LIVING WITH THE OCCUPANTS
Adolf Hitler could not resist visiting his most spectacular new possession and came to Paris on a special sightseeing tour on June 23. A heroic music piece especially composed for the occasion was broadcast on Berlin radio as the Führer posed for the photographers in front of the Eiffel Tower. The image nailed down the new reality.
With Hitler came the first German high dignitaries, Paris’s new rulers. The best Parisian hotels were requisitioned to accommodate them.1 One of the dignitaries settling in Paris in his new quarters was Count Franz Wolff Metternich, a forty-seven-year-old aristocrat and a scholar of Renaissance art and architecture. Appointed head of Kunstschutz (art protection) for the Rhineland and occupied France, he soon made his way to the Louvre to meet Jacques Jaujard. On August 16, a black chauffeured limousine bearing Nazi Germany’s insignia slowly approached the main entrance. The knock at the door Jaujard had been expecting for exactly a year had finally come. Metternich was ushered into Jaujard’s grand office. The two men looked at each other in silence, Jaujard keeping his hands behind his back. They looked similar—both very tall and thin, both in their midforties, both patriots. Each man weighed the other. Perhaps they had more in common than they realized. Jaujard wrote in his diary that Metternich, on learning that the Louvre was empty, had looked almost relieved.2 Jaujard then told Metternich that France’s entire art collection had been taken to safety and showed him his books. He had decided that transparency was probably the best way to deal with Count Metternich. Like many Prussian aristocrats, Metternich was not a Nazi Party member. His task was to protect art in occupied France, and this was precisely, and quite literally, what he intended to do. There would be little he could do to safeguard private collections, especially those of French Jews like the Rothschilds, but he would try to shield France’s public collections from looting and from the irrepressible envy of his superiors for as long as he could, and he would offer cover for everyone who, like Jaujard, had the protection of art at heart. On this August morning, Jaujard and France had made an unlikely alliance. Neither man needed to speak. Their duty was to art and mankind only.
When Pablo Picasso saw the German soldiers enter Royan in the summer of 1940, he realized that there was no reason for him to stay; he might as well be in the eye of the storm and face the devil. It would have been easy for him to go abroad to the United States, Britain, or Latin America, where he had many friends and admirers, but he went home, to Paris. From August 25, he started doing what everyone else did, queuing for food, and walking instead of waiting for the irregular and always crowded bus and métro services. There was no fuel for his Hispano-Suiza car, so he stored it in his garage, and there was very little coal to heat his huge Left Bank studio at 7 rue des Grands Augustins, so he wore extra layers. Every morning he walked the two and half miles from his home, 23 rue de la Boétie, which he had shared with his now estranged wife, Olga, to his studio and back in the evening before the midnight curfew, after a meal at the Café de Flore.
Whether under the bombs in London or in occupied Paris, young men and women had to adapt to the Nazi Occupation while trying to keep on living. Simone Signoret, born Kaminker, was desperate to find a job. In September 1940, Simone was nineteen and the family breadwinner, with two young brothers and a father who had “disappeared,” probably to London. Her mother could not support the family on her own. When Corinne, a former classmate and the eldest daughter of the celebrated journalist Jean Luchaire, heard that Simone was looking for a job, she kindly asked her papa. Corinne had left school at fifteen and had become a movie star, but she was always helpful. Papa Luchaire, a handsome thirty-nine-year-old with sleek black hair, offered Simone a job as his personal assistant—he had just been appointed editor in chief of a new daily newspaper, Les Nouveaux Temps.
* * *
In her new job, with a monthly salary of 1,400 francs,3 Simone had to answer the phone and filter calls. A lot of people were asking Luchaire for help in those days, but there was one caller she was ordered to put through immediately: Otto Abetz, Hitler’s ambassador in Paris and an old personal acquaintance of Luchaire’s. Otto spoke to his friend every day. Jean Luchaire had chosen to “collaborate” with France’s occupants even before Marshal Pétain officially asked the French to do so in an address on October 30, 1940. However, he also regularly called Otto to get someone out of prison, obtain new papers for another, facilitate an escape to Marseille and then to New York via Lisbon or Casablanca, or give people jobs without asking questions. He knew that Simone’s father was Jewish and had in all likelihood fled to fight with de Gaulle in London, but nonetheless he took her on.
In the 1920s, in what already seemed like another life, Luchaire had been a highly regarded journalist, the artisan of Franco-German rapprochement, an ardent pacifist, and a supporter of the socialist Front Populaire. He had founded the progressive daily Les Temps in 1927. Thirteen years later, however, Luchaire, or “Louche Herr,” as he had been derisively nicknamed, found himself on a darker side of history, deliberately choosing to satisfy the occupying force’s every whim, while simultaneously helping those he could.
One evening in October 1940, Simone went to the theater for the first time in her life, alone and using a ticket her boss had given her. A handsome young man in a brown duffle coat caught her eye. Simone was not interested in the play, and neither was he. Intriguingly, the tall, beautiful young blond woman who accompanied him kept smiling at her.
The twenty-four-year-old man was Claude Jaeger, his theater companion Sonia Mossé. Claude wanted to become a film director; Sonia was a poet’s muse. Her height and her blond hair made her look Aryan; in fact she was Jewish. She was the anonymous face in many pictures taken by Dora Maar and Man Ray. At the end of the play they approached Simone, chatted briefly, and all agreed to meet the following day at the Café de Flore, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Simone had never been to the Left Bank: it was another world.
At the Flore, people introduced themselves only by their first name. They were jobless actors, writers, and sculptors and painters without a gallery. Conversations were not loud; the air was serious, books stood between glasses, and the lighting was decidedly dim. There was not a single German in the café, but all had foreign accents. Men wore corduroy jackets, turtlenecks, dirty trench coats, their hair a little too long, while women wore no makeup. Nobody was dressed fashionably, but everyone had style.
