CHAPTER 27 
Odile
PARIS, DECEMBER 1941
CLARA DE CHAMBRUN, our new directress, had helped found the ALP in 1920. Along with Edith Wharton and Anne Morgan, she’d been one of the original trustees. The Countess not only wrote several works on Shakespeare, she also translated his plays into French. She and Hemingway shared the same publisher. More recently, these past months, she sought donors to cover expenses from coal to payroll, and she wrote letters to prevent Nazi authorities from forcing Boris and the caretaker to work in Germany as a part of the Relève plan. I worried that as a prominent foreigner, she could be arrested.
At the circulation desk, I shared my fear with Boris and Margaret as he stamped Madame Simon’s Harper’s Bazaar. He said that Clara had married Count Aldebert de Chambrun, a French general, in 1901. She had dual citizenship, and would not be considered an enemy alien.
Just then, M. de Nerciat burst in, Mr. Pryce-Jones on his heels.
“Kamikazes hit Pearl Harbor!” Monsieur shouted.
We gathered around him.
“What on earth is a kamikaze?” Margaret asked. “And where’s Pearl Harbor?”
“Japan attacked an American military base,” Mr. Pryce-Jones translated.
“Does this mean the United States will join the war?” I felt a glimmer of hope that soon the Germans would be defeated.
“We believe so,” M. de Nerciat said.
“The Americans will annihilate the Nazis!” I said.
“They can hardly do worse than the French army,” Margaret said.
My head reared back. How dare Margaret criticize soldiers like Rémy, when she’d been one of the first to flee Paris. “British forces were certainly quick to retreat to that puny island.”
We glared at each other, and I waited for her to take back her words.
“We shouldn’t talk politics, should we?” she finally said.
She offered an olive branch, not an apology. I tried not to be angry. She didn’t mean to be tactless. Afraid to say something I’d regret, I hurried to the typewriter in the back room, hoping that working on the newsletter would distract me. Before the Occupation, I’d cranked out five hundred copies on our mimeograph, but with the penury of paper, I now posted one lone copy on the bulletin board.
Mr. Pryce-Jones scooted a chair beside mine. “We can hear you pounding away from the reading room.”
I pointed to the ribbon. “It’s so old, the lettering is fainter and fainter.”
“I thought you might be working out your anger. What Margaret said about the French army wasn’t kind.”
“I know she didn’t mean it, but it hurts.” I covered the r, e, m, y keys with my fingers. “I miss my brother so much, and I know he fought hard.”
“Margaret knows it, too. She sometimes speaks without thinking.”
“We all do.” I needed an interviewee for this month’s newsletter. “What kind of reader are you? What are your prized books?”
“The truth?”
I leaned closer. Would he confess to reading scandalous novels?
“Just last week, I discarded my entire collection.”
“What?” Giving away books was like giving up air.
“I’d had my share of Sophocles and Aristotle, of Melville and Hawthorne, books assigned at university or offered to me by colleagues. I’ve spent enough time in the past. I want today, now. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nancy Mitford, Langston Hughes.”
“What did you do with your books?”
“When I heard Professor Cohen’s collection had been pillaged, I boxed up my books and took them to her. Stealing books is like desecrating graves.”
Though Mr. Pryce-Jones made it seem like he was content to give away a collection built over a lifetime, I sensed the truth. He parted with his books because the professor had been forced to part with hers. I reminded myself there were people with bigger problems, bigger hurts.
But I was still miffed with Margaret.
KRIEGSGEFANGENENPOST
12 December 1941
Dear Odile,
Do you know how I can tell that you are holding back in your letters? You haven’t complained about Papa in ages, and you rarely mention Paul. Perhaps you feel you can’t write about him because I can’t hold Bitsi close. You’re wrong. I want to hear Papa bluster and Maman chin-wag. I want to know you in love. Tell me what you truly feel, not what you feel I can bear to hear—I need your honesty as much as your love. Having only a little of you, sensing you censor each sentence is killing me. We’re not together, but we needn’t be distant. Bitsi hesitates when she writes. I do, too. I want to shield you. I don’t want you to know. I want you to know.
Things are hard here. We’re hungry, we’re tired. Our heads are bowed, our clothing threadbare. We long for home. We worry our fiancées will forget us. We weep when we think no one can hear. What bothers us most is the word “prisoner,” associated with criminals. All we did was fight for our beliefs and our country. Barbed wire is always in our peripheral vision.
Love,
Rémy
20 December 1941
Dear Rémy,
I’ll try not to hold back. Paul and I escaped Maman’s spying. He found us an abandoned apartment for afternoon trysts. We’ve decorated our boudoir with my books and his sketches of Brittany. There’s no heat, and we’ve both come down with colds, but it’s worth it! I never expected to find a pursuit more thrilling than reading.
