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CHAPTER 1
THE FALL
ON THE BRINK
Queen Elizabeth was wearing an ankle-length white satin dress, long white silk gloves, a white satin pochette, and a wide-brimmed white hat. She was walking slowly, with French president Albert Lebrun, in a tailcoat, top hat, and white gloves, a few feet behind. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of England's official state visit to Paris, in July 1938, was intended to impress Hitler by reaffirming the strong alliance between Britain and France. Newsreel operators placed along the route of the royal cortège filmed the black limousines approaching the Louvre, followed by mounted Republican Guards in full regalia, their elaborate sabers with inlaid brass scintillating in the sun. Britain's monarchs had chosen to pay a visit to theMona Lisa and the Venus de Milo, to show the world that the Entente was still Cordiale and everything was as it should be. Except that Germany had annexed Austria just four months earlier.
The newsreel shows six men hovering around the royal party as they pass a series of early Impressionist paintings. Jacques Jaujard, the deputy head of the French National Museums, was among them. Tall, dark-haired, and slim, he was, at forty-three, a dashing albeit austere figure.
Jaujard did not believe in appeasement, he never had. While he showed the queen around the Louvre's Grande Galerie, very few knew that he had already started to plan the evacuation of France's entire public art collections for when, not if, the Germans would invade Paris. He had supervised the expatriation of the entire Prado Museum's collection from Madrid to Switzerland, to shelter it during the Spanish Civil War. He had already begun to elaborate contingency plans for this war, writing up lists and ordering thousands of wooden cases made to precise measurements.
There were very few people in the summer of 1938 who felt personally concerned by Germany's aggressive policies against its eastern neighbors, let alone who were preparing actively for war. Untroubled by the worries of a grown-up man spending his days and nights thinking how best to preserve the world's cultural heritage and thousands of years of civilization from a very uncertain future, the youth of Paris were more preoccupied by emulating their idol Charles Trenet, "Le Fou Chantant" ("the Singing Fool"), as the twenty-four-year-old musical prodigy was known. In the summer of 1938, Paris's teenagers wore blue shirts and white ties and hats just like Trenet, the man who made France swingue.
One of their philosophy teachers at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly, the plush western suburb of Paris, also felt completely unconcerned by world events. Like his pupils, the thirty-three-year-old Jean-Paul Sartre enjoyed listening to Charles Trenet. What he enjoyed even more was shattering social conventions. But war? War was not on his mind. He liked taking his students to cafés to discuss literature, something that was simply not done in 1938; nobody before had dared to breach the revered distance between a pupil and his teacher, and question the concept of hierarchy so directly. Sartre also liked to lend his pupils his personal books. Through this strange-looking man with a terrible squint, a buoyant intelligence, and a contagious laugh, they discovered the writing of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, and Faulkner. Sartre was himself about to be published for the first time by the prestigious publisher Gallimard. He called his first novel La nausée (Nausea), an unsavory title. Le Figaro and other conservative newspapers deemed it unpleasant, too bleak, nihilistic even, but all recognized the undeniable talent of its author.
La nausée was dedicated to "The Beaver," a word play in English on the name of his best friend, sparring partner, and lover, Simone de Beauvoir. "Beauvoir" sounds like "beaver" in English pronunciation, which is castor in French. In other words, Simone de Beauvoir became for her close friends "Le Castor" by way of English. Le Castor was, just like Sartre, a brilliant thirty-year-old philosophy teacher, though rather more beautiful. They lived together — that is, they lived in the same shabby hotel, the Hôtel Mistral, 24 rue de Cels, just behind Montparnasse Cemetery, though not in the same room.
Beauvoir and Sartre were attractive teachers and great listeners and never passed moral judgments. Unsurprisingly, their students became their most ardent admirers, often developing a crush on them. Instead of scolding them, Beauvoir and Sartre returned their affection. There were the very blond sisters Olga and Wanda Kosakiewicz, there was Jacques-Laurent Bost, called "le petit Bost" as he was the youngest of a family of ten children, and there were Bianca Bienenfeld and Nathalie Sorokine. They were all infatuated with Simone. Beauvoir and Sartre had agreed that their relationship was essential while other relationships they might have on the side were to remain contingent. Their life together, and not together, formed ripples in an ever-growing pool. New entrants to Beauvoir and Sartre's circle usually accepted the premises of their contingent relationships with their mentor-lover, and an astonishingly large number would remain on friendly terms after passion had consumed itself. Then they often fell for another member of the group. Transparency was not universally shared between the members of what would be later known as the "Sartrean family," and many small secrets allowed such a system to work. For instance in 1938 and 1939, while she was in love with Bost, Beauvoir was having a passionate affair with Bianca (Bost knew about Bianca but Bianca did not know about Bost). Sartre then started courting Bianca in January 1939 after Beauvoir had ended her affair with her. Beauvoir and Sartre were not only lovers and mentors; they also provided for these student-lovers of theirs. They worked hard and paid for everyone's lodgings and food. Their world was one of knowledge and foreplay in which politics and world affairs played the tiniest of parts. They were philosophers and thought of themselves as above politics.
