoetter. The government, the army and most of the population had abandoned Paris. Two million people, including the vast majority of the 30,000 Americans that Murphy estimated lived in Paris before the war, had fled in fear of the conquering Wehrmacht. Thousands of victorious German soldiers were poised to occupy the undefended city at dawn. American Ambassador William Christian Bullitt, whom the departing French government had effectively appointed mayor of Paris on 12 June, had assured the Wehrmacht’s commanders that Paris was an ‘open city’. Open cities waived their right to resist in exchange for a peaceful occupation. Paris had already given up. Twelve hours earlier, at noon, Robert Murphy barely recognized the previously vibrant avenue des Champs-Elysées: ‘The only living creatures in sight were three abandoned dogs cavorting beneath the large French flags which still hung at each corner of the great concourse.’ On the opposite, Left Bank of the Seine, sheep belonging to refugees from northern France grazed on the Hôpital des Invalides’ ceremonial lawns.

Amid the forlorn expanse of the Place de la Concorde, its Egyptian obelisk swaddled in sandbags and its roundabout eerily devoid of traffic, Murphy and Hillenkoetter watched four spectral figures approach out of the darkness. Murphy recognized Chief Rabbi Julien Weill, religious head of Paris’s Jewish community. With the Grand Rabbin were his wife and two friends. Murphy appreciated their fears. As head consular official for the previous nine years until he became counsellor, Murphy’s responsibility had been the well-being of France’s American community. When the Germans began their rampage through the north of France in May, American citizens demanded embassy protection. At the same time, fourteen million Belgian, Dutch and French men, women and children took to the road ahead of the Nazis. Knowing of German atrocities in Poland during the Blitzkrieg of 1939, Parisians, especially Jews, were understandably fearful. Murphy reflected, ‘We in the embassy felt more sympathy for these victims than we did for a considerable number of Americans who became panic-stricken at the last minute and behaved as if they were particular targets of the Nazis. They had much less reason to become alarmed, since we were not at war.’

Rabbi Weill could have obtained an American visa and gone to New York, where his brother, Professor Felix Weill, taught French and was a United States citizen. Despite Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany and the lands the German Army had occupied since 1938, he had chosen to remain in Paris. Knowing now that the French government itself – including the tough and patriotic Jewish interior minister, Georges Mandel – had fled Paris, the rabbi was reconsidering his decision. Murphy thought that Rabbi Weill had ‘very understandable reasons’ for changing his mind. The rabbi asked Murphy and Hillenkoetter whether he and his family might find places in an embassy car, with its diplomatic immunity, leaving Paris. It was too late, Murphy said. German Panzer divisions surrounded Paris. The exiled American Ambassador to Poland, Anthony Drexel Biddle, Jr, and Embassy Secretary H. Freeman Matthews had departed with the fleeing French government for Tours and were following it on to Bordeaux. No other diplomats were leaving Paris that night. Nonetheless, Murphy lent the rabbi and his family a car whose chauffeur drove them to the city gates. There, German sentries ordered them to return.

The two Americans continued their promenade. No cafés were open, as some usually were at midnight. No light shone from any window or street lamp. The prostitutes had vanished from their usual posts along the rue Saint-Denis and up in Pigalle. The great nighttime gathering places, the markets of Les Halles and the jazz clubs of Montmartre, were closed. Many of the vibrant American ‘Negro’ community, like night club owner Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith and band leader Benny Carter, had left Paris in the autumn of 1939 or were about to sail on the last America-bound ship from Bordeaux. Even the most celebrated American woman in Paris, 34-year-old chanteuse Josephine Baker, had left – first as a Red Cross nurse aiding the war’s refugees, then for the safety of her country chateau. ‘The few people who remained in the city were buttoned up in their shuttered homes,’ Murphy noted. The only light Murphy could see was arching across the sky north of Paris, each burst of artillery reminding him of a shooting star. Commander Hillenkoetter similarly recalled, ‘Contrary to rumors, the night passed quietly, although artillery firing could be seen and heard in the northwest.’

The night sky was at last clear of a week’s all-pervasive black smoke including that from the burning files of the French government and British Embassy. Most of the conflagration had come from the Standard Oil Company’s petroleum reserves. Standard’s man in Paris, William Dewitt Crampton, had set the stocks alight at the request of the French General Staff only after checking with the American Embassy. Robert Murphy, rather than let a full month’s supply of petrol fuel German tanks, had told Crampton to go ahead.

Murphy, the red-haired Irish Catholic diplomat from Milwaukee, and Hillenkoetter, a 43-year-old Annapolis graduate from St Louis, returned to the rue de Boissy d’Anglas at the northwest corner of the Place de la Concorde. They heard, coming along the Seine from the east, the gigantic bells in the Cathedral of Notre Dame’s spires tolling midnight to herald the new day, 14 June 1940. The embassy’s iron gates, opposite the façade of the now-shuttered Hôtel Crillon in its brooding Palladian majesty, opened to admit Murphy and Hillenkoetter. They entered the chancellery, where, along with Ambassador Bullitt and a skeleton staff, they waited for the German army. Theirs was the last walk anyone took through free Paris.

The American community in Paris, the largest in continental Europe, had little to fear from the Germans. The United States stood aloof from the war between Germany and the Allies, and it enjoyed the respect of both sides. Although Ambassador Bullitt had advised American citizens without vital business to leave when France and Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, about half had elected to stay. The drôle de guerre, which the Germans called the Sitzkrieg and the British and Americans the ‘phoney war’, dragged on for the next eight months. Only the occasional air raid drill or the sight of sandbags around the monuments disturbed their routine. In May 1940, the German advance through Holland and Belgium into France was so swift that the Americans who feared life under German occupation fled south from Paris. Three weeks before the city fell, as the French and British armies retreated, The New York Times’ front page announced, ‘Most Americans Staying in Paris’: ‘The United States Embassy said that of the slightly more than 3,600 Americans in the Paris district on Dec. 31, about 2,500 are still here. They are mostly businessmen and members of their families and newspaper men, more of whom have been arriving recently.’

The journalists were not the only American arrivals. American Field Service ambulances, funded and directed by the indefatigable sister of New York financier J. P. Morgan, Miss Anne Morgan, ferried wounded British and French soldiers to hospitals from the front throughout the Battle of France. As soon as the Wehrmacht invaded neighbouring Belgium on 10 May, hundreds of young American men rushed to France. They swore to defend democracy, just as 17,000 Frenchmen had answered the Marquis de Lafayette’s call to fight for American independence. So many Americans attempted to join the French Army during the Battle of France that the French could not accommodate them all. Twenty-seven-year-old Tom McBride of Queens, New York, and twelve aviator colleagues attempted to reconstitute the old Lafayette Escadrille, the squadron of American pilots who fought for France in the Great War. When they reached Paris on 1 May 1940, they were welcomed by General Aldebert de Chambrun, a direct descendant of Lafayette, and the air minister. ‘They showed us all over Paris,’ McBride said, ‘then dropped us cold.’ He complained, ‘All the Air Minister would say was, “Wait. Wait. Wait.”’ The French Air Corps commissioned McBride a lieutenant, but he never got the chance to fly against the Luftwaffe. Undeterred, he went to Canada and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force.

American citizens who remained in Paris had little to fear. The embassy issued more than 1,000 red certificates, signed by Third Secretary Tyler Thompson, to indicate which houses and businesses belonged to American citizens and could not, under international law, be touched. The Americans’ institutions – the American Hospital in the fashionable western suburb of Neuilly, the American Library in the rue de Téhéran, the American Cathedral on the avenue George-V, the American Church on the Quai d’Orsay, the Rotary Club, the American Chamber of Commerce and many other clubs and charitable societies – were still functioning. The American Church bulletin had announced the previous Sunday, ‘The American Church will continue its activities and remain open throughout the days to come. The building will be open daily and the various groups will meet as usual.’ The Americans’ newspaper, the Paris Herald Tribune, went on publishing until 12 June, the last paper sold in Paris before the Germans arrived. The American Ambassador, despite White House and State Department entreaties, refused to leave. ‘No American ambassador in Paris has ever run away from anything,’ Bullitt cabled President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ‘and that I think is the best tradition we have in the American diplomatic service.’ That tradition dated to Gouverneur Morris’s decision to stay during the French Revolution. Elihu B. Washburne continued it throughout the German occupation of 1870. In 1914, when Germany’s offensive put Paris within range of the Kaiser’s artillery, every ambassador except the American, Myron T. Herrick, fled. Bullitt would not to be the first to cut and run.

Born in Philadelphia in January 1891 to a WASP family of rich lawyers and railroad magnates who traced their American ancestors through Patrick Henry and Pocahontas, Bullitt spent much of his youth in Europe. His mother’s family, the Horowitzes, was originally German Jewish. The family spoke French at home, and he learned German in Munich. Graduating from Yale in 1912, Bullitt covered the world war in Russia, Germany, Austria and France as a correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger. When America entered on the Allied side in 1917, the State Department hired him to conduct research for its intelligence section. President Woodrow Wilson took him to the Paris Peace Conference in 1918 as part of the American commission. Bullitt resigned, along with historian Samuel Eliot Morison and six other diplomats, to protest the terms of the Versailles Treaty. He pointed out to Wilson that the treaty, with its other flaws, left three million Germans under Czech rule and abandoned thirty-six million Chinese in Shantung to Japan. His resignation letter lamented, ‘But our government has consented now to deliver the suffering peoples of the world to new oppressions, subjection, and dismemberments – a new century of war.’ He predicted, ‘This isn’t a treaty of peace. I can see at least eleven wars in it.’ Political oblivion followed, but he had the funds to enjoy himself in a palace in Istanbul and luxurious apartments in Paris. His only novel, It’s Not Done, sold 150,000 copies in 1925 – prompting Ernest Hemingway, whose books were not selling as well, to mention him in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1927 as ‘Bill Bullitt or Bull Billet, a big Jew from Yale and a fellow novel writer’. He married Louise Bryant, whose late husband, John Reed, had died in Russia after documenting its revolution in Ten Days that Shook the World. Bullitt and Louise had one child, Anne, and divorced in 1930. When his friend Franklin Delano Roosevelt became president in 1933, he appointed Bullitt America’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union. Bullitt’s initial enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution collapsed in the face of Stalinist repression.

In 1936, FDR assigned Bullitt to Paris, where the French admired his style. He employed an excellent chef, served only the finest wines, dressed immaculately and flirted in flawless French. Bullitt rented the Château de Vineuil-Saint-Firmin in thoroughbred country at Chantilly, where he entertained France’s senior politicians at weekends. Ernest Hemingway, who had left Paris in 1929 but visited during the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939, came out occasionally to shoot clay pigeons. During the week, Bullitt lived with his daughter, Anne, in the embassy residence in avenue d’Iéna. He negotiated vigorously in Europe for American interests, while advocating the French cause in Washington. No foreign ambassador was closer to the French cabinet, many of whom confided personal and state secrets in him. After three years in France, during which the country received persecuted Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria, Bullitt hated Hitler as much as he did Stalin. In March 1940, the German Foreign Office released a ‘White Book’ of transcripts seized in Warsaw in which Bullitt told the Polish Ambassador to Washington, Count Jerzy Potocki, that ‘the French Army is the first line of defense for the United States’. The German press accused Bullitt and Ambassador to Britain Joseph Kennedy, despite Kennedy’s reputation for appeasement of Nazi Germany, of ‘using all their influence to aggravate the atmosphere of hostility in Europe’. The Nazis regarded Bullitt as the American diplomat most hostile to Germany, and they were probably right. No one fought harder to persuade America to send planes, tanks and other armaments to France. He had even arranged for French pilots secretly to test fly the latest American warplanes.