Simone did not belong to this milieu, yet she immediately felt at home, as she later recalled in her memoirs.4 She also felt torn. A young woman ought not to pass her late afternoons at the Flore among people who were wanted by the Gestapo, many of them Communists or Trotskyites, when she had just spent the rest of her day answering Otto Abetz’s calls, working for the well-known collaborator Jean Luchaire.
Parisians not only had to learn to live with the occupiers, they had to get used to the many restrictions imposed on them. By autumn 1940, all private cars were prohibited. Buses ran on alcohol or charcoal but not on gasoline. In the métro, Parisians and Germans were packed together. The alternative was to walk or cycle, but bicycles were very rare and an absolute luxury in 1940. Stealing one was the easiest way to get to ride one. The Germans had introduced food rationing for Parisians, limiting their daily intake to 1,300 calories—enough to survive, not enough to rebel. The cafés were open but served only poor imitations of what they used to offer a few months earlier. Meat was already so scarce that traditional French dishes and specialties had disappeared from menus. The famous andouillette at Closerie des Lilas was gone.
Just like Picasso, Parisians started coming home. In October, Samuel Beckett and Suzanne returned from Arcachon to their spartan one-bedroom flat at 6 rue des Favorites in the 15th arrondissement. They were lucky: there was still heating and hot water in their building. Suzanne, like most Parisian women, became a forager, adept at finding butter here, eggs there, meat, fruits, and vegetables elsewhere. A few days later their Swiss sculptor friend Alberto Giacometti had returned to his studio where he lived in Montparnasse, and Alfred Péron, demobilized from the French army, had resumed his teaching post in the Lycée Buffon, a ten-minute walk along the rue de Vaugirard from Beckett’s flat. They had what passed for lunch several times a week.5
Marshal Pétain, the leader of Vichy France, which was independent of the occupied zone, had not wasted time in following the Nazi lead. Beginning October 3, 1940, French Jews were banned from holding administrative, financial, and commercial positions. This triggered the formation of resistance groups. Beckett’s friend Alfred Péron decided at once to join the first underground group set up in Paris, made up mostly of academics and intellectuals with a link to the Musée de l’Homme, such as the art historian Agnès Humbert.6 Samuel Beckett helped by collecting information he heard on British radio and passed on useful notes to Péron, who in turn passed them to Agnès Humbert, one of a few behind the first clandestine sheet, Résistance, published beginning December 1940.7
Simone de Beauvoir was keeping busy teaching, reading, and writing, but politics was still not on her mind. She was missing Sartre, held prisoner in Germany. She taught at the Lycée Duruy next to the Rodin Museum in the morning, studied Hegel at the National Library on the rue de Richelieu in the afternoon, and tirelessly edited her first novel in the evening in warm cafés. She had decided to call it L’invitée (She Came to Stay), the story of a ménage à trois. Her nights were carefully planned: she spent two nights a week with her student Nathalie Sorokine in her room at the Hôtel Chaplain and Saturday nights with Jacques-Laurent Bost, now back in Paris and recovered from his injuries, at the Hôtel du Poirier in Montmartre. The rest of the week, Bost was sharing a room with his new lover Olga, one of the Kosakiewicz sisters, at the Hôtel Chaplain. Such sexual promiscuity may well be partly explained by the freezing temperatures, outside and inside hotel rooms. Beauvoir was working hard to support all three young women and also helped Bost financially.
THE GOOD GERMANS AND THE BAD FRENCH
German officers with specific missions kept arriving in the French capital. On November 8, the day of his thirty-first birthday, Sonderführer Gerhard Heller boarded the train for Paris. Heller, born in Potsdam, had learned French at school, studied in Pisa and at Toulouse University. He loved languages and literature. Never a fully fledged Nazi Party member, he had not taken the oath to Hitler, whom he found repulsive. However, he liked Otto Abetz, Hitler’s ambassador in Paris. Abetz assigned Heller to the Gruppe Schrifttum (literary section) of the Propagandastaffel (propaganda unit), whose offices were at 52 avenue des Champs-Élysées.
Heller was responsible for nothing less than all of France’s literary publishing. “The Otto list” drew the red line French publishers were advised not to cross. This list, written up by Abetz, banned a thousand books by antifascist, Jewish, and Communist writers. The works of Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Louis Aragon, and Sigmund Freud disappeared from the shelves of libraries and bookshops. Heller astutely let French publishers carry out their own censorship. In a few months, Heller had struck an implicit deal with Left Bank publishers: do not give my superiors or me any reasons for suspicion and I may occasionally cover you. Heller loved literature more than he loved Hitler and was going to prove it. “In a sense, he had joined the Left Bank literary scene, if in a new and strange manner. If so many literary stars of the pre-war anti-fascist left wing survived the German years unharmed, Heller and the mentality he represented deserve some credit.”8
* * *
Before being destroyed, banned books were stored in an old garage on the avenue de la Grande Armée, near the Arc de Triomphe. There Heller saw mountains of the very books he had cherished as a student; their destruction filled him with disgust. “I understood only later the nature of my feeling in this garage full of books about to be burnt, thanks to Jean-Paul Sartre who was himself quoting Karl Marx when he later wrote ‘Shame is a revolutionary feeling.’”9
Meeting Gallimard’s charismatic Jean Paulhan also changed Gerhard Heller. Gallimard, France’s most important and prestigious publishing house, had quickly decided to make a pact with the devil in order to save itself. Always an eclectic house, it had a “house fascist,” Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. Abetz had brought Drieu to Germany as early as 1934; he had played a key role in Nazi propaganda in France. A deal was struck. Gallimard’s influential Nouvelle Revue française, edited by Jean Paulhan, was taken over by Drieu La Rochelle. The review was so influential that it was inevitable that Otto Abetz should want to control it. Abetz had once reportedly declared: “There are three forces in France: Communism, High Finance and the NRF.”10 However, in exchange, Gallimard could continue publishing books under the supervision of Jean Paulhan.