Samuel Beckett did not have much time for politics either. He had just turned thirty-three and liked sleeping till noon. On April 18, 1939, he wrote to his friend Thomas MacGreevey back in Dublin: "If there is a war, as I am sure there must be soon, I shall place myself at the disposition of this country." Beckett wanted to be useful; he had time on his hands and had not yet found his voice. He was living in the shadow of another Irish writer, James Joyce, for whom he had briefly worked as secretary, and he was at pains to actually produce something he thought worthy. There was of course Murphy (1938), a novel that he had written in English and that he'd have loved his friend Alfred Péron, an English teacher, to translate into French, but when the two young men met every Tuesday for lunch, they ended up playing tennis rather than talking about work. Apart from Murphy, Beckett had a few poems (some in French) and some translation work to show, but not much else. He read a lot, though, and along with his admiration for this French philosophy teacher's book Nausea, which he thought "extraordinarily good," he liked the work of an older writer, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, particularly his novel Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night). Beckett lived very modestly on his occasional translating and teaching income, supplemented by a monthly allowance from his brother Frank in Ireland. At least if there was a war, he could be of some use.
While Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Samuel Beckett were either happily ignoring world affairs or envisaging what their future role in a war could be, Jacques Jaujard was already fully engaged in action, following his instinct. He had confided to Laure Albin Guillot, a sixty-year-old celebrity photographer, that he would soon do an inventory of the museum's art collection, a rearrangement of some kind. The terms remained purposely vague. Whether he privately told her the extent of his plans is uncertain. Perhaps he wanted one of the most talented French photographers of the 1930s to immortalize artworks that might soon be destroyed or vanish forever.
He could have asked another, younger photographer, the thirty-one-year-old Henri Cartier-Bresson, known at the time only as Henri Cartier. Cartier-Bresson was the well-known name of Parisian industrialists and he did not want his comrades in the Communist Party to realize that he was the son of grands bourgeois. However, Jaujard might have been wary of asking the official photographer of the Communist newspaper Ce Soir, edited by Aragon, especially as Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany had just agreed to sign a pact of nonaggression. Besides, Henri Cartier was busy working for the film director Jean Renoir. Since 1936 he had been enjoying his role as Renoir's assistant director, not only on Communist propaganda documentaries but also films such as La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game), which portrayed a world on the brink — the world of the pleasure-seeking French bourgeoisie oblivious to the world around them.
On August 24, 1939, the day after the Soviet foreign minister Molotov and his German counterpart von Ribbentrop had signed the pact that gave Hitler free rein to attack the West, Jacques Jaujard ordered the Louvre to be closed for three days. Officially, for repair. In fact, for three days and three nights, two hundred Louvre staff, students from the Louvre art school, and grand magasin employees from La Samaritaine carefully placed four thousand world treasures in wooden cases. Luckily, The Wedding at Cana by Veronese could be rolled around a cylinder. So could Jacques-Louis David's The Coronation of Napoleon. But Delacroix's Crusaders, Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa, and all the Rubenses were too fragile and had to be hauled on a special open truck made to transport set designs and murals from France's state theater company, the Comédie-Française. The Raft of the Medusa, weighing nearly one and a half tons, stood in the open-air truck covered only by a giant blanket.
Masterpieces were categorized in order of importance: a yellow circle for very valuable ones, a green circle for major artworks, and a red circle for world treasures. The white case containing the Mona Lisa was marked with three red circles. In a letter to the curator who was in charge of traveling with La Joconde but did not yet know the full burden of his responsibility, Jaujard broke the news by telling him: "Old friend, your convoy will be made of eight trucks. I have to tell you that the Chenu truck which will be departing from 5 rue de la Terrasse, with the plate number 2162RM2, contains a case with the letters MN written in black. It is the Mona Lisa." Leonardo da Vinci's finest work was traveling in an ambulance specially fitted with elastic rubber-sprung suspension.
Private cars, ambulances, trucks, delivery vans, and taxis were requisitioned. A convoy of 203 vehicles transporting 1,862 wooden cases set out one morning in late August to eleven castles in France where they would wait, anonymous and secure, for what would come. Grand châteaux on the Loire such as Chambord and Cheverny were used, but Jaujard also requisitioned more inconspicuous and privately owned estates conveniently "lost" in the French countryside, far from any strategic locations. Every convoy had a curator and staff attached to it. Their mission: to look after the art collections in their new homes for as long as it was necessary. Whole families were displaced and relocated. For those dedicated museum employees, it was an adventure that would last more than five years.