When the French government left Paris on 10 June, Bullitt telegraphed Secretary of State Cordell Hull: ‘This Embassy is the only official organization still functioning in the City of Paris except the Headquarters of the military forces, Governor and the Prefecture of Police.’ Italy, seeing that Germany would win, declared war on France and launched an invasion from the south that the outnumbered French repulsed. A few hours later, at the University of Virginia, Roosevelt declared, ‘On this tenth day of June 1940, the hand that held the dagger struck it into the back of its neighbor.’ He had borrowed the phrase from Bullitt. Gallup published its latest poll the same day: 62 per cent of the American people believed that, if Germany defeated both France and Britain, it would attack America next. The following day, Bullitt cabled Roosevelt: ‘I have talked with the Provisional Governor of Paris, who is the single government official remaining, and it may be that at a given moment I, as the only representative of the Diplomatic Corps remaining in Paris, will be obliged in the interest of public safety to take control of the City pending arrival of the German Army … Reynaud and Mandel just before their departure requested me to do this, if necessary.’

On 12 June, the day that Prime Minister Reynaud and Interior Minister Georges Mandel made him in effect Paris’s provisional mayor, Bullitt attended a prayer service at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Kneeling in the front pew, he was seen to weep for the city and country he loved.

Secretary of State Hull urged Bullitt to follow the French government to Tours and persuade the French to fight on from their bases in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Bullitt argued that, in the absence of FDR’s commitment of American arms, the French would ignore him. He cabled Hull after the service in Notre Dame, ‘As I said to you when you telephoned me the night of Sunday the 9th my deepest personal reason for staying in Paris is that whatever I have as a character, good or bad, is based on the fact that since the age of four I have never run away from anything however painful or dangerous when I thought it was my duty to take a stand. If I should leave Paris now I would no longer be myself.’ Bullitt was saving Paris. Hull was asking him to save France.

A few hours later, Bullitt wrote a follow-up telegram to Hull: ‘I propose to send my Military Attaché and my Naval Attaché to the German General Commanding the forces in the Paris area to explain the situation and return with suggestions of the German command as to methods of facilitating the orderly transition of government.’ German forces agreed to enter the city peacefully the next morning, but someone fired on German truce officers near the Porte Saint-Denis in the north of Paris. General Georg von Küchler, the German 10th Army commander who had demolished Rotterdam only a few weeks earlier, responded by ordering an all-out air and artillery assault on Paris. It was scheduled for eight o’clock in the morning, leaving Bullitt only hours to save the city from destruction. His communications, like everyone else’s, had been sporadic since the French Army cut Paris’s telegraph lines as it withdrew on 11 June. A chance telephone call from the American Embassy in Berne, Switzerland, opened a line for Bullitt to relay a message to Berlin. He urgently requested the Germans to recognize that ‘Paris has been declared an open city’. He proposed a parley early the next morning, 14 June, to save lives on both sides and prevent the destruction of Paris. Bullitt wanted to spare Paris the fate of Warsaw the year before, when the Luftwaffe demolished much of the Polish capital and killed 17,000 people.

General von Küchler agreed to try again before bombing the city. However, the French commander of the Paris region, 48-year-old General Henri-Fernand Dentz, refused a German demand to negotiate the transfer of power. His orders, he told the Germans via a radio link through the Prefecture of Police, were to provide security. He was not authorized to hold discussions with the enemy. At 2.25 in the morning, the Germans radioed Dentz: ‘Delegates till 5 a.m. German time on the fourteenth at Sarcelles. Comply – otherwise attack ordered on Paris.’ (German time was Greenwich Mean Time plus two hours, an hour later than in Paris.) Dentz acquiesced, sending two officers, Major Devouges and Lieutenant Holtzer, to treat with the Germans at Écouen, 12 miles north of Paris. At 5.30 a.m., Paris time, the two sides settled terms for the handover. The French achieved one amendment to the document: withdrawal of a forty-eight-hour non-stop curfew on the grounds that it contradicted the German requirement for public services like water and electricity to function normally. German Major Brink compromised by limiting the curfew from 9 p.m. to dawn. With the document signed, von Küchler cancelled the bombardment of Paris. Bullitt’s intervention had spared the City of Light.

Some Germans did not wait for the official capitulation. At 3.40 in the morning, a German soldier on motorcycle sped through the 11th Arrondissement, between the Place de la Nation and the Place de la République. More troops penetrated the city in trucks and armoured cars, followed by large units marching in formation, all spit and polish to impress the Parisians. The first American resident of Paris to see them was most likely Charles Anderson, who lived in Montmartre and rose before sunrise each day to take the Metro train to work. Born in Lebanon, Illinois, in 1861, Anderson ran away from home to join the Barnum Circus when he was 15. He enlisted in the American Army as it was completing the annihilation of the Indian tribes. In 1884, he worked his way by merchant ship from Boston to Europe. When his seaman’s pay ran out in France, he volunteered for the French Foreign Legion. Military service took him to the North African desert and, during the Great War, to Paris. On leaving the Legion after the Armistice of November 1918, he became an interpreter at the International Transport Company of Maurice de Brosse. De Brosse, in the frantic days before the Germans arrived, urged Anderson and his French wife, Eugénie Delmar, to leave Paris and come south with him. Nazi racial policies could be harsh on a black American, especially one married to a white woman. Anderson answered, ‘No, I’ll stay. No need to run.’

M. de Brosse asked Anderson what he would do in German-occupied Paris. When Anderson answered that he would report to work every day as usual, de Brosse pleaded, ‘The office will be closed!’ Anderson, a patient man who taught chess to young people in the evenings, said, ‘That doesn’t matter. I’m too old now to change my ways.’ De Brosse left, and Anderson stayed. He was almost eighty years old. On the morning of 14 June, Anderson watched German troops occupy an apartment building opposite his seven-room flat in Montmartre. The soldiers were courteous to him, and he was polite in return. The occupation, he decided, would not change his life. And he went to work.

Ambassador Bullitt, fearing a communist revolt in the working class suburbs, had made it a condition of his appointment as acting mayor of Paris that the police and firemen remain at their posts. He had also requested that Washington ship Thompson sub-machine guns to protect the embassy, mainly from the communist uprising that he wrongly predicted. Diplomatic manuals did not dictate protocol for an American ambassador to turn over a foreign capital to a conquering army, so Bullitt improvised. General Bogislav von Studnitz, commander of Germany’s 87th Infantry Division who would soon be Provisional Military Governor of a city he had never visited, simplified Bullitt’s task by instructing his staff to requisition the Hôtel Crillon at 7.55 that morning. The Crillon was only a dozen yards from the embassy wall. Von Studnitz, noted one French writer, was the type of Prussian officer that generations of Frenchmen thought ‘were born with monocles fixed to their eyes’. One of his first acts on entering the city was to put Paris one hour ahead to Berlin time.

Bullitt instructed Counsellor Robert Murphy, military attaché Colonel Horace H. Fuller and naval attaché Commander Roscoe Hillenkoetter to pay a courtesy call on General von Studnitz ‘as soon as he appeared to be settled’. When Murphy saw the Swastika rise on the roof of the Crillon, he decided ‘the moment had arrived for us to make our call’. Their purpose was to keep Bullitt’s promise to Premier Paul Reynaud to ensure a peaceful occupation. When the three Americans left the embassy that warm summer morning, a military convoy passed between them and the Crillon. One car stopped, and a German lieutenant asked in English, ‘You are Americans, aren’t you?’ They nodded. The lieutenant, who said he had lived in the United States, asked, ‘Can you tell us where we might find a suitable hotel here?’ Murphy laughed. ‘The whole city seems to be in your possession. It has hundreds of empty hotels. Take your pick.’

Inside the Crillon’s gilt lobby, Murphy saw a French police commissioner amid a throng of Germans. ‘You can’t imagine what happened,’ the man said. He told Murphy, Hillenkoetter and Fuller that a German colonel stopped him earlier that morning and ordered, ‘Open that hotel. It will be our headquarters. Take down the French flag from the roof, and replace it with this German flag.’ The empty hotel’s doors and shutters could not be opened, and the colonel warned, ‘If that hotel is not open in fifteen minutes and the French flag is not down, we will shoot it down and shoot you, too!’ A locksmith opened the doors in time, but the commissioner was still in a sweat.

‘Murphy!’ one of the German officers in the Prince of Wales suite upstairs called out. Murphy knew Colonel Weber from his years as US Vice-Consul in Munich. Weber, now von Studnitz’s aide-de-camp, welcomed the Americans, wrote Murphy,

as if we were all old friends, ushering us immediately into the drawing room where the general was talking with a dozen staff officers. We had expected to spend only a few minutes with the general, but he had previously ordered champagne from the Crillon’s excellent cellars and was in a mood to answer all the questions of our military and naval attachés. The only information we had about the progress of the war was what we had heard from western and Berlin radio broadcasts, which necessarily were confusing. General von Studnitz, who had served as German military attaché in Poland, said he appreciated it was the duty of attachés to gather intelligence for their governments and he was quite willing to inform us fully and frankly.

Von Studnitz gave the attachés a ‘clear and concise summary of the military campaign to date’ and predicted that ‘mopping up operations in France would not require more than another ten days, after which preparations would begin for crossing the channel to England’. Von Studnitz believed the British, without a single army division intact and most of their heavy artillery abandoned at Dunkirk, would not resist. Hillenkoetter asked how the Germans would cross the Channel, but von Studnitz ‘brushed aside this question with the comment that all plans were made’. The war, he added, would be over by the end of July, in six weeks. Walking the short distance back to the embassy, Murphy and the two attachés agreed that ‘none of us was at all sure he might not be right’.

Commander Hillenkoetter, recalling the same encounter, but without the champagne, wrote that ‘although it was only 10.30 a.m., we were offered a glass of what the General said was the very best brandy in the Crillon’. Hillenkoetter reported that von Studnitz was ‘most happy to make his call on the Ambassador at 1:30 p.m. as the Ambassador wished – assured us that all American property would be protected, and that we could count on the best of cooperation as far as the German military were concerned’. Von Studnitz invited Hillenkoetter and Fuller to attend the review of the Green Heart Division, the 185th Infantry, which he had once commanded, in the Place de la Concorde at 3.30 that afternoon. The two Americans could think of no polite way to refuse.