Jean Paulhan’s tiny office was just next to Drieu La Rochelle’s. Six feet away, while Drieu embraced collaboration with the Nazis, Jean Paulhan was starting to run a résistant cell of writers and planning to publish antifascist novelists, come what may. The charismatic fifty-six-year-old Paulhan even occasionally proposed texts to Drieu La Rochelle’s NRF, and Drieu would accept because, if anything, they shared an absolute passion for literature and poetry. A poem by the Communist sympathizer poet Paul Éluard filled five pages in the February 1941 issue of the NRF, alongside an homage to James Joyce and a tribute to the Jewish philosopher Henri Bergson, who had just died.
Shrewd old Gaston Gallimard was using Drieu La Rochelle as an acceptable façade for the Germans, and while Gallimard felt compelled to publish anti-Semitic and fascist trash, it also published Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, James Joyce, Paul Claudel, Ivan Turgenev, Raymond Queneau, Paul Morand, and even Louis Aragon, a Communist, a résistant, and the husband of Elsa Triolet, a Jewish antifascist.
In fact, Jean Paulhan was now a member of the Musée de l’Homme group,11 one of the very first resistance groups operating in Paris, just like Samuel Beckett’s best friend Alfred Péron and Agnès Humbert.12 And he was hiding the duplicating machine, which served to print tracts and mimeographed news bulletins, right in his tiny Gallimard office. He had also started a clandestine publication called Les Lettres françaises.
Gallimard’s example was going to offer a strange blueprint for many businesses and institutions having to deal with the Germans during the Occupation. Gallimard compromised itself with the Nazis, appearing to trample upon principles the house had seemed to hold dear, precisely for them to be maintained even in a small part. At the time, Gaston Gallimard felt it was the only possible approach. Others chose to close down all activities and join de Gaulle in his resistance efforts in London. Gaston Gallimard elevated ambiguity to an art form instead. By choosing to endure, Gaston Gallimard had paved the way to an “acceptable” form of existence under Nazi duress.
There was of course another option for writers and artists who felt they could not live in a country occupied by the Germans, but who could not muster the moral strength to take an active part in the combat alongside de Gaulle. The Emergency Rescue Committee, the private American program that aided refugees, helped many celebrated artists and writers flee to the United States via Marseille. They were accommodated at the Bel Air Villa while their evacuation was being facilitated. Two hundred artists, writers, and intellectuals benefited from the program. Many of them were Jewish artists, but not all of them. There were the Surrealists André Breton, Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, Roberto Matta, Jean Arp, André Masson, Marchel Duchamp, but also Marc Chagall, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, and the writer Anna Seghers.
For those who had chosen to stay in Paris, 1941 would be a turning point.
TAKING SIDES
Samuel Beckett started to do more than just convey information he heard on the British radio to Alfred Péron. Jeanine Picabia, daughter of the painter, had formed a cell called Gloria. Beckett agreed that his apartment at 6 rue des Favorites could be used as a drop for information collected by others. Beckett would “collate the information, typing it out and translating it into English as briefly and concisely as possible … on one sheet.” At a second drop “a member of the group known as ‘the Greek’ would put the sheet of paper which Beckett had brought onto microfilm for its transfer to the unoccupied zone and from thence to England.”13
For the young Simone Signoret, choices had to be made. She could no longer bear to work for a Nazi collaborator during the day while spending her evenings with her anti-Nazi friends at the Flore. Eight months after starting her job and emboldened by her time spent at the Flore, Simone decided to leave Les Nouveaux Temps and told her boss that she was going to be an actress. Jean Luchaire laughed at her audacity, and at her youth. She was bluffing, of course. She had not found another job, and she had not discussed it with her mother.
Before leaving, she turned back and looked at Luchaire and with the impudence of youth said to her boss: “You will all get shot for treason after the war.” He laughed again and wished her luck. It was spring 1941, and Simone became, as she put it, a full-time “florist.” “Florists” arrived in Saint-Germain-des-Prés around noon and had lunch at Chez Rémy, rue des Beaux-Arts, or Chez Chéramy, rue Jacob, where the boss would let customers eat with rationing tickets or on credit. They went back to the Flore around two for an ersatz coffee with saccharine, left again to go for a stroll in the neighborhood between three thirty and five thirty, then returned at six to meet those they had left at three thirty. They ordered lemonade, just one, and made it last until dinnertime.
Simone would lament how unproductive her day had been, but in fact the Café de Flore was a school of life where she and her friends learned everything. They learned from the “Charlatan,” as the Flore’s twenty-year-olds used to call Picasso. They learned from the Russian Jewish painter Chaïm Soutine, who asked them to buy his paints for him as he feared that the lady in the shop, whom he had known all his life, might denounce him. They learned from the Swiss-Italian man with curly hair, the anxious-looking and kind Alberto Giacometti. Simone and her friends were even learning from those who were no longer there, those who had suddenly disappeared, such as Sonia Mossé. Disappeared, deported, hiding, or fighting. The great forty-year-old French poet Jacques Prévert was the great absentee, not yet back in Paris, but newcomers like Simone would “learn” Prévert from the others’ memories of him. Spending one’s days at the Flore was not wasted time. It was a university.14
When Jean Paulhan was arrested by the Gestapo on suspicion of resistance activities, his archrival and Gallimard house fascist Drieu La Rochelle managed to have him freed. Others from the Musée de l’Homme cell were less lucky. Agnès Humbert was arrested and taken first to the Cherche-Midi prison and then to the Fresnes prison before being deported to Germany, and its founders, the anthropologists Anatole Lewitsky and Boris Vildé, were executed.
