Marlene Dietrich entertained Allied troops at the Stage Door Canteen in Paris, 10 March 1945, and sang ‘No Love, No Nothin”
During my days in Paris I walked just to stay warm. When I wasn’t visiting the Belgian Embassy hoping for news of Hava or her family, I found little other distraction from my loneliness. My father was busy at meetings most days, and I ached for a friend or companion. I visited museums, where there was no heat. I visited cathedrals, where there was no heat. Everything in Paris was gloomy and cold. I was miserable.
My father, recognizing that it had been a mistake to bring his daughter to Paris, asked a business associate if he knew someone who could entertain me. ‘Yes,’ he told my father, ‘I will send you my assistant.’
One day soon afterwards, in the lobby of my hotel, a man approached me and said, ‘I am Pierre St de Coinick. Your father sent me to escort you into the city today.’
‘I am Simone Lyon. I’m cold and tired.’
The assistant was a 32-year-old man, who lived like the Great Gatsby, waltzed every weekend, enjoyed pheasant-hunting, and wanted nothing to do with entertaining the daughter of a Belgian officer. But his boss had insisted, so this disgruntled man, who had practically lived in a dinner suit for the first thirty years of his life, trudged to my hotel through the cold winter air.
When we met, he did not say that he was a Belgian baron. He did not tell me about the size of his summer and winter estates. He didn’t speak about his chauffeurs, gardeners, washerwomen, cooks, and private tutors. All he did was invite me to walk along the River Seine which, to this day, still flows in and out of my imagination.
‘You look exhausted,’ Pierre said as we walked along the river. That is when I told him about Hava, about how I’d made a promise to find her, and how I hadn’t succeeded. ‘It was so many years ago when I saw her last . . . when I made that promise.’
‘Yes, many years ago. A lifetime ago.’
Nothing more was said until the general’s daughter and the baron discovered the famous bouquinistes: the used-book stalls that had existed for over 400 years and still do to this day. People refer to the Seine as the only river in the world that runs between two bookshelves.
Pierre and I quickly discovered that we had the same interests in books and authors.
‘Look at this poetry collection,’ Pierre said. ‘Yeats.’ He picked up the book and turned quickly to a poem, then he read aloud: ‘How many loved your moments of glad grace, / And loved your beauty with love false or true, / But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.’ It was the way that he read those last words that made me fall in love with him then and there.
‘I love his poetry,’ I said simply.
As we walked to the next bookstall, I found a used copy of Madame Bovary. ‘I’ve always wanted to read this,’ I said.
Pierre said, ‘I love the line in that book that says, “It was the fault of destiny.”’ I thought about my first meeting Hava at the Red Cross so many years before.
At the third bookstall Pierre and I reached for the same book at the same time, a book about the fourteenth-century Italian writer and mystic, Angela of Foligno. We both wanted to buy the book and Pierre said, ‘Well, if we both want it, the only thing to do is to buy it together and get married.’
In three days, Pierre St de Coinick and I were engaged, and three months later we were married.