For Colonel Horace Fuller, the experience of handing Paris over to the Germans was galling. The 1909 West Point graduate had been briefing American and British journalists daily that the French Army would not hold. ‘Colonel Fuller was the only man in Paris who knew what was coming,’ Quentin Reynolds, the Collier’s Weekly correspondent, wrote. ‘He advised us to make plans to get out. He told us “off the record” that the French Army wouldn’t even bother to defend Paris.’ Fuller’s astute observations contrasted with the French government spokesman’s reply to a question from Virginia Cowles, the attractive American correspondent of Britain’s Sunday Times, asking whether Paris would be declared an ‘open city’: ‘Never,’ he said. ‘We’re confident that Hitler’s mechanized hordes will never get to Paris. But should they come so far, you may tell your countrymen we shall defend every stone, every clod of earth, every lamp-post, every building, for we would rather have our city razed than fall into the hands of the Germans.’ Colonel Fuller had fought the Germans in the Great War, when he commanded the US 108th Field Artillery Regiment in the Meuse-Argonne and Ypres-Lys offensives. Clare Boothe, covering the invasion for Life magazine, asked Fuller ‘what’s going to happen’:

His hands trembled. His eyes were quite bloodshot from loss of sleep. He tried to smile, but he couldn’t. He said, ‘Oh, there’s hope of course – the morale of the French – we can deliver 1,000 planes a month soon.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘don’t talk morale and economics, talk WAR. What do you think?’ He said so wearily, ‘I don’t want to think any more, I want to use my heart. You see, I want them to win so much, so very much,’ he said. ‘I fought with them at Chateau-Thierry in the last war – and oh, they’ve been Goddamn dumb, but dear Christ I love them.’

Back in his office at the chancellery, Murphy saw German soldiers climbing over the embassy gate: ‘They were running a telephone wire across our courtyard to the Crillon Hotel.’ To Murphy’s shock, the embassy’s ‘picturesque colored doorman’, George Washington Mitchell of North Carolina, was helping them. Mitchell had come to Paris before the Great War as a rider in a cowboy and Indian show. Murphy, who knew Mitchell was married to a German woman and spoke German, demanded to know why he had disobeyed orders not to allow German troops onto embassy premises. Mitchell said the soldiers were from Hamburg, where he knew people, and were ‘nice fellas’. Bullitt reacted with fury, not at George Mitchell, but at the Germans. He sent word to von Studnitz to remove the telephone cable at once. Henceforth, any German soldier breaking into the embassy grounds would be shot. The Germans removed the wire, but they posted a sign in front of the embassy that said, ‘Amerikanische Botschaft’, ‘American Embassy’. It was one of hundreds of signs the Germans affixed all over Paris for their troops and the German civilians, both administrators and tourists, who would arrive in their wake.

Von Studnitz, recalled Hillenkoetter, came to the embassy on time at 1.30 p.m. and spoke with Bullitt for about ten minutes ‘of correctness’. An hour later, Hillenkoetter and Fuller accompanied Bullitt for a similar, formal session at the Crillon. At 3.30, as promised, the two uniformed American attachés met General von Studnitz in the Place de la Concorde. With Nazi newsreel cameramen poised to record the military march-past, von Studnitz invited them to join him on the reviewing stand. ‘Both Fuller and I could easily see how that would look in newsreels, photos, etc. – two American officers taking a review with a German general. So we hastily, but firmly, declined, saying that we didn’t feel worthy to share the General’s honor; that it was his division and his glory; and that it would be a shame to deprive him of even a share of the glory.’ Fuller and Hillenkoetter diplomatically disappeared into the crowd. Robert Murphy, however, stood uncomfortably beside the German generals as the Green Heart Division goose-stepped across the great square to thumping martial music. When the parade ended and Murphy was walking back to the embassy, he complained to New York Herald Tribune correspondent Walter Kerr, ‘The general wanted the ambassador, and the ambassador told me to take his place.’ From an upper window of the embassy, a young diplomat hired locally in Paris, Keeler Faus, surreptitiously took photographs of the German troops in the Place de la Concorde.

Associated Press correspondent Philip W. Whitcomb, a graduate of Washburn University in Kansas and of Oxford, watched the same parade from the pavement and detected a bizarre normality:

On that day the garbage-men cleaned the streets alongside of German troops as they marched up the Friedland and Wagram Avenues or across the Place de la Concorde. The underground railway men ran their trains, though some carried only Germans on their way through Paris. The telephones worked. The police, under instructions to obey German orders, were all on duty, though on June 14th they were little more than members of the silent throng lining the streets through which the Germans moved.

The triumphalism of the military parades offended even a few Germans. A 33-year-old officer, Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, shared his disgust with General Franz Halder and his staff in Paris. Hitler deserved death for this nihilism, von Stauffenberg said. Although Major General Henning von Tresckow was brave enough to second him, General Halder counselled von Stauffenberg that the German public was unlikely to support a coup at a time of military victory.

Martial parades established themselves as facts of daily life that Parisians soon treated with the indifference they accorded to red lights.

TWO

The Bookseller

AS THE FIRST GERMAN SOLDIERS took control of Paris that morning, Sylvia Beach was waiting in Adrienne Monnier’s fourth-storey apartment in the rue de l’Odéon. Adrienne’s window commanded a clear view to the north, where the tiny street crossed the tree-shaded boulevard Saint-Germain. A column of German Army trucks and motorcycles appeared, along with troops riding and marching past. Sylvia called it an ‘endless procession of motorized forces: tanks and armored cars and helmeted men seated with arms folded … all a cold grey, and they moved to a steady deafening roar.’ For the first time, Sylvia heard the Germans’ famous leather jackboots. ‘Those boots always made them seem much more enraged than they were,’ she wrote. As she and Adrienne watched, ‘Tears were streaming down our cheeks. It was an awful experience. Horrible.’

‘Miss Beach’, as James Joyce called the American from the time they met in 1920, was 53 years old. Adrienne, her longtime collaborator, friend and former lover, was four years younger. For twenty years, the American and the Frenchwoman had presided over a unique and fertile realm of French and English literature. Adrienne called their little kingdom ‘Odéonia’, for the two bookshops – her French La Maison des Amis des Livres and Sylvia’s English Shakespeare and Company – whose plate-glass windows reflected each other across the rue de l’Odéon. James Joyce, who had made Shakespeare and Company his office, called it ‘Stratford-on-Odéon’.

The modest rue de l’Odéon flowed downhill from the crest of a rise, dominated by the rear of the great Théâtre de l’Odéon, to a roundabout, the Carrefour de l’Odéon, and the boulevard Saint-Germain. A canyon of five-and six-storey apartment buildings rose from ground-floor laundries, antique shops, carpet merchants and printers. Adrienne’s shop was at Number 7, and she lived on the fourth floor of Number 18. Shakespeare and Company was at Number 12, and Sylvia’s flat was in the mezzanine above the shop. The rue de l’Odéon’s twin bookshops, where contemporary writers were supported and published, made it the world capital of Franco-American letters. For a week before the Germans seized Paris, French people, as well as refugees from the Low Countries, had trudged up the rue de l’Odéon on their way out of the city. Sylvia and Adrienne watched them bearing the weight of all the possessions they could carry on their backs. While other booksellers and publishers were fleeing, the two women preferred to remain, if only to guard a small light amid what their friend Arthur Koestler called Europe’s Nazi ‘night’. Sylvia dismissed what many saw as her courage: ‘I never left Paris – hadn’t the energy to flee, luckily, as nothing happened to us or the other monuments.’

Adrienne had come to Odéonia in 1915, opening her bookshop during the war when rents were low and the city’s male booksellers were mostly in the army. From a peasant family in eastern, Alpine France, Adrienne had retained her earthy love of food and all other things sensual. Her father, Clovis, was a postal clerk who sorted mail on trains. An injury he received in a rail accident gave him an insurance settlement that his daughter used to start her business. La Maison des Amis des Livres became more than a bookshop. It was the base for publishing Adrienne’s literary journals and a venue for authors’ readings and discussions. She had befriended and defended some of France’s greatest writers – among them, poets Paul Valéry and Guillaume Apollinaire and novelists André Gide and Jules Romains.

Sylvia Woodbridge Beach arrived a couple of years later. Born in Baltimore in 1887, she had spent two teenage years in Paris from 1902 to 1904, when her father served as Presbyterian clergyman at the American Church on the Quai d’Orsay. From Paris, the family moved to Princeton, New Jersey. The Reverend Sylvester Beach’s most prominent parishioner was Virginia-born Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton University before being elected governor of New Jersey. The Reverend Sylvester Beach officiated at the weddings of both Wilson daughters and, after Wilson’s election to the White House in 1912, was known as the ‘president’s pastor’. Sylvia, who already spoke French fluently, learned Spanish in Madrid and Italian in Florence before returning to Paris during the Great War in 1917. A course in French literature at the Sorbonne led Sylvia to Adrienne Monnier’s shop in the rue de l’Odéon in search of a French literary journal. In March 1917, the slender, 5-foot-2-inch wisp of an American met the voluptuous French bookseller. Sylvia was thirty and Adrienne almost twenty-six. They discussed American and French books. Adrienne, who spoke little English, said she loved the works of Benjamin Franklin – albeit in French translation. When she told Sylvia, ‘J’aime beaucoup l’Amérique,’ Sylvia answered, ‘J’aime beaucoup la France.’ Soon, they loved each other as well.

Alice B. Toklas called Sylvia ‘flagstaff’ as much for her bony figure as her commitment to flying the banner of American literature on French soil. The American composer Virgil Thompson, who like Aaron Copland and George Antheil came to Paris to study music with Nadia Boulanger, called Sylvia ‘angular … Alice in Wonderland at forty’. Adrienne reminded him of ‘a French milkmaid from the eighteenth century’. William Carlos Williams remembered Adrienne in the kitchen, ‘That woman loved food, the senses were her meat.’ Her dining room was pink, she said, because pink was ‘good for the appetite’. Janet Flanner, who moved to Paris in 1922 with her lover Solita Solano and began her New Yorker column three years later, was a friend of both Sylvia and Adrienne. She compared ‘these two extraordinary women – Mlle. Monnier, buxom as an abbess, placidly picturesque in the costume she had permanently adopted, consisting of a long, full gray skirt, a bright velveteen waistcoat, and a white blouse, and slim, jacketed Sylvia, with her schoolgirl white collar and big colored bowknot, in the style of Colette’s Claudine à l’Ecole’.

Adrienne invited Sylvia to readings in her bookshop, where she heard, among many others, Paul Valéry in French Army uniform read his anti-war poem, ‘Europe’. When the Great War ended in November 1918, Sylvia went to Serbia to help her sister Holly with relief work for the Red Cross. Six months later, she was back in Paris. Adrienne encouraged her to open a French bookshop, like La Maison des Amis des Livres, in New York or London. Both cities proved impractical because of high rents and small readerships for French literature. Sylvia’s fallback was to establish an English language bookshop and lending library in Paris. Adrienne found her space on the ground floor of a building at 8 rue Dupuytren, around the corner from her own shop. With $3,000 sent by her mother, Eleanor Beach, Sylvia opened Shakespeare and Company on 17 November 1919. Above the door hung a pub-like sign of William Shakespeare’s head by the French-Polish painter Charles Winzer. When it was stolen, Winzer painted another. The second too disappeared, and Adrienne made one herself to replace it. Sylvia slept at the back of the tiny shop. Without running water but surrounded by the books she loved, she was content.