* * *
One evening at the end of March 1941, Simone de Beauvoir found a note slipped under the door of her hotel room, in Sartre’s handwriting: “I’m at the Café des Trois Mousquetaires.” Beauvoir ran into the street toward the café. Sartre had tricked the camp’s authorities and had been released under a fake identity. He was changed, he could not stop talking. It was not the kind of romantic reunion she had dreamed of. On learning that Simone had signed an affidavit declaring she was not a Jew, he gave her a stern look. And how could she buy food on the black market? Action was the only word he now cared for. Their friend the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty was also back in Paris. Together, they organized themselves and federated other writers into a resistance group, Socialisme et Liberté. Simone was surprised at Sartre’s vehemence. During the summer of 1941, they cycled together into Vichy France to establish contacts with potential members south of the Occupation line. However, it seemed that the sticking point was the nature of the resistance action the group would carry out. Sartre favored words over bombs. Soon, many of his colleagues wanted to join the more effective and better-organized Communist resistance groups. This was the end of Sartre and Beauvoir as leaders of the Resistance. Sartre went back to teaching at the Lycée Pasteur, and soon after at the Lycée Condorcet. He never signed the affidavit, though. Sartre and Beauvoir went back to their students, to their words, to their complex and diverse relationships, but they were changed forever and they would fight the occupants, only not with guns.
* * *
Jean Bruller, better known as Vercors, took a similar approach; his underground publications would soon have as dramatic an impact as bombs. Bruller was known in the late 1920s for his children’s books. A pacifist until 1938, Bruller joined the Resistance as soon as the armistice was signed. His job was planning escape routes for British prisoners of war. He took the alias Vercors, the name of a part of the French Alpine foothills near Grenoble, which would come to be associated with the most fearless French résistants.15
In the summer of 1941, thirty-nine-year-old Bruller was on a short trip to Paris, walking down the rue du Vieux Colombier, when he bumped into the well-known literary critic André Thérive.16 Thérive was the opposite, politically, of his younger colleague Bruller. Quick-witted, “sharp as a mongoose,”17 he was a reactionary but, more important, an anarchist. Too independent and free-spirited to belong to or serve any political group, he was no collaborationist. Thérive had just read a book that had shaken him; he had it with him and wanted to give it to Bruller.
* * *
The book in question was Ernst Jünger’s Gardens and Roads, his diary of his time as captain in the Wehrmacht during the Battle of France. Ernst Jünger, a German nationalist writer who profoundly disliked the Nazi Party, offered a complex image of the German officer. His diary revealed, in essence, a sensitive man, caring and refined, reading Casanova’s memoirs, the letters of Erasmus, short stories by Herman Melville, André Gide, and Herodotus while his Wehrmacht unit thrust forward through Belgium and France. Ernst Jünger’s book would soon be banned by the German occupiers, probably for its humanity and underlying criticism of the Nazis. While it was available, though, Gardens and Roads proved very popular. His curiosity piqued, Jean Bruller thanked Thérive and later read the book. He was shocked and alarmed by Jünger’s sincerity. “Would not the average French reader imagine that the kindly Jünger represented the behavior and intentions of all Germans?”18
There was no room for a good German officer, Bruller thought. There was no room for complexity and subtlety; this was war and war had to be fought, Germans defeated, and France liberated. He felt prompted to write a kind of response. In just a few weeks he wrote Le silence de la mer, the story of an old French man and his niece obliged to house a German officer in their home during the war. The officer, a former composer, wants nothing more than to strike up a friendly relationship with his French hosts, but they refuse to talk to him. Crushed, defeated by such resounding silence, the officer enrolls to go and fight on the eastern front.
Bruller and his résistant friends decided to publish Le silence de la mer as a book. “Thus began the most unusual publishing house of the Left Bank, then or ever.”19 The men found a courageous printer whose inconspicuous printing plant just off the boulevard de l’Hôpital in the 13th arrondissement specialized in death notices offered the safest option. Bruller wanted an elegant one-hundred-page book, printed on fine paper. In a time of paper rationing, extreme danger for clandestine work, and general scarcity, it was, in Bruller’s eyes, paramount to be as professional as one could possibly be. They called their publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit (Midnight Editions), and Vercors designed the star that would soon symbolize the résistant publishers.
Each week, Vercors brought the printer eight pages, which were destroyed as soon as the type was set. He then went to drop the printed pages to a cache on the boulevard Raspail where a friend took them for binding. It took weeks to print and bind the first three hundred and fifty copies. Vercors had a copy passed on to Jean Paulhan at his office at Gallimard in February 1942 and from there it was duplicated and reached London and New York. One morning in London, the book dropped onto the desk of Sonia Brownell at Horizon magazine. She read it immediately and passed it on to her boss Cyril Connolly, who translated it as Put Out the Light and published it as fast as he could in 1944. In New York, Life magazine serialized it. It was so successful in France and abroad that Les Éditions de Minuit asked other celebrated writers to provide texts to be published. Aragon, Paul Éluard, Jean Guéhenno, and Jean Paulhan all published texts and poems under noms de résistance. Each book, four and a half by six and a half inches, had on its second page the words “In France, there are writers who refuse to take orders.” Paul Éluard became Les Éditions de Minuit’s chief literary adviser, while living in hiding at the antiquarian bookseller Lucien Scheler’s shop at 19 rue de Tournon.20 Les Éditions de Minuit expanded its horizons beyond French writers and published a translation of John Steinbeck’s novel about a village in northern Europe occupied by a foreign army, The Moon Is Down.21
* * *
Life for the American citizens who had chosen to stay in Paris even after Germany declared war on the United States in December 1941 was becoming more and more difficult. And dangerous. Sylvia Beach decided to hide all her books and close her bookshop: a German officer had threatened her after she refused to sell him anything. Along with the other Americans in Paris, Beach had to report to her local police station every week. “The Gestapo kept track of me, and they’d come to see me all the time.”22 Sylvia and Adrienne were freezing. Adrienne had installed a woodstove in her bookshop but her flat was glacial, too cold even to read or write. The two women would combine their ration tickets and take it in turn to cook a hot meal for two with only one ration of coal, which they used at midday or dinnertime. Chocolate, sugar, wine, and coffee were available only on the black market, at ten times their prewar prices.23 Even worse, women were not allowed tobacco rations, unlike men.
