Americans in Paris: Life and Death under Nazi Occupation 1940–44. Charles Glass
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teenagers, was partially built into mountain caves. In an earlier letter to Holly, she had reassured her that ‘caves are bombproof’.
Sylvia nonetheless missed her family. ‘If only I could see my daddy and the California girls and Carlotta, it wouldn’t be at all bad over here,’ she wrote to her father on 10 April 1940, ‘though today we have heard of another of Hitler’s snatches and we wonder what next.’ Hitler’s ‘snatches’ of the day before were Norway and Denmark, his prelude to the invasion of France a month later. Sylvia scolded her father for sending another $10 cheque, adding, ‘And you know I am getting along in this little war very nicely. You needn’t ever worry about me. If for any reason things got difficult I would sail away right back home.’ Holly wrote on 20 May that she had read Sylvia’s letters aloud to their father, who feared for Sylvia’s safety and often sent her small sums of money. ‘Of course,’ Holly wrote, ‘we can’t help worrying about you in these terrible days, but we are concerned that the Allies must win and we hope that beautiful Paris may never be threatened. We know you will go down to Carlotta’s if necessary.’
Carlotta Welles Briggs wrote regularly to Sylvia, usually enclosing a cheque to help her survive. She reminded her to take some jam from her Paris apartment and to use or give away the clothes her husband Jim had left behind. On 25 August, Carlotta wrote to Sylvia from Altadena that she was ‘very glad to read a letter which Cyprian received by diplomatic channels and so to know that you had stuck to your shop and were still, as far as we could tell, all right’. She sent Sylvia money to have her piano moth-proofed by the Steinway dealer. In the same letter, she asked, ‘Are you still riding your bicycle around?’ Three months into the occupation, everyone in Paris was either riding a bicycle or walking.
Sylvia, from the distance of Paris, had also been commissioned to keep an eye on Carlotta’s house at Bourré. A mutual friend, an American named Gertrude de Gallaix, went to La Salle du Roc at the end of the summer with her French husband, Marcel de Gallaix. Marcel was a lawyer who represented some of the wine growers who were resisting German confiscation of their lands. Gertrude wrote a distressing letter to Sylvia on Monday, 2 September. While helping to take honey from the hives near the house, a bee stung her ankle and left her immobile for a few days. She continued, with a cavalier disdain for apostrophes,
But the really unpleasant news is that the Germans are back. We headed here Tuesday morning the 27th – during that heat wave … Friday my husband left here at 7:00 a.m. to return at 8:00 p.m. having spent the day at Blois on business. And that afternoon the soldiers came looking for officers quarters. That was the beginning of our troubles.
Wednesday afternoon they were back again, and Wednesday evening while we were in the garden the officers came!! They were furious at not finding us, so my husband went to the mayors where they threatened to requisition the whole house – and told us we must clean the Welles room at once.
Gertrude’s maid from Paris, Maria, and Mme Julia, Carlotta’s housekeeper, spent the whole day sweeping and polishing the house for the Germans. With Gertrude, they carried chairs and curtains down from the attic to make two rooms habitable for a captain and lieutenant who were to be quartered there.
The most dangerous time was Friday noon, when the Colonel came himself to see the house – we had guests, so he had the discretion not to come in on the drawing room floor, but he was quite pleased with the Welles room. He told us we didn’t need two homes – that we had a domicile in Paris. My husband insisted it was his office – and after showing him the rooms downstairs (he also looked into the drawing room) and learning we were to have officers he did not insist again. But he had come determined to turn us out!!!
Gertrude advised Sylvia to ‘be thankful you haven’t had to face soldiers and officers again and again as we have here’. In Paris, Sylvia confronted other difficulties. Merely to eat, she and Adrienne became scavengers, chasing the latest rumour of butter, eggs or fresh fruit in one shop or another. Shakespeare and Company no longer received periodicals and books from the United States. The Germans were censoring her favourite authors, including André Gide and Ernest Hemingway. Adrienne had ceased publishing her Gazette des Amis des Livres, because most of her authors were either banned by the Germans or could not pass German censorship. The writers who had fled from France or been forced underground were being replaced in the main journals and publishing houses by a clique, including Marcel Jouhandeau and Robert Brasillach, who were either fascists and anti-Semites already or adjusted their philosophies to German Kulturkampf. Symbolic of the change was the appointment of one of France’s most anti-Semitic authors, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, to edit André Gide’s prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française.
Odéonia, whose literary giants had been left-wing and pro-Jewish, was giving way to the salon of Florence Jay Gould. In the American beauty’s suite at the Hôtel Bristol, followed by the move to her flat at 129 avenue Malakoff in 1942, collaborationist French writers socialized over champagne with the celebrated German author Ernst Jünger and Propagandastaffel officer Gerhard Heller. The French writer Claude Mauriac wrote in his memoirs of one of Mrs Jay Gould’s parties that he was ‘stupefied to be shaking hands with one of those [German] officers whose contact I find so repugnant on the metro … The champagne and the atmosphere of sympathy and youth made everything too easy. I should not have been there.’ Florence’s friendship with the German Ambassador Otto Abetz was so intimate that he gave her a long-term Ausweis to travel freely between Paris and her winter house at Juan les Pins, where her husband Frank was living. Gerhard Heller was charmed by Mrs Gould and was honoured to be welcomed into her ‘sanctuary’. He reminisced, ‘She was beautiful, great, with chestnut hair; a very attractive woman in her thirties; she had a great knowledge and a great love of literature. She deployed another lure, very important for the period: her table ignored rationing.’ One writer, who smuggled an anonymous ‘Letter from France’ to Cyril Connolly’s London magazine, Horizon, described the new bookmen of the right:
Among the collaborationists the best known are Jacques Chardonne … Abel Bonnard – now more commonly known as Abetz Bonnard, a degraded and corrupt academician who has long been a public laughing stock; [Pierre] Drieu La Rochelle, a clever and talented Fascist; Ramon Fernandez, a professional Fascist and drunkard;
Henri Bidou, an able journalist; and Bernard Fay, a professor who has just been made head of the Bibliothèque Nationale, in place of [Julien] Cain, and whose first act was to ‘lend’ Marshal Goering that institution’s great collection of hunting books. [Fay was a friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.]
Neither Sylvia nor Adrienne had a place in the collaborators’ literary milieu, and they despised those who did – apart from Jacques Benoist-Méchin. They had known Benoist-Méchin as a teenage music student, who played in George Antheil’s orchestra when Antheil was living above Shakespeare and Company. A writer and translator as well as a musician, war veteran Benoist-Méchin came to Odéonia in 1920. Adrienne wrote of him in 1926, ‘He was there when [Paul] Valéry read us, in a corner of the bookshop, the pages of Eupalinos, which he was about to hand over to his publisher. One day he showed us, jubilant, a copy of Partage du midi [Break of Noon] that he had written by hand. We saw him translate fragments of Ulysses for [Valéry] Larbaud, who was preparing his lecture on Joyce … No young man was so much the son of the house as he was … I am very proud of our son.’ She did not write what became of that pride in January 1941 when his ministerial-level appointment as Vichy’s secretary general for relations with Germany put him in daily touch with the Nazis.
POLLY PEABODY WAS A RAVISHING, 22-year-old ‘all-American girl’ from East 57th Street in New York. The blonde-haired society beauty spoke perfect French and German, having studied in France, Switzerland and Germany for much of her childhood. Defeating the Nazis became her obsession from the moment the war began in September 1939. Seeking to play a part, she volunteered to drive ambulances in France for Anne Morgan’s