The first American writer to patronize Shakespeare and Company was the formidable Gertrude Stein, who appeared in the shop on 16 March 1920 with her companion, Alice B. Toklas. Already a figure on the Paris scene, Stein had yet to achieve success in America. Her weekly salon, initiated in 1906, attracted Pablo Picasso and other artists, whose paintings she assiduously collected. In the 1920s, American writers in Paris, including Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, sought her invitations. Stein became one of the Shakespeare and Company library’s original ‘bunnies’, as Sylvia called them, from the French word for subscriber, abonné. On 12 November 1920, 22-year-old Stephen Vincent Benét became the first young, aspiring American writer to join the library. Sylvia’s English competitors were Brentano’s bookshop for sales and the American Library of Paris for lending, both Right Bank institutions not favoured by the Left Bank bohemians. Brentano’s did not stock books by new writers or sell the experimental literary journals that Sylvia promoted. The blue-stockinged American Library matrons played moral censor, something Sylvia refused to do. When they removed H. L. Mencken’s journal, American Mercury, from their shelves, poet Ezra Pound, another of Sylvia’s American bunnies, wrote, ‘DAMN the right bank pigs, anyway.’ Shakespeare and Company became the haven of a new generation of writers and publishers. Most of its bunnies were students from the nearby University of Paris who, too poor to buy imported English books, paid the small subscription to borrow them.

In the summer of 1920, Shakespeare and Company reopened in a larger space at 12 rue de l’Odéon, facing Adrienne’s shop. Sylvia had two rooms just above Shakespeare and Company, but she did not live in them. She moved in with Adrienne at Number 8 and rented the rooms over the shop to pilgrims, as she called Americans arriving in Paris. Avant-garde American composer George Antheil lived there for several years. He used to climb up the front of the building to enter through a window rather than bother Sylvia by ringing at the shop. At the back, Sylvia kept a stove to brew tea and keep warm in winter. William Shirer, the great American journalist who was then working at the Paris Tribune, recalled how he ‘loved to browse among the shelves or be invited to tea in the back room, when in winter a fireplace blazed and there was much good talk’. Also at the back were children’s books, toys and a little red table. The outline of Odéonia was complete. It comprised the outdoor bookstalls in the arcades of the Théâtre de l’Odéon, the two bookshops, a music store, a library appraiser and, in the boulevard Saint-Germain, the writers’ favoured cafés, the Flore and the Deux Magots, and the Alsatian Brasserie Lipp.

Sylvia met James Joyce in July 1920. Joyce had just moved with his wife, Nora Barnacle, and their two children from Trieste. At the time, he was consumed with writing Ulysses. Sylvia, who had already read his short stories, later admitted, ‘Probably I was strongly attracted to Joyce as well as to his work, but unconsciously. My only love was Adrienne.’ When American courts convicted Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of the Little Review for printing ‘obscene’ sections of Joyce’s Ulysses, American and British publishers refused to consider the book. Sylvia Beach hated censorship. ‘You cannot legislate against human nature,’ she said. Although she had never published anything, she came to Joyce’s rescue by publishing Ulysses. Adrienne’s French typesetters printed it, and Sylvia proofread every page. It went on sale in her shop, and she persuaded friends like Ernest Hemingway to smuggle copies into the United States. Her friend Janet Flanner called Sylvia ‘the intrepid, unselfish, totally inexperienced and little-moneyed young-lady publisher of “Ulysses” in Paris in 1922’. When the book appeared, Sylvia lost one of her first bunnies, Gertrude Stein. Miss Stein, who hated Joyce, took her custom to the American Library on the Right Bank.

Within six years of opening her shop, Sylvia Beach was called by Eugene Jolas, the American publisher of the Paris literary magazine transition, ‘probably the best known woman in Paris’. If she had any rival for that honour, it could only have been another American, the beautiful singer-dancer Josephine Baker. Sylvia made Shakespeare and Company the centre of Parisian American literary life. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, John Dos Passos, Elliot Paul, Malcolm Cowley and other expatriate American writers used her combined bookshop-lending library as, in Janet Flanner’s words, ‘their club, mail drop, meeting house and forum’. Over tea at Shakespeare and Company, the Americans met the Irishman James Joyce and French writers like Louis Aragon and André Breton, as well as one another. It was a time of high living for the Americans, who found Paris cheaper than home and loved the freedom to write without censorship and to drink alcohol without being arrested. Aged 22, Hemingway fell in love, however platonically, with 34-year-old Sylvia the moment they met in 1921. ‘She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip,’ Hemingway wrote of her in his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast. ‘No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.’ He made a point of taking her to boxing matches to shake her further from her Protestant clerical upbringing. She became an enthusiast and introduced Hemingway to French writer Jean Prévost, who wrote a book called The Pleasure of Sport and matched Hemingway’s physicality. The two men sparred in the ring, but Prévost’s head was so hard that Hemingway broke a thumb on it. Sylvia adored Hemingway, encouraging the young journalist to publish in Paris’s growing number of literary periodicals.

The Twenties bounty turned, for Sylvia as for much of the western world, into Thirties desperation. The dollar’s devaluation slashed the incomes of expatriate Americans – impoverished writers, painters and composers most of all. Ernest Hemingway and her other favourites left Paris for the United States. In December 1933, restrictions on drinking and writing that had driven many American writers to France were lifted with the repeal of Prohibition and the American publication of Joyce’s Ulysses. Judge John Woolsey of the US District Court in New York wrote the landmark decision that Ulysses, despite its sexual content, was a ‘sincere and honest book’. He famously added, ‘His locale was Celtic and his season spring.’ This was good news for Joyce, whose book sold 35,000 copies in three months, but it came at a cost to Sylvia. Joyce had convinced her, after her years of subsidizing him and keeping his book in print, to relinquish publishing rights to Random House in New York and the Bodley Head in London. Her health, plagued since childhood by eczema and migraines, suffered. The writer Katherine Anne Porter recalled ‘attacks of migraine that stopped her in her tracks’. Lack of business in Depression-era Paris put her deeper into debt. Her family helped when it could – small amounts arriving in their letters from Princeton and California. But the presents were not enough to protect Shakespeare and Company from bankruptcy.

When Sylvia told André Gide in 1935 that the shop might close, he declared, ‘But something must be done!’ Thanks to Gide and fellow writers Jean Schlumberger and Paul Valéry, something was. They created the Friends of Shakespeare and Company, whose members paid dues for two years to support the shop. Almost all of France’s best writers contributed. André Maurois, Jean Paulhan, Jules Romains and Georges Duhamel headed a long list of donors who paid a minimum of $45 a year to attend readings by French and American novelists and poets. The poet Archibald MacLeish sent $75. The largest donation came from Sylvia’s childhood friend, Carlotta Welles Briggs, with whom she had spent summers at the Welles’s country house near Bourré in the Touraine.

The civil war in Spain brought American writers back to Paris, where they took leave from the battlefront. Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and the English poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender became Sylvia’s loyal customers. Sylvia persuaded Hemingway to do a reading to raise funds. He agreed on condition that Spender join him on the platform. This was less generosity than stage-fright. He was so nervous that he drank copiously before and during his reading of the short story ‘Fathers and Sons’. Faltering at first, he was declaiming like a Shakespearean dramatist by the end. The Paris Herald Tribune wrote, ‘He was beginning to show grace under pressure.’ Hemingway left Europe again when the Republicans lost the war in Spain and the half million Spanish refugees who escaped to France were be interned in camps.

In 1936, with the shop on a more secure footing, Sylvia made her first visit to the United States since coming to Paris in 1917. Her older sister, Holly, followed by younger sister Cyprian and their father, had moved to Altadena, California, where Sylvia saw them for a few weeks. By the time she stopped in Princeton to see childhood friends, severe menstrual bleeding took her to a Connecticut hospital for diagnosis and a hysterectomy. While Sylvia was away from Paris, a young German-Jewish photographer, Gisèle Freund, whom she and Adrienne had encountered two years earlier, supplanted her in Adrienne’s affections and apartment. Returning to convalesce in Paris, Sylvia, without demur, moved into the mezzanine rooms above Shakespeare and Company. The three women remained close, usually having lunch together in Adrienne’s kitchen.

A year later, after receiving nominations from parliamentarian Edouard Herriot and Henri Hoppenot, a poet in the French diplomatic corps, the French government made Sylvia a Knight of the Legion of Honour. It was the first official recognition she had received of her contribution to Franco-American letters. While she made light of her ‘little ribbon gibbon given me by the French’, she wore it proudly when occasion demanded.

At the outbreak of war in September 1939, Sylvia’s family urged her to return home. But her home was Paris. Friends, though, were leaving. The few American writers there in 1940, like Henry Miller and Robert McAlmon, as well as the photographer Man Ray, were fleeing to the south, where most went on to safer countries. Gisèle Freund waited until the Germans were bombing the industrial suburbs of Paris before she too escaped, first to the south, finally to Argentina. As a German-Jewish refugee, she would have been arrested immediately. By June 1940, Joyce was on his way to Switzerland. Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier and their contracting circle of brave friends awaited the humiliation of their city.

On Monday, 3 June, Adrienne wrote, ‘Loud noise of planes roaring over our heads. Raid: 200 planes, numerous victims.’ Six days later, she and Sylvia heard German artillery pounding Paris’s outskirts. Adrienne’s diary entry for the day said, ‘We think seriously of putting mattresses in the cellar to sleep on.’ Only the day before, a friend warned them that ‘Paris will be involved in the battle.’ Two days later, the same friend’s husband ‘let me understand that Paris will not be involved in the battle’. Rumours, compounded by government radio bulletins that lied about the war, were confusing rather than reassuring. Someone warned Adrienne that, if she stayed in Paris, people would assume she welcomed German occupation. By the morning of 12 June, Adrienne was ready to quit: ‘Personal longing to leave and go to Rocfoin’, the village southwest of Paris where her mother and father had a smallholding. After asking Sylvia to bicycle to Montparnasse station to see whether there were any trains, Adrienne had lunch in her kitchen with her sister, Marie. Marie, whose pet name was Rinette from Marinette, persuaded her to stay, saying that ‘we should live such moments here’. Sylvia, meanwhile, urged Ruth Camp, a young Canadian student who worked for her, to escape. Canada, unlike the United States, was at war with Germany, making Ruth subject to detention as an enemy alien. Sylvia despaired that ‘she could not be persuaded to leave in spite of my efforts to push her homeward, [and] was still helping me when the Germans swarmed into France’. As the Germans neared Paris, Ruth, in Sylvia’s words, ‘did try to get away. She was machine-gunned in the ditches, and was later interned in spite of her efforts.’ On the 13th, Sylvia had an urge to flee. She went to the American Embassy, where she discovered it was too late.