On September 24, 1942, three hundred fifty American women, including Sylvia Beach, were rounded up and taken to the zoo in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, in the Bois de Boulogne, and into the now empty monkey house. “We were the only monkeys,” Sylvia later commented drily. This strange cohort of women—artists, bourgeois wives, dancers, and spies—were then driven to the northeastern French town of Vittel, in the Lorraine region, where they were kept under house arrest, accommodated in one of the once grand old spa hotels. They lacked freedom, but they were better fed than in Paris. Sylvia bided her time while friends back in Paris did their best to obtain her release.
Tension rose tangibly in Paris after the United States officially entered the war in December 1941. Major General Carl Oberg of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst, the much-feared Nazi Party’s security service) took over Paris. The forty-five-year-old was a true SS, having joined the ranks as early as 1931. He also looked the part: shaved head, rimless steel spectacles, and a long black leather coat over his black uniform. As Höherer SS und Polizeiführer, Oberg was taking over from the Wehrmacht the policing of the occupied zone. He had two missions: to send Jews from France to die in Poland and to destroy the French resistance. With the roundup of more than thirteen thousand Parisian Jews (one-third of them children) on July 12, 1942, Oberg became known as the “Butcher of Paris.”
A few weeks later, Alfred Péron was arrested. A coded telegram sent straightaway by Péron’s wife allowed Samuel Beckett and Suzanne to destroy any incriminating documents and leave Paris at once before other members of the résistant cell Gloria were arrested. They first took refuge just outside Paris in Janvry with Nathalie Sarraute, the Jewish Russian-born novelist, also in hiding under a fake identity.
In 1942, every action had a meaning and consequences. In May, Jean Cocteau attended an exhibition of Hitler’s favorite artist, the sculptor Arno Breker, at the Orangerie. Picasso did not. Cocteau was not cautious. Neither was the movie star Arletty, madly in love with the German officer Hans Jürgen Soehring, with whom she lived on the seventh floor of the Ritz, next door to Coco Chanel and her own German beau, Hans Günther von Dincklage. On August 24, 1942, Life magazine launched the first in a series of American press campaigns against French collaborators, publishing a blacklist of the “Frenchmen condemned by the underground for collaborating with the Germans.” It included America’s French darling Maurice Chevalier, Arletty, and the playwright Sacha Guitry.24
PARIS ON THE HUDSON
In the summer of 1942, Apollinaire’s young American translator, the ardent Trotskyite Lionel Abel, had returned from Chicago to New York. The thirty-year-old literary critic for the Nation had been in Chicago for a year on the prestigious Writers’ Project, and now, back in New York, he dreamed of only one thing: to meet the French Surrealists who had found exile in New York. Before approaching them, though, he went to seek advice from his friend the art history professor Meyer Schapiro. One had to be careful—the Surrealists and their leader André Breton had an aura akin to Hollywood stars, and Lionel did not want to make a faux pas. At Professor Schapiro’s, Abel met the slender and handsome twenty-seven-year-old New York painter Robert Motherwell, who also dreamed of paying a visit to André Breton, who lived nearby, at 265 West Eleventh Street.
Abel already had his foot in the door of Surrealism thanks to another exiled Surrealist from Paris whom he had befriended, the thirty-one-year-old painter Roberto Matta. Matta and his young American wife, Ann, lived on Twelfth Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, in a modest but elegant three-room flat. Matta had managed to bring a few cases of absinthe back from France to share with New York visitors. “This is not anisette, this is the real thing!” he would warn his guests, laughing.25
An audience with the pope of Surrealism was arranged for Lionel Abel and Robert Motherwell; the young Americans were not disappointed. “Breton took us both with him to the 18th century. The movements of his hands when he talked were graceful, his voice musical, his diction perfect, and his sentences always in syntax: he never failed to use the subjunctive as required.”26 A few weeks later, Roberto Matta invited both Lionel Abel and Robert Motherwell to a party: Matta had just finished painting a very large canvas and would name it during the evening. Marc Chagall, the Surrealists André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, and Kurt Seligmann, the composer John Cage, the art gallery owner Pierre Matisse (son of the painter), and of course His Surrealist Highness André Breton were there, too.
Now part of the group, Abel was asked by André Breton to help him edit a new Surrealist magazine called VVV. They worked on the first issue together but their relationship lasted only a few months. If Breton was a very compelling and fascinating figure, he could also behave like Zeus, hurling bolts of lightning down from his throne. Abel, an upright New York Jewish intellectual, also had some difficulty with the intense promiscuity displayed by the French Surrealists. Somebody was always breaking up, divorcing, stealing another man’s wife or another woman’s husband, or sleeping with a third party, and all within their circle. The Parisian Surrealists in New York had re-created their sexual ronde, just like in Arthur Schnitzler’s controversial play Reigen, known as La ronde or Hands Around. Somebody somewhere was always going to fall in love and be heartbroken, repeatedly, with a different person each time but within the group. For instance, Matta broke up with his wife Ann, but she would accept a divorce only if he fathered her a child. He reluctantly agreed and she went on to have twin boys. Matta left her as soon as his sons were born and immediately married one of his lovers, Patricia Connolly, who was also having an affair with the gallery owner Pierre Matisse. André Breton’s wife Jacqueline left him for a young American painter, David Hare, a friend of Robert Motherwell. And so on.
