While the Salesman agents confronted treachery and death in Hitler’s Europe in 1943, Jean Claude Guiet, a world away in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was enjoying a thoroughly irresponsible year as a freshman at Harvard. He made a little money working as a waiter in a dining hall, cut lots of classes, and spent most of his time fooling around with an eccentric roommate. His grades suffered. If Jean Claude seemed to be the model of an immature college boy out on his own for the first time, that’s just what he was.
Jean Claude’s upbringing was bilingual, transatlantic, and sheltered nearly to the point of insularity. His parents, René Guiet and Jeanne Seigneur, met at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where both were exchange students from France. Their first child, Pierre, was born in Urbana and was thus an American citizen. Jean Claude was born three years later, in Belfort, France, and so began life legally French.
The Guiet family was formal, bourgeois, and well-to-do, though it reached that status by a curious route. René Guiet was the son of a postmaster in Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, on the rocky coast of Brittany. Serving in the French army during World War I, he was bayoneted in the neck and left for dead on a battlefield. Days later he was found by a farmer, taken to a nearby house, and nursed back to health. Rather than return to the army, René embarked on a moderately successful career as an art thief, according to family lore. He hid his collection, it was said, in an outbuilding near the house in Saint-Briac.
René had other talents, which came to the fore once peace returned. He was a superb violinist—later in life he performed occasionally with the Boston Pops Orchestra—and he was academically gifted. He obtained a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris, winning high honors for a thesis on French opera libretti, and embarked on a teaching career.
René’s wife, Jeanne, was a strong and sometimes difficult woman. Born in Mandeure, in eastern France, she was attractive and socially ambitious, fond of giving elaborate parties. She was exceptionally bright and strong willed, but she had black moods and a vengeful streak. Expressions of love for her husband and children did not come easily to her.
In 1926 the Guiets settled in Northampton, Massachusetts, where René and Jeanne both took jobs in the French Department at Smith College (René eventually became the department’s chairman). René sold some paintings and invested the proceeds shrewdly. The family lived comfortably in a clapboard house with a big garden on Washington Avenue, a leafy boulevard near the campus, with a French cook and two French servants. Jean Claude grew up without much exposure to ordinary American things; his principal playmate was his big brother, Pierre, and Jeanne insisted that the boys speak French at home. At the end of each academic year the family booked a first-class passage aboard an ocean liner—the Normandie, the France, or a Cunard ship—and went to spend the summer in Conliège, a farming village in the Jura, with a close family friend they called Grandmère. Jean Claude was unaware, until many years later, that he grew up in the Depression.
The family was not completely untouched by the outbreak of war in Europe. In 1939 Jean Claude was a fifteen-year-old day student at Deerfield Academy; Pierre attended boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy. That summer the boys boarded the Normandie and sailed to France as usual, but without their parents for the first time. In September, as they were getting ready to leave for home, war was declared. Pierre was eighteen, and even though he had an American passport, French officials wouldn’t give him an exit visa. Because both his parents were French, the authorities considered Pierre French too—and eligible for the draft.
The Guiet family decided that both boys should stay with Grandmère and attend a local school while the parents worked with the U.S. embassy to resolve the problem. Jean Claude and Pierre spent an enjoyable, rural academic year attending classes, chopping wood, feeding animals, and scything hay. This was the period of the “Phony War,” when hostilities had been declared but shooting hadn’t started in the West. Companies of reservists were quartered in the village, armed with ancient Lebel rifles with long bayonets that looked to the Guiet boys like fencing foils. But Jean Claude’s biggest dread was the biweekly dictée, a dictation exercise in which pupils had to transcribe a text—underlining the title twice, without crossing any part of a letter that projected below the line—neatly in ink. It made Jean Claude long for a pencil with an eraser.
Early on the morning of June 15, 1940, a tremendous explosion shook the town. Gasoline storage tanks had been blown up to keep the fuel from advancing German troops. Grandmère and the boys lashed two mattresses, blankets, and suitcases to the roof of an old Renault and joined the throngs fleeing southward.
They found temporary lodging at a farm outside Sanssac l’Église, in the Haute-Loire department. They stayed in a single room that had been used to store barley, keeping their food in a box hung from the ceiling so the rats couldn’t get at it. After two weeks they returned to Conliège; the Germans hadn’t occupied the town after all.
The Guiet boys made contact with their parents back in the United States, who sent money and made ship reservations for them out of Lisbon. Pierre had by then obtained a French passport, by the simple expedient of applying for it in a neighboring prefecture and not mentioning that he already had an American one. Grandmère was determined to stay at home, so the boys did what they could to prepare her for the hardship that lay ahead. They cut several cords of wood, gathered huge burlap bags of sawdust to burn in the stove if the coal ran out, dug up formal gardens to make vegetable plots, built two rabbit hutches, and laid in all the canned goods, sugar, and cooking oil they could find. Then, in mid-August, they packed two small suitcases and set out for Portugal.
They traveled by train to Barcelona, then on to Madrid. There they checked their suitcases and went to get something to drink in the train station buffet. Two members of the Guardia Civil entered and began checking everyone’s papers. Pierre produced his American passport. The policemen saw that it had no Spanish entry visa, and they took the boys in for questioning.
Jean Claude and Pierre were locked in a holding cell with soiled, thin mattresses and a hole in the floor for a toilet. They spent three anxious days and nights there while the police and the U.S. embassy sorted out their case. Finally an embassy representative arrived at the prison with papers to secure their release. They returned to the railroad station, retrieved their bags, and boarded a crowded train for Lisbon.
Tickets were waiting for them at the offices of the American Export Lines. They boarded a freighter with passenger accommodations and large American flags painted on its sides, illuminated by spotlights, and sailed home.
Jean Claude settled back into his peaceable New England life. He spent the next two years at Deerfield. In the summers he worked on a farm, earning seven dollars a week and looking forward to the Friday night square dances at the local Grange Hall. When the United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor he thought about trying to join the navy, or perhaps the Free French, but he stayed in school and pleased his parents by doing well enough to earn admission to Harvard, where Pierre was enrolled.
But he wasn’t ready for it. In his first semester in 1943 he worked long hours in the Dunster House dining hall, which was run like a full-service restaurant (he especially disliked it when students ordered grapefruit, which had to be prepared individually at the table). When Jean Claude had time to study, he usually didn’t. In the second semester, Jean Claude made the dean’s list—not the good one, but a list of students with dangerously unsatisfactory attendance records. He grew acutely uncomfortable at the thought of having to explain himself to his parents. So it was a relief when he opened his mail one spring day and found a draft notice from the U.S. Army.