The anti-Nazi, anti-Soviet, Hungarian-Jewish writer Arthur Koestler had been hiding in Adrienne’s apartment. The French authorities had already interned him with other foreigners, many of whom were also anti-Nazis and Jews. The Nazis would take charge of those still stuck in the camps when the occupation began. After Koestler’s temporary release, Adrienne took him in. He was reading Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir on her sofa, when a four leaf clover in the book ‘fell right between his eyes!’ Adrienne kissed the spot and assured him it was an omen that he would be safe. A year later, Koestler wrote discreetly in London, ‘I still had some friends. Who these friends were, how they passed me on in turn, hiding me for one night each, and how they succeeded in obtaining for me a travelling permit to Limoges, where a fortnight later I ceased legally to exist, will be an amusing and moving story to tell at a time when the night has gone from Europe and acts of kindness and solidarity no longer count as crimes.’ When the Nazi night had passed, he was free to give Adrienne credit without putting her in jeopardy: ‘For a few days I remained in hiding, first at the flat of Adrienne Monnier, then at the P.E.N. Club.’ The president of International PEN was Sylvia and Adrienne’s old friend Jules Romains. The French novelist’s anti-Nazi views were known, and he fled Paris for the south in hope of reaching New York with his wife, Lise, the French-American novelist Julien Green and American surgeon Dr Alexander Bruno. Romains said, more in hope than truth, ‘It is impossible that France should go fascist.’

On 14 June, Sylvia’s and Adrienne’s bookshops, like all other businesses in Paris, were closed. Sylvia’s premises enjoyed some protection. Two American diplomats, Third Secretary Tyler Thompson and her friend Keeler Faus, had personally affixed red American seals to her apartment and shop to tell the Germans they belonged to a US citizen. But Sylvia and Adrienne’s anti-Nazi past made them vulnerable to the occupier. Adrienne, as well as hiding Arthur Koestler, had assisted the brilliant German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin’s escape from Paris to the south of France. (Benjamin was hoping to obtain an American visa from the consulate in Marseilles and travel to the United States via Spain and Portugal. He made an exhausting trek over the Pyrenees, but Spanish police forced him back to Nazi-occupied France. Rather than be sent to a concentration camp, he committed suicide.) Adrienne had also written a long condemnation of Nazi anti-Semitism in her Gazette des Amis des Livres in 1938: ‘From the day the Jews were emancipated (as you know, it is one of the glories of the French Revolution that they were), they have proved that they could be national elements of the first order.’ Sylvia had sold artists’ prints in her shop to raise money for Spain’s legitimate republican government to fight the Nazi-supported Francisco Franco. She also had many Jewish friends, including an unpaid voluntary assistant at Shakespeare and Company, Françoise Bernheim.

As the Germans occupied each arrondissement in Paris, someone told Adrienne that they were ordering everyone to remain indoors for forty-eight hours. Wehrmacht loudspeaker vans repeated this message, until it became known the curfew had been amended to begin at 9 p.m. Adrienne waited with Sylvia all morning in her apartment. At noon, they noticed civilians on the streets. In some places, Parisians were accepting gifts of food from German army trucks sent to feed the populace. In others, women flirted with soldiers. One of the better bordellos posted a notice: ‘Business as usual from 3 p.m.’ A few cafés opened to serve their first uniformed German customers, who were polite and paid for all they ate and drank. Adrienne was disgusted by a common sentiment she overheard: ‘What if the Germans are here? At least there will be order.’ She prepared lunch for Sylvia in the kitchen where for twenty years the earthy and maternal bookseller had cooked oily peasant dinners for the luminaries of French and American literature. It would be her last lunch before the Germans began requisitioning most of France’s food.

After lunch, the husband of Adrienne’s sister Rinette, painter Paul-Emile Becat, came to the flat to see her and Sylvia. He told them he had seen ‘the procession of the first German battalions this morning at the Place de l’Etoile’. A great phalanx of helmeted Wehrmacht troops marched to a Nazi band, while the Swastika flew over the Arc de Triomphe. At this scene, Parisians had stared sullen and silent, many of them weeping. Adrienne ended her diary of the day, ‘In the evening, great depression.’ She was not alone.

German forces seized both houses of France’s parliament, the Chamber of Deputies over the Seine from the Place de la Concorde and the Senate in the Luxembourg Gardens. They also commandeered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d’Orsay, the Naval Ministry beside the Hôtel Crillon and most other government buildings. Signs were posted in German saying they were under the ‘protection’ of the German army. Troops set up light cannon and machine guns at the main approaches to the Arc de Triomphe. They replaced French flags with Swastikas on government buildings, monuments, the arcades of the rue de Rivoli and the main hotels. Robert Murphy wrote, ‘I was amazed in those first occupation days to discover how thoroughly the Germans had prepared for every phase of military government. It became apparent that they had drafted comprehensive blueprints long in advance to suit whatever conditions they might encounter in conquered countries.’

The only fatal incident occurred at nine in the morning, when a lone French soldier shot at German troops in the southern suburb of Antony. ‘The German soldiers responded to the firing, killing the French soldier and a woman,’ noted the Paris Prefect of Police, Roger Langeron, in his diary. No Americans were harmed.

The Germans honoured most of the embassy certificates of American property ownership, including one that Bullitt personally issued to a French friend, Marie-Laure de Noailles. Married to an aristocrat, Marie-Laure was the daughter of a Jewish banker. Bullitt’s gesture undoubtedly saved her collection of Goyas and other masterpieces from German seizure. Nonetheless, the Nazis requisitioned two American homes near Paris in Versailles. One belonged to James Hazen Hyde, whose house was ransacked by German troops. The other was the villa of the twice-widowed Mrs James Gordon Bennett, in her youth Miss Maud Potter of Philadelphia. Her first husband had been Baron George de Reuter of the news agency his father founded. Five years after his death, she wed the eccentric, 73-year-old owner of the Paris Herald. When the Germans occupied her Versailles villa, she stayed in her Paris townhouse in the avenue d’Iéna near the American Ambassador’s residence. Other American losses were houses north of Paris belonging to Harlan Page Rowe and Ogden Bishop, both looted during the battles. The Luftwaffe bombed American oil and communications facilities on the northern French coast. Another American loss during the Battle of France was a consignment of 150,000 cigarettes for Ambassador Bullitt. The Germans did not tamper with any other embassy supplies, but a Wehrmacht colonel told French officials in the Paris customs house, ‘So these are Bullitt’s cigarettes! Well, he won’t get them. I used to live in Philadelphia and I never did like Bullitt. Take them away.’

In the evening, Bullitt received a visit at the embassy from Police Prefect Roger Langeron. For the past weeks, the two men had come to know and respect each other. Langeron told the ambassador that the Germans had arrested and were interrogating his chief of general intelligence, Jacques Simon. This violated the assurances given that morning by General von Studnitz, who told Langeron, ‘If order is maintained, if you can guarantee the security of my troops, you won’t hear a word from me.’ Langeron asked for Bullitt’s help. The ambassador called Robert Murphy, who went immediately to the Crillon with a message from Bullitt: if Simon were not released, no one would be responsible for security in Paris. Without Langeron’s 25,000 policemen, who had remained at Bullitt’s request when the French government was planning to remove them, the occupation which had gone smoothly until evening would become a shambles. At 11 p.m., Simon appeared unharmed in Langeron’s office on the Ile de la Cité.

THREE

The Countess from Ohio

THE NAZIS REQUISITIONED the best Parisian hotels – not only the Crillon, but the Ritz, Majestic, Raphael and George-V. The American Embassy beat them to the Hôtel Bristol, Ambassador Bullitt having already leased it from proprietor Hippolyte Jammet. The elegant hotel in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré was suitable as an American refuge, because its basement shelter was the only one in Paris with protection against poison gas. The hotel flew the American flag, which the Germans did not remove. One American expatriate, Isadora Duncan’s brother Raymond, made the Bristol bar his second home. The Hellenophile Duncan was easy to recognize, invariably dressed in a toga and hand-made sandals. His Left Bank art gallery, the Akademia in rue de Seine, was close enough to the Bristol for him to walk there over the river. Representatives of the American Red Cross, the Rockefeller Foundation and the American ambulance units moved into the Bristol. Anne Morgan also took up residence there, hiding foreign and French Jews under quasi-diplomatic protection until she found ways for them to leave France. Dorothy Reeder, directress of the American Library in the rue de Téhéran, went to the Bristol on the occupation’s first day to work for the embassy verifying that the residents were American citizens.

Two days earlier, Miss Reeder had received an unexpected visit from the American Library’s first vice-president, Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun. The two women conferred in the darkness of a library whose windows were obscured in brown paper as a precaution against bombing. The rest of the library’s board were preparing to leave France altogether, but Countess de Chambrun was going that afternoon to the country – imperiously informing Miss Reeder that she would return as usual in September. Miss Reeder, the countess recalled, ‘promised to remain on the spot and continue to wave the flag of neutrality. Meantime, she appeared to be getting what she termed “quite a kick” out of the position in which she was left as sole guardian of the premises, and with authority to negotiate the most delicate questions with the occupants, certain that the American Embassy would back her decisions.’ Miss Reeder herself wrote, ‘Was it really Paris whose streets I walked through the 11th, 12th and 13th of June 1940? I do not think so. It was a dead city. Everything was closed, locked and deserted. Even the fall of a pin could be heard.’

Clara Longworth de Chambrun was reluctant to abandon Paris. Her husband’s employers, the National City Bank of New York, had a ‘theory that, should the enemy enter Paris, certain French directors might be held as hostages and endanger the interests of the establishment’. So, Count Aldebert de Chambrun, the Marquis de Mun and six French employees were ordered to move the bank south of any imaginable German penetration to Le Puy. Clara told Aldebert that he could leave Paris without her. She refused to desert their house at 58 rue de Vaugirard, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens and the Senate’s ornate Palais du Luxembourg, in the 6th Arrondissement. A few dozen yards away was the Théâtre de l’Odéon, where Clara staged plays. Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company was just around the corner. Clara was obstinate: ‘My temperamental dislike of retreating from danger when others less capable of facing it remained behind caused me to protest vigorously against this mandate [from the bank to leave].’

Her husband reminded her that she would be alone in Paris. Aldebert himself had to be in Le Puy with the bank. Their only son, René, was in Washington on a mission from the French government at the request of Ambassador Bullitt to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt, a distant cousin by marriage, to send emergency military aid to Britain. Her husband’s brothers had also left. Pierre, who as the eldest had inherited their father’s title of Marquis de Chambrun in 1891, had gone to his country seat, the Château l’Empery-Carrières, in Lozère. As representative of Lozère in the Senate, he was the only American citizen in the upper house. With him was his wife, Clara’s cousin, Margaret Rives Nichols. Aldebert’s younger brother, Count Charles, known as Charlie and formerly French Ambassador in Rome, took refuge with relatives in Brittany. ‘My husband argued that, if I remained in Paris and saw the hideous swastika replace the tricolor, I would be cut off from everyone and everything I loved except the house itself and a little grave [of her daughter] nearby. I gave in before the inevitable and busied myself with the practical arrangements for that hated flight.’