A friend of Abel’s, the twenty-four-year-old Chicagoan Harold Kaplan, was also in New York. He had enrolled in the army the month Paris fell into Nazi hands, dreaming of following in the steps of Ernest Hemingway and E. E. Cummings as an ambulance driver. But the U.S. Army had found another use for him, at its little-known Office of Facts and Figures in New York. Young Kaplan’s academic knowledge of both French culture and language and his love of Marcel Proust, on whom he wrote his PhD thesis, qualified him to join the radio team in New York whose broadcasts, in French, were aimed at France and French-speaking North Africa. Useful, as General Eisenhower was about to invade North Africa in November 1942. And who better to speak to the French from New York, with his mellifluous baritone voice and commanding tone, than André Breton? Kaplan was as “mesmerized”27 by the Surrealist as Abel was.
French exiles in New York could find solace from the bleak world events by going to the movies and to the opera in Manhattan. In December 1942, while movie theaters were starting to show Casablanca,28 a film that “makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap,”29 according to the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, the Metropolitan Opera was putting on a rather special production30 of Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment.31 Every night, on stage, the French-born soprano Lily Pons waved the French Resistance’s Cross of Lorraine instead of the Tricolor and, in a scene that did not belong in Donizetti, sang “La Marseillaise.” A few bars into “Allons enfants de la patrie,” the young baritone Wilfred Engelman, in the small part of a corporal, would step forward holding high the flag of the United States next to the Free French banner. The New York audience, surprised at first, erupted in wild cheers every night.
TAKING RISKS
In Paris, the mood in cinemas—the ones not exclusively reserved for German officers—was more subdued. However, a film had just been released on December 3 whose subtext left nobody indifferent. Les visiteurs du soir, directed by Marcel Carné and scripted by the poet Jacques Prévert, was set in medieval France in order to pass German censorship, but the allegory with occupied France was striking. The French star Arletty and a newcomer from the stage, the thirty-four-year-old Alain Cuny, played the parts of the devil’s envoys, sent as minstrels, to ruin the nuptials of a baron’s daughter to a local warlord. While minstrel Arletty seduced the groom, minstrel Cuny lured the bride. But love struck the bride and the minstrel. The enraged devil turned the two lovers into statues. Beneath the stone, however, one could hear their hearts beat, like France under German rule.
Marcel Carné, the most famous French film director at the time, had chosen to stay in Vichy France and to continue to make films. His choice had raised many eyebrows, especially among the French actors and film directors who had fled to Hollywood, including Jean Gabin, Jean-Pierre Aumont, and Jean Renoir. Carné had to abide by all sorts of restrictions and, of course, German censorship. However, he also continually bypassed them. Carné used Arletty, a huge star who attracted crowds and was in a very public relationship with a German officer, as a front, much as the publisher Gallimard used Drieu La Rochelle. Carné needed all the help he could get in case his set designer, Alexandre Trauner, and his music composer, Joseph Kosma, both Jewish and banned from their jobs, were discovered working for him under pseudonyms. Carné and Jacques Prévert did not hesitate to hire aspiring actors spending their days at the Café de Flore, most of whom did not have any legal papers, along with Communists wanted by the Gestapo or résistants in hiding. Simone Signoret got a small part that way—a gypsy in Les visiteurs du soir.32
Les visiteurs du soir drew large crowds and quietly galvanized the French in their third year of Nazi occupation. After the invasion of North Africa by the U.S. Army in November 1942, France was completely occupied, and the mirage of the so-called Free France under Vichy rule had disappeared once and for all.
In fact, Paris was now seething with underground activity.
The CNE, the Comité National des Écrivains, the résistant writers’ group, had been dissolved after the Gestapo had executed its leader, Jacques Décour, in May 1942. Claude Morgan had been asked to restart it, and he contacted the thirty-year-old Édith Thomas, who had enjoyed a moment of fame when Gallimard had simultaneously published her first two novels in 1934.33 By September 1942, Édith was working by day at the National Archives, where she had landed the “absurd” task of compiling long-forgotten documents for future improbable studies that would never see the light of day, while by night she opened her flat to the recomposed Comité National des Écrivains. Every week, French writers arrived two by two, on foot or by bicycle, among them Jean-Paul Sartre, François Mauriac, Paul Éluard, Jean Paulhan, Claude Morgan, and Raymond Queneau. From her window, she watched them approach 15 rue Pierre Nicole in the 5th arrondissement, a very quiet street off the rue Saint-Jacques. Her flat was on the first floor, and luckily there was no concierge, so people could come and go much more discreetly than in other Parisian buildings. For Édith, every one of these meetings proved a miracle: “Those writers were Catholic, atheist, Communist, liberal, Existentialist, and yet they all trusted each other intimately. There never were any traitors among us.”34
Of the great names of French literature who gathered in her home every week, Édith Thomas had a particular fondness for the poet Paul Éluard. “Serene, gentle, handsome with a medieval face,”35 a close friend of Pablo Picasso and André Breton, Éluard was a poet whose talent, a little like Picasso’s painting, always transcended categorization, fashions, and eras. His twenty-one-quatrain poem “Liberté”36 had reached London and New York, where it had been published to great acclaim. The Royal Air Force was dropping tens of thousands of copies of it over France during its nightly raids.
It began:
On my schoolboy’s copy-books
On my desk and the trees
On the sand on the snow
I write your name
and ended:
On the steps of death
I write your name
On health returned
On danger averted
On hope without memory
I write your name
And by the power of one word
I start again my life
I was born to know you
To name you
Liberty.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, a prisoner of war for almost three years, caught one of those flying “Liberté” poems dropped by the RAF as he crossed the French-German border at night, after his third escape attempt. He walked along the Moselle canal into France, stole civilian clothes, managed to get a train ticket and fake identity papers, and went into hiding for three months in a farm near Loches, twenty-six miles southeast of Tours.