The eleven-foot-tall Winged Victory of Samothrace was the last piece to go into hiding, at three o'clock on the afternoon of September 3, the precise time that France declared war on Germany. Then, in the next few weeks, the entire national public collection was taken to safety. Every museum in the country used the plan of evacuation Jaujard had used for the Louvre, each work being treated in order of artistic and historical importance. By autumn 1939, every single artwork of significance had been put in safekeeping. The news, quite inevitably, filtered out. Raymond Lécuyer, in Le Figaro, wrote of "the exodus of paintings," praised the dedication of the nationalmuseums' keepers, many of them retired veterans from the Great War, and apologized to his readers for being elusive about the whole operation. He could not be specific, nor could he give names, dates, or places, but he wrote: "May [it] be, however, a comfort for you to know that the world's art heritage is safe from the scientific enterprises of German barbarism."
Having fulfilled his duty to history, Jaujard retreated to his office in the Louvre overlooking the Tuileries Gardens. He was now bracing himself for the inevitable. It might take months, but the Germans would soon be in Paris, he was certain of that. Jaujard may have been ready but, unfortunately, the French army was not.
TWILIGHT
Instead of immediately fulfilling their duty of assistance to Poland, Britain and France bided their time and did not engage in offensive military operations, allowing the German army to concentrate on invading and crushing Poland without having to fight on two fronts at once. There was something decidedly strange about this war. The French called it the "Drôle de guerre," the Americans and the British the "Phony War." If the French army had attacked head-on, immediately after the declaration of war, the German army could not have held out for more than one or two weeks — at least that is what the German general Siegfried Westphal stated years later during the Nuremberg trials. In September 1939, Britain and France had a combined 110 divisions to Germany's 23.
Both France and Britain, however, were busier making life difficult for the German and Austrian citizens living on their soil, such as Arthur Koestler in France and Stefan Zweig in Britain, than confronting Hitler on the ground. In October, the Hungarian-born antifascist intellectual Koestler was arrested and interned at the Le Vernet detention camp in the French Pyrenees, while the celebrated Austrian author Zweig, now a UK resident, was forbidden to travel more than five miles from his home in Bath.
Some Parisians left immediately after the war was declared. Janet Flanner, the formidable Paris correspondent of the New Yorker since 1925, a lesbian who was as well known for her beautiful lovers as for her steely writing, decided to go back to the United States. She told her French lover Noeline, or Noel Haskins Murphy, as she was officially known, that she would write and come back soon. Noeline, a six-foot-tall "stunning woman with high cheekbones and hay-coloured hair, a veritable Viking, a blend of Garbo and Dietrich," would look the shadow of herself when they next met in December 1944.
The fifty-eight-year-old Pablo Picasso, horrified by the bombings of Guernica in April 1937, left Paris on September 2 for Royan, a seaside resort in southwestern France, sixty-one miles north of Bordeaux. He rented a villa for his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter and their daughter, Maya, about to turn four, and lived with his new love, the photographer Dora Maar, at the Hôtel du Tigre. He soon rented a studio space on the third floor of the Villa les Voiliers with a beautiful sea view. Royan failed to inspire him, though. Picasso was no wildlife or landscape artist. He may have felt relieved at first to be away from Paris, but the vivid light of the Poitou region did not suit him. He kept busy sketching and even writing to fight his anxiety about the war. The seafood at the local market inspired a few paintings, but he drove back to Paris regularly to get supplies of brushes, paints, canvases, and sketchbooks. The November 15 opening of his first American retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, called "Forty Years of His Art," which should have been a great satisfaction, felt very far away, almost unimportant.
Others had decided to wait and see, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who had remained in Paris, teaching, and occasionally changing hotels, their lovers and students in tow.
* * *
While everyone in Western Europe was adjusting to this "phony war," the largest army in the world, as the French army was described in newspapers at home and abroad, was utterly unprepared, a victim of traditionalism, ignorance, arrogance, and paralysis. One eyewitness account of the time clearly understood the collapse of French soldiers' morale, the total failure of the French high command, the demented military strategies focused on the Maginot Line and the so-called "impenetrability" of the forest of the Ardennes, and the fantasy worlds inhabited by the French bourgeoisie and the working class. Marc Bloch was a veteran of the Great War, a professor of medieval history at the Sorbonne and founder of the Annales School. He volunteered to serve in 1939 at the age of fifty-three. The French high command's utter incompetence and inability to adapt to modern times was not the only cause of the fall of France, wrote Bloch in 1946's Strange Defeat, published posthumously. The way in which the state, its government, and France's political parties relayed the most inane optimistic messages to the country, hinting that defeat was inconceivable, while acting in the most timid way toward Hitler, prevented a clear and cool-headed look at reality. He accused the working class of coward pacifism while the bourgeoisie only sought egotistical pleasures in life. What Marc Bloch described was the complete moral collapse of an entire country — as Renoir had done a few months earlier in his film La règle du jeu, showing the unbearable lightness of the French elite, an innate insouciance shared by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Left Bank"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Agnès Poirier.
Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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