On 12 June, after her visit to Dorothy Reeder at the American Library, Clara met her husband for a last lunch at home. Their chauffeur having disappeared in the chaos, an American employee of the bank, Mr Hunt, drove the count, the countess with her Japanese dog, Tsouni, on her lap and the Chambruns’ house maid out of the city that afternoon. With a million other Parisians, they found themselves in a disorderly procession that disrupted military convoys heading to the front. Their car crawled southwards along National Route Seven to Juvisy. There, where the highway joined regional roads, the traffic halted.

There were trucks, delivery wagons, military lorries and the whole running equipment of certain factories and aviation centers. Men and women were standing entwined on flatcars, careless of the fact that they could not remain erect for ever – or even at all – when running at normal speed. No question of that now; all proceeded at a footpace, and were stopped completely every three minutes. A lad on a dark brown thoroughbred pushed past our car and, on extricating himself from the mass, galloped off across country.

Further along the road, Clara noticed people setting out picnics. One man and woman in particular caught her eye: ‘I recall the silhouettes of a distinguished-looking couple in well-cut clothes seated at a tiny folding-table which formed part of their Rolls-Royce equipment. She was dressed in printed crepe de Chine with silver fox boa; he, in impeccable grey jacket with decorations. His carefully trimmed beard recalled Leopard II.’

Mr Hunt drove them for twenty-five hours on a journey that normally took seven. They had to sleep overnight in the car. On the second night, they reached Vichy, where the Hôtel du Parc gave Aldebert and Clara a room. They were lucky. Most of the other displaced Parisians who survived Luftwaffe strafing on the highways were sleeping rough in barns, on roadsides and in cheaper hotels and inns, several families often crowded into the same room. The rambling, white-porticoed Hôtel du Parc was the best that the spa town had to offer. Its management knew the Chambruns, who had summered there to ‘take the waters’ since 1926. Their July reservations were simply pushed forward to June. The couple took baths and settled in for their first good sleep in three days.

At four o’clock in the morning, while the Germans were about to occupy Paris, the urgent banging of a gong woke them. The incessant racket worsened when ‘an excited servant thundered at our door, and commanded us to dress and pack without delay as all guests must be out of the hotel by five o’clock’. The military staff of General Maxime Weygand, France’s new minister of national defence, had requisitioned the hotel. ‘We argued, but to no avail,’ Countess de Chambrun recalled. The hotel servant ‘compromised by giving us a cup of coffee before the start’. Despite their age, their wealth and Aldebert’s status as a retired army general, they packed and left the hotel before dawn.

Clara Longworth de Chambrun, a stalwart American matron of 66 years, and her American-born husband did not complain. ‘I must say for our personal honor,’ she wrote, ‘all thought of self was totally forgotten in the magnitude of national disaster. Even my little dog seemed to understand that no attention could be paid to him. Instead of balancing himself on my knees to supervise the chauffeur or admire the landscape, he crept down on the floor of the car and lay between my feet.’ They left Vichy for Le Puy, where the National City Bank had arranged lodging for its Paris staff.

This was Clara’s third war since she left Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1901. She took it in her stride. Four years before the Battle of France, she had written, ‘By birth and education, my life – which began on October 18, 1873, was predestined to adventure, tragedy, romance and mirth.’ By the time her third war began in September 1939, she was an accomplished Shakespearean scholar and had written sixteen books, eight each in English and French. These included the memoir of her life to 1935, Shadows Like Myself, and The Making of Nicholas Longworth, a biography of her brother. Nicholas Longworth III had been a Republican congressman from Cincinnati and was twice Speaker of the House of Representatives. His marriage to President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, at the White House was the American social event of 1906. Born into a rich and respected Cincinnati pioneer family, Clara Eleanor Longworth was, by her own admission, no beauty. ‘Why should any man wish to marry a woman who is not extremely beautiful?’ she asked in her first memoir. Clara nonetheless had bountiful chestnut hair that she tied back to reveal a striking face that exuded patrician self-confidence. Her fiercely independent, intellectual temperament had probably made her unsuitable to the Ohio boys who congregated at her family’s mansion on Grandin Road. In 1895, her cousin, Margaret Rives Nichols, married a French aristocrat, Pierre de Chambrun. Clara met his younger brother, Count Aldebert, at the same time.

Although the Chambrun brothers had an impeccably French pedigree, they were American twice-over. Aldebert and Charles had been born in Washington, DC, where their father, Adolphe de Chambrun, served as legal counsel to the French Embassy during the administrations of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. The Marquis de Chambrun’s Washington memoir, Impressions of Lincoln and the Civil War, recounted his friendship with President and Mrs Lincoln, who invited him to join them at Ford’s Theatre on the night Lincoln would be assassinated. The Chambruns were direct descendants of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of American independence and loyal friend of George Washington. Under an April 1788 act of the Maryland legislature, all of Lafayette’s male heirs were automatically citizens of the state and, thus, of the United States. Aldebert’s favourite sport, dating to his Washington boyhood, was baseball. Clara said that Aldebert ‘never considered the United States, where he was born and passed his early school-boy days, as foreign soil’. She also thought that he looked at moral problems ‘from a more American point of view’ than she did. Their differences were many: ‘Like all his family, he upholds a woman’s right to vote; I am firmly and temperamentally against it … His ultrahumanitarian views condemn the practice of capital punishment while my baser and more practical mind considers that in our present imperfect state of civilization it is a necessary evil.’ They wed in 1901, a Cincinnati ceremony presided over by the Episcopal Archbishop of St Paul for the Longworths and the Catholic Archbishop of Ohio for the Chambruns. Aged 27, she was not a young bride for her generation. Aldebert, born in Washington on 23 July 1872, was a year older.

Clara moved with Aldebert to France and tackled French life with the determination that her late eighteenth-century forebears brought to settling the Ohio frontier. She perfected her French, took a doctorate at the Sorbonne and became a figure in the conservative world of the French aristocracy. The couple had a son, René, whose godfather was President William Howard Taft; and a daughter, Suzanne, who died of an accidental electrocution in Paris at the age of 19. In 1910, Aldebert was dispatched to Washington as French military attaché and became with Clara part of what the press called President Taft’s ‘golf cabinet’. Taft, a jovial and rotund Ohio Republican who had been governor of the Philippines and vice-president under Theodore Roosevelt, called Aldebert ‘Bertie’. The Longworth and Taft families had been friends in Cincinnati, where Taft had taught her brother Nicholas at law school. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt challenged Taft, his former protégé, for the presidency, splitting the Republican vote and handing the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The Longworths and Chambruns, almost alone in Washington, remained close to both the Roosevelt and the Taft families.

The Chambruns returned to France in time for the Great War in 1914. Aldebert, a career soldier who had worked his way through the ranks to become a colonel, commanded the French 40th Regiment. At Bar-le-Duc during the Battle of Verdun in 1916, his entire unit was cited in dispatches for bravery. The award was presented by Aldebert’s former military academy instructor, General Henri-Philippe Pétain. Clara used her privileged position to visit her husband near the front. When she was forced to return to Paris and feared she might never see him again, she wrote, ‘But there is an end to everything, even tears.’ Her family’s sense of noblesse oblige led her to work for French refugees from the Meuse Valley battle zone and her mother to come from Ohio and nurse the wounded at the American Hospital of Paris. When the United States entered the war in April 1917, Aldebert was made French adviser to the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, General John Pershing. Clara preserved three images of the war: ‘the appearance of General Pershing on the balcony of the Hotel Crillon, the arrival of the [American] First Division, and the salute to Lafayette at Picpus Cemetery’. It was said that an American officer arrived in Paris, went straight to Lafayette’s simple grave at Picpus in the east of the city and announced, ‘Nous revoilà, Lafayette!’ This was America’s answer to Lafayette’s famed ‘Nous voilà!’ on reaching the rebellious American colonies 140 years before.

After the war, the Sorbonne awarded Clara, then aged 48, a doctorate in literature. Her interests included staging plays at the Comédie Française and helping to manage the American Library. The library had been established to provide books to doughboys, as the American soldiers were affectionately known, and remained open after they went home. Its members were mainly American residents of Paris and French students studying English. Among Clara’s American friends on the library board were its only other female members, Edith Wharton and Anne Morgan. The American Library, like Clara herself, had little contact with the Left Bank ‘lost generation’ writers who congregated at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company.

Aldebert was posted to Morocco in 1922, where Clara experienced her second war three years later. ‘In the spring of 1925,’ she wrote, ‘the storm that had been brewing over the Rif broke with full force against the French outposts.’ Her husband, promoted to general, helped Maréchal Pétain to crush a war for independence that she called the ‘onslaught of more than 50,000 warriors of the fiercest description’ and capture their leader, the legendary Abd el-Krim. The French exiled Abd el-Krim to Réunion in the Indian Ocean, and the Chambruns returned to France. The French Academy awarded her its Bordin Prize for her Shakespearean scholarship in 1926, and in 1928 she became a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. Aldebert retired from the army as a general in 1933.

Two years later, their son, René, returned from practising law in New York to marry Josée Laval. Her father, Pierre Laval, had served in several French cabinets and had recently been prime minister. At the Laval–Chambrun wedding in Paris on 19 August 1935, the best man was General Pershing. Among the witnesses was René’s Aunt Alice Roosevelt Longworth. ‘Bunny’, as family and friends called the 6-foot, dark-haired René, opened law offices at 52 avenue des Champs-Elysées, where his father’s National City Bank maintained its French headquarters. René was the first lawyer admitted to the bars of both New York and France.

Bunny’s father-in-law was not from a similar aristocratic background. The mercurial Pierre Laval was born poor in the village of Châteldon. He studied law and defended trade unionists. In 1914, he was elected as a socialist to the lower house of parliament, the Chamber of Deputies. When the party split between socialists and communists in 1920, he became an independent. He eventually bought the chateau in his home village and a flat in the exclusive Villa Saïd off the avenue Foch in Paris. In 1927, he moved to the upper chamber, the Senate, and became Président du Conseil, prime minister, in 1931. Time magazine named him its 1931 ‘Man of the Year’. ‘Swarthy as a Greek, this compact little Auvergnat (son of a village butcher in Auvergne, south-central France) was a Senator of no party, an Independent,’ Time commented. ‘The public neither knew that he always wears a white wash tie (cheapest and unfading) nor cared to figure out that his name spells itself backward as well as forward. Addicted to scowling, didactic (he once taught school), possessed of a mellow but unexciting voice, identified with no conspicuous cause or movement, Senator Laval was also too young to be noticeable in France in January 1931.’ In October 1931, he became the first French prime minister to visit the United States. His government fell in February 1932, but he served in several more cabinets until the 1936 victory of the leftist Popular Front coalition. Friends said that René’s devotion to his father-in-law, who called him affectionately ‘lapin’ rather than the English ‘Bunny’, derived from his passionate love for his wife, Josée. After René and Josée married, the two families became close and socialized regularly in Paris and the countryside.