Paul Éluard was one of those résistants who was often completely oblivious to danger but who always seemed to have luck on his side. Many others were less fortunate, executed after just one small act of defiance. Others, following in the steps of Gallimard and Marcel Carné, resorted to cultivating ties with collaborationists in order to help their underground activities. Such was the case of the twenty-nine-year-old aspiring writer Marguerite Duras, a civil servant at the Book Committee by day and a conspirator by night. She had found a flat at 5 rue Saint Benoît, right at the corner of the boulevard Saint-Germain at the Café de Flore, where she settled with her husband, Robert Antelme, a civil servant at the Préfecture de Police. One of her neighbors, who lived in the flat two floors above hers, was the pro-Hitler collaborationist Ramon Fernandez. He and his wife held a salon on Sundays where people like Drieu La Rochelle and Gerhard Heller were regular visitors. She sometimes went. However, her flat, with a bed in every room, often all occupied by visiting friends in need of a hiding place, became a hub for Communist résistants on the move.
By the spring of 1943 the Allies’ attacks on factories all around Paris were gathering pace. On April 4, 1943, more than a hundred American B-17s bombed Paris in daylight for the first time, targeting the Renault car factory, which was producing tanks and armored vehicles for the Wehrmacht.
Jean-Paul Sartre was working furiously on his second play, Les mouches (The Flies),37 while finishing his major philosophy treatise L’être et le néant38 (Being and Nothingness). Jean Paulhan had convinced Gallimard to publish the 700-page essay even if the commercial prospects were extremely limited. However, three weeks after it came out in early August, sales took off. Gallimard was intrigued to see so many women buying L’être et le néant. It turned out that since the book weighed exactly one kilogram, people were simply using it as a weight, as the usual copper weights had disappeared to be sold on the black market or melted down to make ammunition.39 Les mouches opened at the Théâtre de la Cité.40 Both in his play and in his philosophical essay, Sartre was developing the idea of libre-arbitre, free choice and free will, one’s freedom and responsibility. Like Prévert and Carné had in Les visiteurs du soir, Sartre had transposed the action to a faraway time and place. He had chosen ancient Greece. Through a reworking of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sartre had managed to talk about occupied France. At the opening of the play, a handsome thirty-year-old, a sort of Gallic Humphrey Bogart, introduced himself to Sartre. His name was Albert Camus. Like Simone de Beauvoir seated a few rows down, Camus could feel the audience gasp when the word liberté was uttered on stage. The clandestine Communist-leaning Les Lettres françaises saw in Les mouches a satire of Vichy and an apologia for freedom, while the theater reviewer for the Berlin newspaper Das Reich called the play an incredible affront and “defiance.”41
A few weeks later, Gallimard finally published Simone de Beauvoir’s first novel, L’invitée (She Came to Stay), with its scandalous story of a love triangle. Set in contemporary occupied Paris, it told the slightly fictionalized, or semiautobiographical, account of Beauvoir’s relationship with Sartre and the Kosakiewicz sisters, Olga and Wanda. Causing tremendous gossip, the novel seeded Sartre and Beauvoir’s legend.
* * *
In September 1943, Picasso asked the Hungarian photographer Brassaï to come and visit him. They had not seen each other for eleven years. Picasso wanted Brassaï, and Brassaï alone, to take pictures of the works he had done under the Occupation. The Nazis might have banned Picasso from exhibiting, publishing, and selling his work, but he was nonetheless thinking ahead. A timid hope was in the air that fall: the Battle of Stalingrad had stopped the German army once and for all in the east; the Allied armies had won a string of battles in North Africa, had liberated Sicily, and were now advancing in Italy. Mussolini had just surrendered and the RAF was pounding factories, seaports, and major railway yards in France. A ground invasion by the Allies, on either France’s Atlantic coast or the Channel beaches, seemed more and more likely. The question was when.
Picasso had changed. He had lost almost all his hair, but his eyes were as ever black diamonds. Picasso’s studio, as large as the hold of a ship, with its wooden beams and walkways, contained more than a hundred statues, some of them huge heads of women, once in dazzling white plaster, as Brassaï had seen them before the war, but now cast in bronze. Where on earth had Picasso found bronze in occupied Paris, at a time where the Germans requisitioned every piece of brass to make cannons? “Oh, that, it’s a long story,” Picasso said, evading the question. Sculpture had been occupying all his days and nights. Transforming his bathroom into a sculpture room, he had made Man with a Lamb. Brassaï could go about the studio as he pleased, Picasso told him; he had a hundred fifty sculptures to photograph and no time to lose.
While Brassaï got to work on Picasso’s sculptures, beginning with a striking bronze skull looking like a monolith with its eyeless sockets, emaciated cheekbones, and chewed nose—a recurrent theme in Picasso’s work during the war—many résistants decided to “disappear” for a while, and collaborators to flee—or not.
At Gallimard, Drieu La Rochelle, disenchanted by the ways of the world, had deserted his office and given up on editing the NRF, whose last issue had been released in July 1943. Urged by his old friends, and even his new German friends like Gerhard Heller, who offered to supply safe-conducts and visas, to leave the country, Drieu preferred to stay in France, even if the socialist-fascist revolution he had so ardently wished for had not taken place. Drieu had retreated to the solitude of his spacious home on the avenue de Breteuil with its panoramic view over Paris and the Invalides’ golden dome under which Napoleon lay. Drieu was now spending his days reading religious texts on Confucianism, Hinduism, and even Judaism. The world of this dandy who had embraced one political fad after another in the first half of the twentieth century, the same way he had collected women, was a far cry from the world inhabited by Paris teenagers, such as sixteen-year-old Juliette Gréco.
