Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44. Charles Glass
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close enough to the Bristol for him to walk there over the river. Representatives of the American Red Cross, the Rockefeller Foundation and the American ambulance units moved into the Bristol. Anne Morgan also took up residence there, hiding foreign and French Jews under quasi-diplomatic protection until she found ways for them to leave France. Dorothy Reeder, directress of the American Library in the rue de Téhéran, went to the Bristol on the occupation’s first day to work for the embassy verifying that the residents were American citizens.
Two days earlier, Miss Reeder had received an unexpected visit from the American Library’s first vice-president, Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun. The two women conferred in the darkness of a library whose windows were obscured in brown paper as a precaution against bombing. The rest of the library’s board were preparing to leave France altogether, but Countess de Chambrun was going that afternoon to the country – imperiously informing Miss Reeder that she would return as usual in September. Miss Reeder, the countess recalled, ‘promised to remain on the spot and continue to wave the flag of neutrality. Meantime, she appeared to be getting what she termed “quite a kick” out of the position in which she was left as sole guardian of the premises, and with authority to negotiate the most delicate questions with the occupants, certain that the American Embassy would back her decisions.’ Miss Reeder herself wrote, ‘Was it really Paris whose streets I walked through the 11th, 12th and 13th of June 1940? I do not think so. It was a dead city. Everything was closed, locked and deserted. Even the fall of a pin could be heard.’
Clara Longworth de Chambrun was reluctant to abandon Paris. Her husband’s employers, the National City Bank of New York, had a ‘theory that, should the enemy enter Paris, certain French directors might be held as hostages and endanger the interests of the establishment’. So, Count Aldebert de Chambrun, the Marquis de Mun and six French employees were ordered to move the bank south of any imaginable German penetration to Le Puy. Clara told Aldebert that he could leave Paris without her. She refused to desert their house at 58 rue de Vaugirard, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens and the Senate’s ornate Palais du Luxembourg, in the 6th Arrondissement. A few dozen yards away was the Théâtre de l’Odéon, where Clara staged plays. Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company was just around the corner. Clara was obstinate: ‘My temperamental dislike of retreating from danger when others less capable of facing it remained behind caused me to protest vigorously against this mandate [from the bank to leave].’
Her husband reminded her that she would be alone in Paris. Aldebert himself had to be in Le Puy with the bank. Their only son, René, was in Washington on a mission from the French government at the request of Ambassador Bullitt to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt, a distant cousin by marriage, to send emergency military aid to Britain. Her husband’s brothers had also left. Pierre, who as the eldest had inherited their father’s title of Marquis de Chambrun in 1891, had gone to his country seat, the Château l’Empery-Carrières, in Lozère. As representative of Lozère in the Senate, he was the only American citizen in the upper house. With him was his wife, Clara’s cousin, Margaret Rives Nichols. Aldebert’s younger brother, Count Charles, known as Charlie and formerly French Ambassador in Rome, took refuge with relatives in Brittany. ‘My husband argued that, if I remained in Paris and saw the hideous swastika replace the tricolor, I would be cut off from everyone and everything I loved except the house itself and a little grave [of her daughter] nearby. I gave in before the inevitable and busied myself with the practical arrangements for that hated flight.’
On 12 June, after her visit to Dorothy Reeder at the American Library, Clara met her husband for a last lunch at home. Their chauffeur having disappeared in the chaos, an American employee of the bank, Mr Hunt, drove the count, the countess with her Japanese dog, Tsouni, on her lap and the Chambruns’ house maid out of the city that afternoon. With a million other Parisians, they found themselves in a disorderly procession that disrupted military convoys heading to the front. Their car crawled southwards along National Route Seven to Juvisy. There, where the highway joined regional roads, the traffic halted.
There were trucks, delivery wagons, military lorries and the whole running equipment of certain factories and aviation centers. Men and women were standing entwined on flatcars, careless of the fact that they could not remain erect for ever – or even at all – when running at normal speed. No question of that now; all proceeded at a footpace, and were stopped completely every three minutes. A lad on a dark brown thoroughbred pushed past our car and, on extricating himself from the mass, galloped off across country.
Further along the road, Clara noticed people setting out picnics. One man and woman in particular caught her eye: ‘I recall the silhouettes of a distinguished-looking couple in well-cut clothes seated at a tiny folding-table which formed part of their Rolls-Royce equipment. She was dressed in printed crepe de Chine with silver fox boa; he, in impeccable grey jacket with decorations. His carefully trimmed beard recalled Leopard II.’
Mr Hunt drove them for twenty-five hours on a journey that normally took seven. They had to sleep overnight in the car. On the second night, they reached Vichy, where the Hôtel du Parc gave Aldebert and Clara a room. They were lucky. Most of the other displaced Parisians who survived Luftwaffe strafing on the highways were sleeping rough in barns, on roadsides and in cheaper hotels and inns, several families often crowded into the same room. The rambling, white-porticoed Hôtel du Parc was the best that the spa town had to offer. Its management knew the Chambruns, who had summered there to ‘take the waters’ since 1926. Their July reservations were simply pushed forward to June. The couple took baths and settled in for their first good sleep in three days.
At four o’clock in the morning, while the Germans were about to occupy Paris, the urgent banging of a gong woke them. The incessant racket worsened when ‘an excited servant thundered at our door, and commanded us to dress and pack without delay as all guests must be out of the hotel by five o’clock’. The military staff of General Maxime Weygand, France’s new minister of national defence, had requisitioned the hotel. ‘We argued, but to no avail,’ Countess de Chambrun recalled. The hotel servant ‘compromised by giving us a cup of coffee before the start’. Despite their age, their wealth and Aldebert’s status as a retired army general, they packed and left the hotel before dawn.
Clara Longworth de Chambrun, a stalwart American matron of 66 years, and her American-born husband did not complain. ‘I must say for our personal honor,’ she wrote, ‘all thought of self was totally forgotten in the magnitude of national disaster. Even my little dog seemed to understand that no attention could be paid to him. Instead of balancing himself on my knees to supervise the chauffeur or admire the landscape, he crept down on the floor of the car and lay between my feet.’ They left Vichy for Le Puy, where the National City Bank had arranged lodging for its Paris staff.
This was Clara’s third war since she left Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1901. She took it in her stride. Four years before the Battle of France, she had written, ‘By birth and education, my life – which began on October 18, 1873, was predestined to adventure, tragedy, romance and mirth.’ By the time her third war began in September 1939, she was an accomplished Shakespearean scholar and had written sixteen books, eight each in English and French. These included the memoir of her life to 1935, Shadows Like Myself, and The Making of Nicholas Longworth, a biography of her brother. Nicholas Longworth III had been a Republican congressman from Cincinnati and was twice Speaker of the House of Representatives. His marriage to President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, at the White House was the American social event of 1906. Born into a rich and respected Cincinnati pioneer family, Clara Eleanor Longworth was, by her own admission, no beauty. ‘Why should any man wish to marry a woman who is not extremely beautiful?’ she asked in her first memoir. Clara nonetheless had bountiful chestnut hair that she tied back to reveal a striking face that exuded patrician self-confidence. Her fiercely independent, intellectual temperament had probably made her unsuitable to the Ohio boys who congregated at her family’s mansion on Grandin Road. In 1895, her cousin, Margaret Rives Nichols, married a French aristocrat, Pierre de Chambrun. Clara met his younger brother, Count Aldebert, at the same time.
Although the Chambrun brothers had an impeccably French pedigree, they were American twice-over. Aldebert and Charles had been born in Washington, DC, where their father, Adolphe de Chambrun, served as legal counsel to the French