IN THE ELEVENTH century, two brothers from a family originally named Chaources built defensive fortresses side by side on a site most likely occupied since the Gallo-Roman era in the tiny village of Saint-Symphorien in the Sarthe Département, seventeen miles from Le Mans and 125 miles southwest of Paris. By the mid-1400s, one of the medieval structures was gone; the Marquis de Sourches first visited the remaining one in 1740, located at the end of a long secluded entry drive in the quiet countryside almost a mile north of the village. He fell in love with the panoramic view from the rise of land eastward across the estate’s more than 220 acres of grounds and beyond to the distant horizon. The marquis eventually demolished the old château and replaced it with a new limestone palace à la mode, with three floors, 80 rooms and 229 doors and windows. In 1940, the château’s large doors and windows welcomed the large paintings of the Louvre and Versailles; in 1944, its vast lawns would be used to send a message to Allied planes flying overhead. The owner, Duke François des Cars, hoped his gesture of allowing the partial requisition of his château would keep the Germans at arm’s length. But he could not anticipate the Germans’ repeated visits to examine a particular piece of art or that they would barge through the door in the middle of the night with machine guns in search of the curator. It would not be the only time German soldiers came with their guns.
CHÂTEAU DE SOURCHES
During the June 1940 evacuation of the Loire depots, the curators had decided that the very large unrolled paintings from the Louvre and Versailles were too big and fragile to move all the way south to Loc-Dieu, especially given the road conditions. Instead, they grouped them, along with many of the large rolled paintings and other works at the isolated Sourches château. It was ideal as a depot for the large paintings since they could easily fit through the tall doors, reached by only a few steps fitted with a ramp, and it had unusual ground-level access to the basement windows, which allowed rolled paintings to slide easily and directly from trucks into the building. The basements were huge and dry and their half-meter thick arches were strong enough to withstand even heavy tactical bombs.
ROLLED ARTWORKS ENTERING THE BASEMENTS, CHÂTEAU DE SOURCHES
Throughout the war, Sourches would be one of the most important art depots. The Raft of the Medusa arrived from Versailles on a scenery trailer, the bridges and telephone wires along the route meticulously identified after the problem at Versailles. The large works at Sourches also included, among others, two paintings by Courbet and a group of works, each 13 feet tall, from Rubens’ Medici cycle. Sourches also became home to Delacroix’s iconic painting, Liberty Leading the People, portraying a bare-breasted woman raising the French flag during the Revolution of 1830. The Sourches château sheltered not only many of the large paintings from the Louvre but also tapestries, furniture and other items from Versailles and works from other museums. It also held smaller paintings such as Boucher’s Diana Leaving Her Bath.
L’ATELIER DU PEINTRE (GUSTAVE COURBET) ENTERS SOURCHES
Items from private collections of several Jewish families were also at Sourches. In 1936 and 1937, George Huisman, then France’s director of fine arts, had authorized the future evacuation of important private collections, a number of which were owned by Jewish families. Both the owners and the French fine arts administration knew the collections were at risk; one had only to watch what had happened in Germany.
During the great 1939 evacuation of the Louvre, Jaujard had obtained enough trucks to include a small portion—530 crates—of works owned by the families of several Jewish collectors, among them David David-Weill, a long-time Louvre benefactor and head of the Musées Nationaux board of directors until losing his position as a result of the Vichy anti-Semite laws. Jaujard had also obtained falsified pre-war stamps and applied them to contracts he drafted purporting to show that certain Jewish collectors had donated their art to the Louvre before the war. The Germans would simply ignore the documents.
While the Jewish-owned art was spread among the depots, one of the biggest lots comprised the 130 crates from David-Weill at Sourches. On January 20, 1941, a group of German police and military authories arrived at Sourches demanding a list of the contents of the David-Weill crates. On April 8, Wolff Metternich warned Jaujard by telephone that the ERR was about to confiscate the collection, having called in the slim hope that the French could find a way to stop it. But they could not: three days later, four German trucks arrived at Sourches and loaded up the 130 crates containing nearly 2,900 paintings, engravings, sculptures and other items. Destination: first the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris, then Germany.
The Sourches seizure was just the beginning. In July and August 1941, the ERR seized Jewish-owned artworks at the Moire, Brissac and Chambord depots. Wolff Metternich had also called Jaujard four days ahead of the Chambord seizure but again both men were helpless to prevent it. The Germans confiscated not only most of the families’ evacuated art but also much of the rest of their collections located elsewhere. During the course of the war, but in large part by 1942, four families alone—Wildenstein, Rothschild, Kann and Seligmann—would be looted of more than ten thousand objects located in Paris, the depots and elsewhere in France.