The young Juliette was not disenchanted with a fantasy world that was not to be after all; she was in a prison cell in the infamous Fresnes Prison just outside Paris. Arrested in the spring of 1943 with her older sister, Charlotte, Juliette was finally released in the autumn, alone. She did not know yet that her sister and her mother, both active in the Resistance, had been sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Without any money, no home to return to, and wearing just the navy blue cotton dress and straw sandals she’d had on the day she was arrested, she stepped out of the prison into one of the coldest autumns on record. She started walking the eight miles back into Paris and thought hard. She suddenly remembered her mother’s friend Hélène Duc, a celebrated theater actress, who lived in a decrepit and discreet boardinghouse at 20 rue Servandoni, near Saint-Sulpice church. Night had fallen and the narrow Servandoni street was plunged in darkness when Juliette knocked at the door. Hélène Duc opened it, looked at Juliette, and understood immediately. After quickly checking to see that nobody else was in the street, she let Gréco in. “I stayed in bed for the next two years,” she said later.42 With nothing to wear, hungry and cold, Juliette Gréco would indeed spend long hours under the covers. Male friends, aspiring actors and art students, gave her some of their clothes. They were far too big, so she rolled them up: shirts, sweaters, jackets, trousers, the lot. In the streets and cafés, heads turned; a new fashion was about to be born.
Unlike Drieu La Rochelle, indulging in suicidal thoughts, Juliette Gréco and her generation were simply trying to survive the war. And like the budding actress Simone Signoret, Juliette, who wanted to become a tragedian, was going from audition to audition to obtain small parts in plays and films. Her drama teacher managed to get work for her as an extra at the Comédie-Française. Juliette was there on November 27, 1943, on the opening night of Le soulier de satin (The Satin Slipper), an eleven-hour play by Paul Claudel. Gréco was on stage, hidden, like many other extras, under a huge sheet. They had to rise slowly and then dive and rise again, to create the movement of a giant wave. The celebrated actor Jean-Louis Barrault had reduced the play to a five-hour performance, which enthralled the critics. Such a production in occupied Paris was an almost unheard-of endeavor.
Jean-Paul Sartre was frantically working on his next play, so much so that he finished Huis clos (No Exit) in just over two weeks. He had written it for Olga’s sister, Wanda, another student lover of his, who wanted to become an actress. There were three characters in the play, two women and one man, and the action took place in hell. Sartre asked the handsome young man who had introduced himself to him a few months earlier at the opening of Les mouches to direct his new play. Albert Camus had never directed a play before, but as soon as he met the beautiful Wanda he accepted. He did not know that Sartre and Wanda were lovers, but did it matter, after all? Camus decided to do the rehearsals in Wanda’s room at the Hôtel Chaplain, 11 bis rue Jules Chaplain, near the Luxembourg Gardens. It was handy, for all kinds of reasons, both practical and amorous.
Sartre had immediately liked Camus and, thanks to him, the social horizon of both Sartre and Beauvoir expanded. They also befriended the older Surrealist writers Michel Leiris and Raymond Queneau, who in turn introduced them to Picasso. In the winter of 1943, Beauvoir and Sartre often joined the group of friends who visited Picasso in his studio every morning. They now lived very close, having moved hotel again after friends from the Café de Flore recommended the Hôtel La Louisiane, 60 rue de Seine. One of the three large, round rooms with a rooftop view was suddenly available. Beauvoir managed to get it, while Sartre settled into a smaller and rather spartan room with no shelves for his books. Beauvoir was enchanted by her new lodgings: “Never had any of my bowers been so close to my dreams. I was thinking of living there until the day I died.”43
In the morning, Picasso’s studio turned into a salon, with Brassaï often hovering in the background, arranging and rearranging paintings and sculptures and checking the light for his photography. The poet Jacques Prévert visited often in October and November 1943. He seemed nervous about the shooting of Les enfants du paradis (Children of Paradise), which he had scripted for the film director Marcel Carné. Les enfants du paradis, set in Paris in 1828, tells the story of Garance and the four men in her life: mime, actor, swindler, and aristocrat. They all love her but she loves only one. Like all true love stories it ends badly. The cast included Arletty in the leading female role and 1,800 extras, among whom were as many collaborationists imposed by Vichy as résistants in need of a front. The situation of Joseph Kosma and Alexandre Trauner—both Jewish and working on the film under pseudonyms—was getting more precarious with the ever-growing number of people involved in the production of this three-hour epic film. They could be denounced at any time, be arrested, and deported to Germany.
In the winter of 1943, hunger and cold hit Parisians harder still. Picasso could not obtain any coal, even on the black market, and Brassaï simply could not get his fingers to operate his camera. While Picasso found himself a secondhand leather jacket lined with lamb’s wool at the flea market,44 Brassaï made himself a hut in his own living room. With temperatures dropping to near zero in early December 1943, Parisian interiors were literally freezing. One morning Brassaï found Alfred, his frog, frozen to death in his tank. “I loved Alfred. His ugliness was almost sublime, like the times we were living.” So, in order not to face a similar fate, Brassaï took large photographic reproductions from a past exhibition of his and built himself a little shack in his flat. Inside, he placed an armchair, his typewriter, a small camp stove, a lamp, and a kettle.45
Despite the hunger and the cold, Brassaï could see that Picasso was somehow energized by a new presence in his life. And he was not entirely surprised to bump into the young Françoise Gilot one morning. Brassaï knew her. He had met her three years earlier at another painter’s studio, that of the Hungarian Jew Endre Rozsda, where her fervent admiration for both painting and painters was obvious. “She made me think of Bettina Brentano, the eighteen-year-old madly in love with Goethe, who lived only for poetry and poets. Bettina had the devil in the flesh.”46 To Brassaï it seemed that it was Françoise Gilot who seduced Picasso as much as Picasso who seduced her. Everything in her fascinated and attracted Picasso: her pouting lips, her Greek nose, the mole on her cheek, her asymmetric green eyes, her arched eyebrows, and her tiny waist. He may still have lunch with Dora Maar, who lived a hundred yards away at 6 rue de Savoie, but it was both the end and the beginning for Picasso. Françoise heralded a new phase in his art. And as the terrible year 1943 drew to a close, Paris and Parisians, too, were waiting for an end and a beginning.