Now that Germany has declared war on the U.S., and Americans in France are enemy aliens, I fear the Nazis will close the Library for good. Though staff tries to put on a good face, we’re tired and frightened. We move like toys winding down. Sometimes I get angry for no reason. Sometimes I find it hard to think. Sometimes I don’t know what to think.
At any rate, we have the Christmas party to look forward to. The Countess said we may bring family if they are of “superior quality,” so I’ve invited Maman and “Aunt” Eugénie. Papa can’t come, he has meetings. That’s why I don’t complain about him—he’s never home.
Love,
Odile
The scent of Boris’s hot spiced wine wafted through the Library. Chestnuts crackled in the fireplace. Bitsi helped children cut up old catalogs to make ornaments for the fir tree. Margaret and I fetched the festive red ribbons from the closet and decorated the reading room.
“It’s cold in my flat,” she said. “I could use a few of these fusty books as firewood.”
Instinctively, I grabbed a novel and held it to my chest. I’d die of hypothermia before destroying a single one. Many of these books had been sent from America to soldiers of the Great War. Read in trenches and makeshift hospitals, their stories brought comfort and escape.
“I was joking,” Margaret said. “You do know that?”
“Of course…” Still, it was a horrible thing to say. I moved to a secluded corner, cradling The Picture of Dorian Gray. 823. I inhaled the novel’s slightly musty odor, imagining it was a mélange of gunpowder and mud from the trenches. Whenever I opened a worn book, I liked to believe I released a soldier’s spirit. “Here you go, old friend,” I whispered. “You’re safe now, you’re home.”
“Talking to yourself?” Bitsi teased, Maman and Eugénie in tow.
“So this is where you work,” Maman said. “It’s not as grim as I expected.”
Eugénie giggled. “Did you think she worked in a coal mine?”
Maman tapped her playfully on the arm.
Each attendee brought a delicacy that was scarce and dreadfully expensive, obtained either from the black market or country cousins. A creamy Camembert. A basket of oranges. Eugénie passed the plate of foie gras she and Maman had prepared with the goose liver that Paul had brought from Brittany.
A hush fell over the room as the Countess, in her ermine wrap, entered the party on the arm of her husband, a white-haired gentleman in a tuxedo. Even without medals on his breast, it was clear from his deportment—chest thrust out, coolly surveying the guests as if they were his troops—that he had been a general.
Near the refreshment table, Madame Simon cornered Clara de Chambrun, giving a long-winded explanation of how she’d fashioned her tatty turban from a bathrobe. The Countess shot her husband a “save me now” look, and, like an obedient lapdog, he scampered over to whisk her away.
“He commanded soldiers on two continents,” Mr. Pryce-Jones said.
“But there’s no mistake about who’s in charge now,” M. de Nerciat observed.
“The general has met his Waterloo.”
“Met his Waterloo? He married her.”
Paul led me to my favorite section of the stacks, to 823, where we joined Cathy and Heathcliff, Jane and Rochester. I gazed at his lips, rosy from the wine. Slowly he knelt before me. “You’re the woman of my life,” he said. “The first face I want to see when I awake, the one I want to kiss at night. Everything you say is so interesting—I love hearing about the autumn leaves that crunch under your feet, the cranky subscriber you set straight, the novel you read in bed. I can tell you my deepest thoughts, my favorite books. The thing I want most is a continuation of our conversations. Will you marry me?”
Paul’s proposal was like a perfect novel, its ending inevitable and yet somehow a surprise.
From the reading room, I could hear my mother ask, “Where did Paul and Odile go?,” could hear Eugénie respond, “Oh, for once, let them be.”
“I wish we were at the apartment,” I whispered, “in our rosy boudoir.”
“I love being alone with you, too, only…”
“Only what?”
His Adam’s apple bobbled nervously. “We shouldn’t be sneaking around, it’s not right. I’m not sure how much longer I can—”
“Papa won’t find out.”
“Why do you make everything about your father?”
“I don’t!”
“Let’s not fight,” he said.
Caressing his face, I took in the changes that war had wrought: dusky shadows gathered under his eyes; lines formed bitter parentheses around his mouth. So much had changed. I wanted some things to stay the same—my work at the Library, our afternoon trysts.
“You’re the person getting me through the war,” he said, “through my work duties. I want us to be together.”
“Yes, my love. When Rémy’s released.”
I slid to my knees. Paul started to say something, maybe I love you, maybe I don’t want to wait, but I kissed him and his words were lost beneath my tongue. He drew me to his chest. My hands slipped under his jacket, his sweater, his shirt, to the heat of his skin. In the background, friends sang “Silent Night,” but Paul and I remained entwined, eyes closed to everything but our passion.