Sourches came to have another, very special, piece of art coveted by the Germans: the famous Bayeux tapestry, a 225-foot-long embroidery of wool on linen depicting the conquest of England in 1066 by William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, at the battle of Hastings. Created within a decade of the event, the tapestry had survived repeating pillage of the city of Bayeux during the Hundred Years War. It had survived the violent religious wars of the sixteenth century, including the 1562 sacking of the Bayeux Cathedral. The tapestry had also escaped destruction in 1792, when France’s revolutionary government declared that all works of art reflecting the history of the monarchy were to be destroyed. Likewise, it remained safe during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 and World War I. The tapestry had survived a thousand years of intermittent war, revolution and neglect, nestled in the small town of Bayeux all that time except for a brief exhibition in Paris during the time of Napoleon. But by the eve of World War II, the Germans had already targeted it and throughout their occupation of France they would not give up their quest to get it.
In 1935, Heinrich Himmler, overseer of the Gestapo and the SS and an avid collector of both purchased and looted art, set up a research group called the Ahnenerbe, whose purpose was to prove—whether by truth, distortion or outright fabrication—Hitler’s belief in the existence of a lost Aryan master race from northern Europe from which, according to Hitler, modern Germans were descended. As part of this quest, one mission of the Ahnenerbe was to identify and track down purported Aryan art and artifacts. As early as July 1939, the Ahnenerbe had taken the position that, since the Normans who had conquered England in 1066 were Vikings originally from northern Europe, the Bayeux tapestry was of Germanic origin, not French, and therefore eligible to be claimed as a German national monument. The Ahnenerbe faced a stumbling block to immediate plunder, however: the tapestry was officially a French national monument, entitled to protection by the Hague Convention.
On September 1, 1939, the almost 900-year old tapestry was removed from its exhibition case in Bayeux’s former Palais des Evêques (Bishops’ Palace), rolled onto a special mechanism, sprinkled with moth powder and crushed pepper, wrapped in two large sheets, tied and inserted into a custom-made, zinc-lined crate. The crate was set into a specially constructed concrete shelter in the dry, thick-walled, and presumed bombproof basement of the Palais des Evêques. The tapestry remained in the calm, safe darkness of its basement shelter until France fell to German forces in June 1940. Nazi attention soon turned to the tapestry.
Between September 1940 and June 1941, Germans demanded access to the tapestry a dozen times. An SS cameraman came to shoot the tapestry for two propaganda films. After all, how better to illustrate Hitler’s goal of conquering England than by a work of art portraying the previous “Aryan” conquest? The most worrisome attention, however, was spearheaded by Himmler, who in early 1941 called for a detailed scientific investigation of the tapestry in his Ahnenerbe quest to prove Aryan origin and justify the tapestry’s confiscation. From June through August 1941, German experts came to Bayeux to study and photograph the tapestry as part of work on a future multi-volume publication about the tapestry and an artist sent from Berlin began work on a detailed reproduction of the tapestry in pen and watercolor.
It was evident to Wolff Metternich that the tapestry was at risk. To provide a possibly stronger buffer for the tapestry, he suggested to Jaujard in August 1941 that it join the Louvre works stored at Sourches. The move may have been intended for the tapestry’s protection, but its journey to Sourches would sorely test its thousand years of luck.
The Kunstschutz, although having ordered the move, did not provide fuel for the 220-mile round trip. Bayeux authorities solved the problem by borrowing a 10-horsepower van from a local tradesman whose engine, like many others in France, had been converted into a gazogène one, powered by burning wood or charcoal.
The tapestry’s departure was set for 5 a.m. on August 19. Monsieur Cervotti, Bayeux’s police commissioner, and Monsieur Falue, keeper of the tapestry, waited in vain for the driver to arrive. They finally walked over to the town’s main street, where they found the driver struggling to start the van, which had only just recently been equipped with the gazogène converter. After finally getting it going, they headed to another spot in town to load twelve sacks of charcoal and a fire extinguisher. Just after 7 a.m.—already two hours late—they departed. Four hours later, the three men, the small van and its precious cargo reached Flers, only forty-two miles from Bayeux.
Not having eaten since before dawn, they decided to stop for lunch and turned off the van’s motor to conserve fuel, leaving the priceless tapestry aboard. When they returned, the van would not start. For twenty minutes, the driver stoked and poked and prodded. Finally, after several exploding sounds, the driver, covered with black soot and sweat, managed to start the van and off they went. But not for long. At the edge of town the road inclined, causing the van to falter so much that they feared the motor would again give out. Cervotti and Falue jumped out and pushed the van up the hill. Once over the summit, the van started speeding downhill. Cervotti and Falue ran after the runaway van and caught up only when it reached level ground. The rest of the journey continued in this precarious manner until the men, tired and dirty, reached Sourches around 4 p.m. after the nine-hour, 109-mile trip. They handed over the tapestry to Maurice Sérullaz, the assistant head of the Sourches depot, whose first act was to affix red circles to the crate to indicate its priority for evacuation in case of fire or other danger.
In January 1942, the Ahnenerbe wrote to the Kunstschutz requesting access to the tapestry at Sourches. The request was answered by Bernhard von Tieschowitz, Wolff Metternich’s second in command and of the same mind as his boss regarding the protection of French museum collections. Tieschowitz responded that since the Sourches château was unoccupied and unheated—neither of which was true—such a project should be delayed until better weather. The tapestry was safe at Sourches for the time being, but Himmler was just waiting; later, he would act.