On the morning of 14 June 1940, when Clara and Aldebert were evicted from the Hôtel du Parc in Vichy, Mr Hunt drove the Chambruns to see the Lavals at the Château de Châteldon. It was only a short detour on their way from Vichy to Le Puy. Pierre Laval was at home with his wife, Jeanne, and their daughter, Josée. The former prime minister immediately gave his in-laws the latest news. Clara wrote, ‘There was too much of it, and all bad: the Government was at Tours. They were joined there on June the thirteenth by Winston Churchill, Lord Halifax, Lord Beaverbrook and General Spears – the latter some days later was to spirit away from Bordeaux the recently appointed Under-Secretary of War, Colonel Charles de Gaulle, elevated for the nonce to the rank of Brigadier General pro tem.’ Clara conceived at this time a hatred of de Gaulle. Her memoirs, while criticizing him as an upstart without compassion for French suffering, omitted his brilliant armoured offensive against the Germans – a rare French success during the debacle of 1940. Laval and the countess dismissed the proposal by de Gaulle and Premier Paul Reynaud to continue the struggle against Germany from the North African colonies as ‘a wild scheme of continued military resistance from across the Mediterranean’.

Although Clara favoured an early armistice to spare France the loss of more people, she insisted she was adamantly anti-German. Clara’s hostility to Germany dated to her Washington years, when the French and German embassies vied for influence over American opinion. She detested German behaviour during the Great War and believed Germany should have paid its full war reparations to France. She wrote that her son René ‘fully shared his parents’ anti-German feelings’. René founded the French Information Center in New York before the Second World War to counter ‘the scarcely concealed Teutonic propaganda’ in the United States. Yet the perceptive American journalist Vincent Sheean detected in Clara a certain sympathy for Nazi objectives in Europe. He met the countess in Paris during the Spanish Civil War and wrote that ‘she had referred to Franco’s forces as “our army”, and had said “we shall soon be in Madrid”, and had declared quite flatly that if any of Hitler’s officers needed help getting to Spain she would assist them’. Clara did not mention this conversation, or her views on Spain, in her memoirs.

General de Chambrun recalled the stopover at Châteldon: ‘There we found M. and Mme. Laval, ready to leave for Bordeaux, where M. Laval believed his presence to be necessary. He questioned me at great length regarding Maréchal Pétain and told me his desire that the Maréchal should be placed at the head of the country, believing that he would be able to keep the upper hand against the enemy.’ The Lavals drove to the government’s new rest stop at Bordeaux, and the Chambruns resumed their journey to Le Puy.

‘The sights on the road were worse than those between Montargis and Vichy,’ Clara wrote. ‘We caught up with the same groups of trucks from aviation and munition centers but the picnic spirit had quite died down. Youths and maidens were no longer thinking of embracing each other; scowls and curses were the best they had to bestow upon passers-by.’ The route via Thiers and La Chaise Dieu took them slowly through the mountains until they saw Le Puy, ‘seated apparently on several extinct volcanoes upon whose empty craters rose tall churches’. Lodgings had been arranged nearby at an old castle belonging to the Comtesse de Polignac. There, the household maid told them that

Madame de Polignac was away for the afternoon but that she had left orders that the accommodations offered should be shown us. Our hearts sank a bit when she told us that every individual connected with the bank had already inspected the château, and after one look had gone on to Le Puy. There was no choice left at present, for that very morning a messenger had come from Mr. Pearce, the manager of the bank, saying that there was not a single bed left vacant in town.

To Clara’s question about the castle’s gas and electricity, the maid answered, ‘No gas, Madame, and just enough electricity to light one bulb in each room. If the river rises there may be more.’ They went down two flights of stairs to a massive kitchen cut into solid stone. It was bare, apart from a large, ancient stove. Was there either coal or wood for the stove? ‘Unfortunately, no, Madame,’ the maid said. ‘There is none at all here, and none to be bought in the village either. We have hardly enough fuel for the bakers’ oven. We hope to have bread in three days’ time. They are grinding the first sacks of flour at the mill below the castle.’ To Clara’s statement that she had been told the bathroom had hot water, the maid answered, ‘There is, if you heat it.’

Mr Hunt soon demonstrated his Yankee ingenuity. ‘Having explored the wildest parts of India and Thibet, the Sierras and the Rockies were to him mere child’s play,’ Clara observed of her erstwhile chauffeur. Hunt drove to the village of Lavoûte-sur-Loire and returned with implements to make a success of the kitchen – pots, pans, kettle and cooking gas. He gathered firewood, turned his hand to preparing dinner and in the gatekeeper’s cottage located a radio for them to hear the news. Clara and Aldebert nicknamed him ‘Daniel Boone’, only to discover that ‘he was in fact a true and lineal descendant of our great Kentucky hunter and pioneer’.

On 17 June, the radio informed the Chambrun party that Paul Reynaud had resigned and the new prime minister was their old friend, 84-year-old Maréchal Philippe Pétain. They listened sympathetically to Pétain’s broadcast that day, in which he called for an early armistice and an end to the fighting. By then, more than a hundred thousand French soldiers were dead, almost two million had been taken prisoner and many of the others were in flight – hiding their uniforms to disguise themselves as civilians. A few heroic units fought on, while many others had been evacuated from Dunkirk to England. On 18 June, the Chambruns listened to the British Broadcasting Corporation’s French language service from London. General Charles de Gaulle, who had only just reached England, assured the few French who could hear him, ‘France has lost a battle, but France has not lost the war.’

De Gaulle’s ‘Appeal of June 18th’ calling for resistance to the Nazis infuriated Clara de Chambrun, who denigrated the rebel general. At the same time, the countess promoted her son, 34-year-old René, as a more suitable national hero. It was Count René, after all, who had convinced Ambassador Bullitt at the end of May that Britain would stand fast against German bombardment and invasion. While leaving for England from Dunkirk in May on a mission for the French general staff, Captain René de Chambrun – who had been a reserve officer since studying at the military academy of Saint-Cyr in 1927 – observed the superiority of the Royal Air Force over the Luftwaffe:

And then, just as we were leaving the shores of France, three squadrons of Heinkels, twenty-seven planes in all, converged upon the city [Dunkirk] from three different directions, and, as if they had had some secret rendezvous with the Germans, six small British planes appeared almost at the same moment, flying at very high altitude. The Germans began to pour their bombs just as the British fighters swooped down upon them. The sound of the British engines was unlike any plane I knew, and their guns sounded strange too, but they did the most deadly job of dogfighting I have seen. I counted within a few minutes nineteen trails of smoke as Heinkel after Heinkel dropped and the six little fighters took control of the sky.

Back in Paris, René de Chambrun had convinced Bullitt that the RAF would stop Germany from winning the war. At Bullitt’s request, Prime Minister Paul Reynaud dispatched René to Washington to intercede for Britain with his cousin, Franklin Roosevelt.

Clara wrote, ‘It is historically interesting to note that his [René’s] assurances that England would inevitably win the war were made in New York twenty-four hours before Charles de Gaulle launched his radio broadcast from London.’ In Clara’s eyes, de Gaulle, who had only just been promoted to one-star general, possessed neither breeding nor compassion:

That any man of military training should have attempted to make hay in the political sunshine of the colossal falsehood FRANCE HAS LOST ONLY A BATTLE NOT A WAR shows how far the speaker had already flown from the grim realities of total disaster in the midst of which we found ourselves. It must be supposed that an officer who seeks shelter far from the tragic situation that he himself has abandoned, who is clothed, fed and financed by a Government [Britain’s] which has seldom throughout history manifested affection

toward his fatherland, is hardly in a position to judge the conditions from which he himself has escaped.

Clara applauded Pétain’s decision to give up a struggle that was bleeding France of its young men. Without the Armistice, she wrote, ‘nothing would have been left but capitulation and unconditional surrender. What would then have become of all those who had taken refuge in the ever-dwindling free zone, and of those who laboriously made their way to England, America, or North Africa, had the entire south, east and west been overrun?’ She admired her husband’s old commander, Maréchal Pétain, as ‘the very symbol of integrity and glory’ and compared Pierre Laval to Abraham Lincoln. ‘Both of them were sometimes called ugly,’ she wrote, ‘but in the President of the United States as in the great French statesman there was strength and beauty of soul which shone in their eyes and placed them above other mortals.’ Her in-law, Laval, had been instrumental in making Pétain premier, but had not himself been included in the cabinet of 17 June. Meanwhile, along with other citizens and expatriates, Clara and Aldebert waited for the Battle of France to end. The humiliating capitulation came on 22 June at Compiègne in the same railway car in which Germany submitted to France in November 1918. At that moment, in Washington, her son, René, was pleading with the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee for America to provide arms for Britain to resist the Nazis. In the forests and hills surrounding Mme de Polignac’s riverside castle, Mr Hunt foraged for firewood and food. ‘Our three weeks there,’ Clara wrote, ‘were one long effort merely to keep alive.’

FOUR

All Blood Runs Red

WHILE CLARA AND ALDEBERT WERE HEADING south to avoid the Germans, another American left Paris to find them. Eugene Bullard walked towards the front lines, lugging a knapsack of sausages, crackers, canned food and a two-volume history of the American contingent of the French air corps during the First World War, the Lafayette Escadrille. ‘I said good-bye and set out to join the 170th Regiment in holding back the enemy – at least that was what I thought,’ Bullard wrote. His march took him to Châlons, about halfway along the 100mile trek to Épinal in the Moselle Valley, where Bullard believed the French infantry regiment was holding the Germans back. Refugees at Châlons told him the Germans had already captured Épinal. So, he walked back to Paris. At the gates of Paris, Bullard learned that another infantry regiment, the 51st, had engaged the Germans near Orleans. He trudged south to join them.

Bullard, with the heavy pack still on his back, marched 50 miles in twenty-eight hours. He stopped at Chartres, where, as he wrote, ‘I had a stroke of luck. I ran into Bob Scanlon, the black boxer and comrade from the Foreign Legion. There were two of us now, together, two friends sharing everything. I did not feel lonely anymore.’

German Stukas dive-bombed Chartres as the two Americans were leaving. ‘During the bombardments I threw myself on the ground, and I saw Bob Scanlon do the same thing about twenty feet away,’ wrote Bullard. ‘A huge shell burst about where he was, leaving a crater with the dead and wounded and bits of human bodies strewn around it. I thought Bob’s must be one of them, for he was nowhere in sight.’ Bullard, unable to find even a shred of Scanlon’s clothing, abandoned the search for his friend. Near the bomb crater, a boy with a paralysed arm screamed for his mother. The woman, Bullard wrote,

lay cut in half as if by a guillotine, her hand still clutching a piece of chicken. The crippled lad jumped up and down shrieking. He went into a convulsion as I tried to comfort him. I put my hand on his shoulder to take him with me – where, I don’t know – but the poor little thing jerked away in terror and his eyes actually crossed and uncrossed … Still crying, I pushed on in the hope of fighting the enemy that causes such horrors.

An unusual route had brought Eugene Jacques Bullard from his birthplace, Columbus, Georgia, in 1895 to the Battle of France in 1940. His parents were of mixed African-Creek Indian heritage, and his father had been born a slave at the beginning of the Civil War. When Eugene was 6 years old, his mother died. His father supported his six children working as a labourer. When a foreman struck him with an iron grappling hook, William Bullard made the mistake of fighting back. A white mob rode out to the family cabin that night to lynch him, but the terrified children convinced the men their father was away. The drunken racists swore to return. ‘This near lynching of his father,’ wrote one of Bullard’s biographers, Craig Lloyd, ‘was the traumatic event that led young Bullard to leave home sometime later.’