MY FAMILY CONTINUED to count the days of Rémy’s captivity as 1941 turned into 1942. January 12: Dear Rémy, You’re the only one I can tell: Paul proposed! We’ll have the wedding when you come home. February 20: Dear Odile, Don’t wait for me. Be happy now. March 19: Dear Rémy, Margaret and I have no more stockings, so we pat our legs with beige powder. Bitsi thinks we’re crazy. April 5: Dear Odile, Bitsi’s right! Thanks for the package. How did you know that I wanted to read Maupassant?
Everyone had to register for something—housewives for rations, foreign and Jewish people with the police. Though Mr. Pryce-Jones signed in weekly at the commissariat, Margaret hadn’t gone once. Scrawled on the sides of buildings, I saw Vs—for Victory over the Nazis, but I also saw “Down with Jews.” Marshal Pétain, the World War I hero who’d been appointed chief of state, transformed the French motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” to “Work, Family, Fatherland.” It felt as if Parisians’ state of mind was “Tense, Angry, Resentful.”
Paul and I strolled under the leafy shade of the Champs-Élysées, past cafés filled with Nazis and their gaudy girlfriends. Soldaten had deutsche marks to buy beer and trinkets like bracelets and blush. The men were away from the Eastern Front and wanted to forget the war in the company of lovely, lonely Parisiennes.
I didn’t blame the girls. At eighteen, who didn’t long to dance? At thirty, mothers needed help with the bills. Their husbands had been killed in battle or were stuck in Stalags. The women went on with their lives the best they could. Still, next to them, I felt like a frump. I pinched my cheeks, hoping to bring out a little color, and reminded myself, It’s chic to be shabby.
“I can only dream of offering you a piece of jewelry.” Paul scowled at the couples. “Not being able to give you the sweet somethings you deserve—it’s damn humiliating!”
“How I feel about you has nothing to do with trinkets.”
“Those sluts get everything while we go without. They’re whores, sucking off—”
“There’s no need to be crude!”
“They should be ashamed, plastering themselves over the damn Krauts, sucking up to the enemy. I’d like to teach them a lesson they’ll never forget.”
He stepped toward the Soldaten and their girls. His jaw was clenched. His fist clenched. He didn’t look like himself. For the first time, he frightened me.
“Don’t pick a fight. It’s not worth it.” I grabbed his arm and held on tight.
SOLDATEN WERE BECOMING impossible to avoid. They loafed at our favorite cafés, they set up more and more checkpoints on our streets. It was difficult to know where they’d turn up. On my way to Montmartre to deliver scientific works to Dr. Sanger, I passed through a metal barricade that had not been there just the day before. One of the soldiers grabbed my satchel and dumped the contents onto the ground. I winced as the heavy tomes hit the pavement and fell open. He picked one up and leafed through the pages. Perhaps he was looking for top-secret codes or a knife hidden in the binding; perhaps he was just bored. Glancing at the title, he smirked. “Mademoiselle is reading treatises on physics?”
It had been a long time since my physics class at lycée. If he asked a question, I was in trouble. I could say the works were for a neighbor, or I could ask a question of my own.
“Are you saying women should stick to books on embroidery?”
He handed over my satchel and told me to pick up my books.
When I returned to the Library, I tried to warn Margaret, but she refused to acknowledge the danger she was in, even as we filled crates intended for internment camps where foreigners like our Miss Wedd and the Left Bank bookseller Miss Beach were imprisoned.
“Have you registered with the police yet?” I asked for the tenth time.
“I feel French, that should be enough,” Margaret said, gently laying Christmas Pudding over Pigeon Pie.
“Perhaps you should join Lawrence in the Free Zone.”
“His mistress wouldn’t appreciate it.”
Mistress? No, it couldn’t be. I revisited our conversations, searching for clues I’d missed. She’d said he was with a “friend,” and I’d taken the word at face value. Margaret had never spoken of receiving letters from her husband, never mentioned missing him. I felt a fool, blathering about Paul while she suffered in silence. I could read books but couldn’t read people.
I knew that a mistress could bring about a divorce and worried that Margaret might move to London, or worse, disappear like Aunt Caro. I must have appeared distraught, because Margaret placed her hand over mine. “Diplomatic ties between France and England were cut,” she said. “He stayed for her. Lawrence and I live separate lives. It’s not what I wanted—especially for Christina, who never sees her father—but I’ve accepted it.”
“He’s an idiot. He must be if he doesn’t see how lovely and brave you are.”
Margaret smiled tremulously. “No one’s ever seen me the way you do.”
My hand tightened around hers. “Do you think he’ll want a divorce?”
“Couples like us don’t divorce, we ‘muddle through.’ ”
“So you’ll stay?”
“I’ll never leave the Library.”
“Promise?”
“The easiest one I’ve ever made.”
“I’m thrilled you’re staying, but don’t want you to get in trouble. What if you get arrested like Miss Wedd? Please think about signing at the commissariat. It’s the law.”
“Not all laws are meant to be obeyed.” She untangled her fingers from mine and set the lid firmly onto the crate of books. Case closed.