After I left Seminary I had learned that, in the weeks that followed the Normandy landings, the Germans, thrown onto the defensive, drew units from occupied territories, particularly from southern France and northern Italy, to build up strength for a battle that they hoped would throw the Allies back into the sea. I heard odds and ends about it over the radio, read scraps of stories in the occasional newspapers, and we talked about it around the school during the days before graduation, and on the picnics with friends who had cars and could drive out to nearby lakes. We did not have much real information, and the news was kept off-stage much of the time by the impending graduation itself, the visiting families, our own sense of imminent change, and our moving out of the old dormitory building—its long swaybacked halls with their brown linoleum floors and naked overhead bulbs, shadowy at all hours with the ghosts of generations going back to the Civil War and before it. Then we would hear of the war again: fragmentary accounts of the fighting in Normandy, silent and unreal. Impersonal dispatches about the advances, the continuing bombardments, the German buildup. I am sure it did not occur to me that I would go on hearing details of those days, those far-off events, for years, and in fact for the rest of my life.
The Germans hoped to rout the advancing Allies near the city of Caen, east of Bayeux and the landing beaches, and as they fell back they were preparing defensive positions and assembling troops, artillery, and armor for the battle. The Luftwaffe had been crippled by then, so they could no longer count on air support as they had done in the early days of the war, at the time of the British evacuation of the beaches at Dunkerque. The Germans based their hopes, in great part, on the numbers and performance of their tanks, and crack German units—armored units especially—were being rushed north and west for the decisive confrontation. The troop movements toward Caen were part of a general ebbing of German forces out of southern Europe to concentrate on defending the north. As the Germans retreated through southern France, with certain picked units such as the Das Reich Division perpetrating vindictive farewell massacres on the way, the French Resistance, which had long been organizing for this moment, did whatever it could to ambush and harass and delay them, at times with telling success, but often at terrible cost to themselves, and to nearby civilian populations, whom the Nazis punished in retribution for the activities and the very survival of the Resistance.
A small number of British and American agents had been hidden in the French countryside for a year and more, helping to maintain contact between the Allied command and the French Resistance network, and in the days after the Normandy landings others were parachuted into the south, to provide liaison and to help, where that might be possible. One of these agents, as I understood the story (though it was told in so sidelong and elusive a manner that I was never sure exactly what did happen), was Alan Stuyvesant, a direct descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, “Peg-Leg Pete,” the Dutch seventeenth-century governor of New Amsterdam, which after the English took it would be called New York.
When I came to know Alan I had just turned twenty and he was forty-seven. Although I had graduated from Princeton and was in graduate school and married, I was still provincial, naïve, and penniless. And Alan, a generation older, was worldly, knowledgeable, opinionated, and very rich. He had learned, long before that, how to appear to be frank and open, while referring to his own life with a practiced reserve, recounting moments of it with a flourish of humor, as finished anecdotes, and then stepping aside from them into the wings. It was a while before I learned to recognize the maneuver, and to see that his descriptions of his brother’s and his mother’s drunken binges and turns of unedifying behavior were cutouts: mythologized fragments held up in front of him in a way that was meant to suggest his own amiable candor about matters that he knew someone would reveal sooner or later, in any case. My own upbringing had not fostered an aptitude for asking pertinent questions. I had been told repeatedly that it was rude to be openly curious about anything “personal.” Besides that, I am still surprised to learn how many things other people who have known each other for years, and perhaps at close quarters, have never found out about each other.
It is not hard to understand why Alan might have been chosen for a liaison mission with the French Resistance in Provence near the Italian border. He was bilingual, to begin with. His mother had been the Belgian Princesse de Caraman-Chimay. (I never managed to find out much about his father, who for some reason or other was not talked about.) Alan had grown up partly in France and had gone to French schools. From his mother he had inherited a large villa on the sea cliff at St. Jean Cap-Ferrat, between Nice and Monte Carlo, which had been her summer house for many years. It was a house where he had spent summers during his childhood. He had known the Alpes Maritimes all his life.
The story, as I understood it, was that in the summer of 1944 Alan had been dropped by parachute into a small valley north of Nice to join a man whom he already knew well, from very different, urbane circumstances.
That man’s code name in the Resistance was Captain Goderville. The name by which Alan knew him was Jean Prévost. Prévost was a man of letters, a writer and literary critic of some eminence. In 1944 he was forty-three years old, roughly the same age as Alan. He had been born in St. Pierre-les-Nemours, south of Fontainebleau, and at the age of seventeen had entered the Lycée Henri IV as a student, in a special category chosen to study for a competitive examination. His philosophy professor was the well-known writer and essayist who published under the name of “Alain.” Jean began to write, and was publishing articles in La Nouvelle Revue Française by the time he was twenty-three. He married two years later. His wife, Marcelle Auclair, was also a writer. They had three children, Michel, Françoise, and Alain, named for Jean’s professor, who had remained a family friend. In the early thirties Jean lectured at Cambridge and travelled to the United States. His first marriage came apart and he remarried when he was thirty-nine. In 1943, after the fall of France, he obtained his Doctorate of Letters and was awarded the Grand Prix of the Académie Française for a study of Stendhal.
In that same year, 1943, he joined the Resistance, undertook several missions in Paris, and in 1944 took command of a company of the Maquis in the Vercors, a mountainous region that became a famous operational area of the Resistance. On June 13th of that year, one week after the first Normandy landings, on a winding mountain road near St. Nizier du Moucherotte, his company ambushed and repulsed the German 157th Gebirgsjager Division. Fighting continued there in the mountains until the Maquis withdrew on July 23rd. Jean had been wounded. He and some of his company hid in a cave, the Grotte des Fées, where the Germans found them on August 1st, and Jean was killed.
At what point in 1944 Alan Stuyvesant made contact with him, if that is what really happened, I have never been completely sure. Alan had known Jean, and Jean’s first wife, and their children, in Paris, and his friendship with Marcelle and the children continued after the war. Alan said that Jean had asked him to promise to look after the children if he did not survive the war. It is hard to imagine such a promise being requested and given before the war. The most likely time for that would have been at a meeting between them when Jean was in the Resistance, just before the action in early June 1944. But Alan’s vagueness about the circumstances made me curious—to no avail—about how it had come about. Only once, when several of us were driving to dinner from St. Jean Cap-Ferrat to St. Paul de Vence, at an intersection north of Nice Alan pointed to a road we were not taking and said that it was “up that way” that he had been dropped in by parachute, and Jean had been wounded, and caught by the Germans, and killed. It sounded as though the place was just a few miles up the road, and it was years before I pieced the dates and names of sites together and realized that the region he had been talking about was most of the way to Grenoble, a distance of many miles through the mountains.
It was because of Alan’s promise, and Jean’s youngest son, Alain, that I would go to Europe.