Bullard was ten years old when he ran away. At first, he travelled with a gypsy family and worked with horses. A year later, he stowed away on a tramp steamer to Hamburg. When the captain discovered the youngster on board, he gave him £5 and dropped him in Glasgow. Bullard found odd jobs and, in Manchester, became a professional boxer. A twenty-round match with Georges Forrest in 1913 brought him to Paris. After winning the decision, he stayed in Paris as a boxer and sparring partner. He loved the city. ‘There never was any name-calling like “Nigger”,’ he wrote in his unpublished memoirs. ‘It seemed to me that the French democracy influenced the minds of both white and black Americans there and helped us all to act like brothers as nearly as possible.’ Two months after France went to war with Germany in 1914, on Bullard’s nineteenth birthday, he repaid the people who had treated him as an equal by joining the French Foreign Legion. Among the Americans in his unit was Bob Scanlon. They were posted to the Somme, where Bullard fought as a machine gunner. He was wounded and commended for bravery. So many Legionnaires were killed in 1914 and 1915 that the survivors were transferred to the 170th Infantry Regiment. For many months from late February 1916, the 170th resisted the German mass offensive that became the Battle of Verdun. In one engagement, Bullard sustained shrapnel wounds to his head. In another, a shell ripped open his leg. He won the Croix de Guerre and was invalided from the army. After six months’ recovery in Lyons, he returned to Paris and applied to the French Army’s air corps.

Bullard qualified as a pilot in May 1917, winning a bet with a Southern white friend that he could do it. He took advanced combat flight training along with other American volunteers at Avord. The Americans formed what became the Lafayette Escadrille. As each pilot qualified, he was sent into action. But some trainees who started school after Bullard left before he did. A friend confided to Bullard that an American in Paris was pressuring the French to prevent American blacks from flying in the war. Dr Edmund Gros, the director of the American Hospital of Paris, was responsible for the welfare of Americans in the Lafayette Escadrille and the American Ambulance Corps. Bullard had already noticed how Dr Gros distributed the cheques from a fund that wealthy Americans in Paris had established for the American pilots: ‘I was always the first in Dr. Gros’ office. But the dear doctor would never give me my check until after the whole crowd received theirs and the banks were closed for the day, so I could not cash mine.’ When Bullard threatened to write to the Inspector General of the Schools of Aviation about being passed over for a combat assignment, he was finally sent to the front. His comrades in the Escadrille gave him a party to celebrate, and someone confided that ‘a certain person in Paris in the Ambulance Corps … had done everything he could to keep me from becoming the first Negro military flyer for no reason except that he didn’t like my color’. The ‘certain person’, Dr Gros, had failed.

Bullard flew his first combat mission in September 1917 with the motto ‘All Blood Runs Red’ painted on his plane. He flew more than twenty missions, most over the Verdun front, and had one confirmed downing of a German plane. The squadrons in which he served, the N-93 and N-85, acknowledged his bravery. His plane took bullets from German ground fire and fighter planes, but he always made it back to base. When the American Army Air Corps arrived in France that autumn, the other 266 American pilots in French service became the US 103rd Pursuit Squadron. Bullard was the only pilot excluded. He was also the only black.

Dr Gros took matters further when, using a dispute that Bullard had with a white colonial officer who refused to return his salute, he influenced the French to dismiss him from their air corps. Bullard was reassigned to his old regiment, the 170th Infantry, as a non-combatant for the last ten months of the war. In May 1918, the French government issued scrolls of gratitude to all American pilots who had flown for France. Dr Gros, delegated to make the presentation, gave scrolls to every flyer except Bullard.

Dr Gros was not alone in his opinion that African-Americans should not be sent into battle against white soldiers. US Army commanders prevented troops of the all-black 15th Infantry Regiment from serving at the front with the American Army. The Harlem Hellfighters, as they were called, were put under the command of General Henri Gouraud in the French Fourth Army. The French did not believe in segregated units and were grateful to combatants of any colour. The Hellfighters became the 369th Regiment and spent more time under continuous fire, 191 days, than any other unit of American soldiers. They ceded no ground, and none surrendered. They were the first regiment to reach the River Rhine, and they collectively earned the Croix de Guerre for valour. At war’s end, however, General Pershing did not permit them, or their popular regimental band under James Reese Europe, to participate in the Allies’ victory march through Paris. Many of the demobilized African-American doughboys, unsurprisingly, stayed in Paris rather than return to the land of Jim Crow and lynching.

The army discharged Bullard in October 1919 at the end of a distinguished tour of duty that included the rare achievement of service in the Foreign Legion, the regular army and the air corps. He had also been awarded the Légion d’Honneur, the Médaille Militaire, Croix de Guerre, Croix du Combattant Volontaire de la Guerre and many other medals for bravery and for his wounds. There was no decoration for being the first black combat pilot and the only African-American to fly for any army in the Great War.

Peacetime proved more eventful for Bullard than war. Back in Paris, he returned to boxing but also took up the drums in one of the increasingly popular jazz bands. Montmartre became home to new jazz ensembles and to the demobilized black American soldiers who elected not to return to the United States. Some had played in James Reese Europe’s famous Harlem Hellfighters’ orchestra. Bullard became artistic director at Joe Zelli’s nightclub in Montmartre after helping the Italian to obtain the first Parisian licence to open after midnight. He booked some of the finest jazz talent in the world to play at Zelli’s.

In 1923, Bullard married Marcelle Eugénie Henriette Straumann, daughter of a rich industrialist and his aristocrat wife. To Bullard’s delight, the Straumann parents welcomed him into their family. Eugene and Marcelle had three children, a son who died in infancy of pneumonia and two daughters, Jacqueline and Lolita. In 1928, Bullard bought his own Montmartre club, Le Grand Duc, at 52 rue Pigalle. It became the centre of a jazz age scene that drew the likes of the Prince of Wales and Ernest Hemingway to Bullard’s champagne-laden table. Bullard hired Ada Smith, whose red hair earned her the name ‘Bricktop’, to sing. He also gave Langston Hughes, then a struggling young poet, work as a dishwasher. This was an exciting time in Montmartre, when jazz lovers could hear trumpeter Arthur Briggs in one club and celebrated pianist Henry Crowder in another. Eugene Bullard dominated the Parisian scene as impresario, restaurateur and benefactor of Americans in need. Clarinettist Sidney Bechet, who played in the club and became Bullard’s friend, wrote:

If someone needed help, he did more than any Salvation Army could with a whole army; and what he wanted to do for himself, he could do in a smooth, smart way. He’d made himself the kind of man people had a need for. The cabarets, the clubs, the musicaners – when

there was some trouble they couldn’t straighten out by themselves, they called on Gene. He was a man you could count on.

Bullard opened another club, L’Escadrille, at 5 rue Fontaine, and a gym, Bullard’s Athletic Club, at 15 rue Mansart in Pigalle. Marcelle wanted him to give up his Montmartre life and become a country gentleman. ‘Like most American men,’ Bullard wrote, ‘who aren’t sissies, I could not stand the idea of being a gigolo even to my wife. So I told her she could lead the life of a full-time society woman if she liked but to count me out during working hours because I was not going to give up earning my living. Soon we were seeing so little of each other that we decided to part company.’ She may have wearied of the occasional scars he carried home from fights in and out of the clubs, as well as of his all-night hours. They divorced in 1935, and he was awarded custody of their two daughters.

In early 1939, a new French intelligence service, created three years earlier within the Ministry of the Interior to monitor the 17,000 Germans in Paris, recruited Bullard as an agent. An ancien combattant with an impeccable war record, fluent in French and speaking good German, the nightclub and gymnasium owner was an ideal spy. So many Germans flocked to his gym and club that he was bound to hear something. His police handler, Georges Leplanquais, assigned a 27-year-old Alsatian woman, Cleopatre ‘Kitty’ Terrier, to work with him. Fluent in German, French and English, she had loyalty that was beyond doubt – the Germans had murdered her father during their wartime occupation of Alsace. Gene and Kitty were a good team. When Germans dropped into Le Grand Duc, Bullard was always nearby.

Of course, they figured, no Negro could be bright enough to understand any language except his own, much less figure out the military importance of whatever they said in German. So, as the Nazis talked together at my tables and I served them, they were not at all careful about discussing military secrets within my hearing. These I promptly passed on to Kitty, who could slip unnoticed out of the bar, if need be, and pass along everything important to headquarters.

French intelligence recruited another prominent African-American, Josephine Baker, who passed along information on German clients at the theatres and nightclubs where she sang. When war came in September 1939, Paris was blacked out at night. This finished the nightclub business in Montmartre, and many of its more famous musical residents – including singer and club owner Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith – left. Bullard closed his nightclub and gym. A wealthy American woman, June Jewett James, offered him work as a major domo and a home for his daughters at her chateau in Neuilly. While there, he sent Kitty Terrier any important information he heard from Mrs James’s visitors. At one formal party, Bullard wore his full dress army uniform with medals. Among the guests was Dr Edmund Gros, who said, ‘Bullard, I didn’t know you had the Médaille Militaire.’ Bullard shot back, ‘I thought you kept all my records just as you keep the scroll issued me by the French government as it was to every member of the Flying Corps.’

When the curfew was relaxed to midnight in February 1940, Bullard went back to Paris and reopened Le Grand Duc. In late May, the Germans launched their blitzkrieg of the Low Countries and cut through France at shocking speed. Kitty Terrier warned him, ‘Now, get out of Paris as fast as you can.’ Bullard knew that his skin colour would make him a target for Nazis, who were even more race-obsessed than the white ‘crackers’ he had grown up with in Georgia. They might also discover he was working for French intelligence. The Germans interned African-American jazz musicians, despite their status as neutrals, as they found them in their advance on Paris. Trumpeter Arthur Briggs was sent to a camp at Saint-Denis, where he formed a twenty-five-member classical orchestra. Bullard agreed to leave Paris as Kitty asked, but not to escape the Nazis. He went to fight them, as he had from 1914 to 1918. Bullard asked Kitty to care for his daughters and keep an eye on his apartment. Kitty helped him to pack the food and books he was carrying on his back when he walked from Chartres to Le Mans on 14 June 1940, just as the Germans were occupying Paris.

In Le Mans that hot summer afternoon, Bullard tried to fill his empty canteen with water, but he could not get to the town pump through the crowd fighting for a drink. The next morning, he found the 51st Infantry Regiment in Orleans. The commanding officer greeted him, ‘Bullard! Is it really you?’ Major Roger Bader had been Bullard’s lieutenant in the 170th Regiment at Verdun. Bullard’s memoirs recorded the events that followed:

Major Bader assigned me to a machine gun company and ordered me to install machine guns on the left bank of the Loire River opposite German infantry on the right bank and to take charge of a section. We managed to hold the Germans back until midnight. Then they brought their artillery to within three miles of the city on the right bank. French resistance became non-existent and we were ordered to retreat.