And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (49 page)

At Florence’s salon, conversation moved easily between literature and gossip, between politics and war news. In his journal for August 4, 1943, Jünger noted that over lunch he had learned from Florence that Mussolini had just resigned—he had in fact resigned on July 25—and his portraits were already being burned. That day, the guests also discussed the week-long Allied bombing of Hamburg and the reports of some 200,000 victims, “which is probably highly exaggerated,” Jünger added.
¹⁰
One evening a few weeks later, Jünger found Jouhandeau very upset because he had been singled out on a Free French broadcast from London. Jünger noted, “He had spent a sleepless night because it seems that his name was on a list of people
to be executed. In recounting his fears, he had the air of a little boy watching a policeman write down his name in a notebook.”
¹¹

Occasionally, political differences surfaced. Giraudoux, a frequent guest whose son had joined de Gaulle in London, once warned Paulhan against Heller: “Beware. Don’t you see it’s a bait?”
¹²
Another guest, Paul Morand, was openly
pétainiste
at a time when Vichy seemed to many to be a lost cause. He returned from his diplomatic post in London after Paris fell and from 1942 headed Vichy’s commission for movie censorship. In his favor, Morand was a lively raconteur who was often accompanied by his elegant wife, the Romanian princess Hélène Soutzo, who years earlier had been part of Proust’s inner circle. Later Morand became Vichy’s ambassador to Romania and then, shortly before the liberation, ambassador to Switzerland.

On one occasion, during a visit to Paris by Horace de Carbuccia, the editor of
Gringoire
, Florence’s guests for dinner included Colette, who was still writing short stories for
Gringoire
. This time, she was accompanied by her Jewish husband, Maurice Goudeket, who normally stayed out of view. Also present was a German,
^*
Colette noted in a letter to a friend: “An electric atmosphere. Maurice suddenly became imprudently magnificent, and there was no further conversation between him and the German.”
¹³

More often the mood over lunch and postprandial cigarettes and cognac was relaxed, as if culture weighed more than politics. One day, Claude Mauriac, who, like his father, François, was a
résistant
, was summoned to a nearby café by Jouhandeau, who then took him without warning to Florence’s apartment. There, he later recounted in his memoir
Le Temps immobile
, he was shocked to find Heller in his Wehrmacht uniform and the German playwright Curt Langenbeck in German naval attire. But he was gradually won over by Heller.
^*
“I had before me a young man barely older than myself, drinking steadily, laughing and smiling, good humored and amiable, with nothing to remind that he was German, above all a conquering and highly placed German,” Mauriac wrote, adding that he was even
tempted to romanticize that moment: “An American, two Germans and three Frenchmen. Far above the massacres, the lies, the blood, there was this little island of civilized people.”
¹⁴

Quite the most eccentric of Florence’s guests was the conservative writer Paul Léautaud. Now in his early seventies, he had long preferred the company of myriad dogs and cats in the Paris suburb of Fontenay-aux-Roses to that of fellow writers in Left Bank cafés. But he had some friends in literary Paris, among them Paulhan, who arranged for his first invitation to lunch at the avenue Malakoff apartment on November 22, 1943. That evening, Léautaud penned a vivid description of Florence, albeit giving her thirteen years less than her age: “Pretty, pressing up against you when she talks to you, around 35 years old, nut-brown hair, tall, slim, supple, svelte, in an old-fashioned skirt more elegant than today’s fashion, unusual eyes, when we were having coffee, sitting beside me, as I spoke of cats as my favorite animals, her face next to mine: ‘I have the eyes of a cat, look at me.’ Unusual eyes, I repeat, in which, if they have something of a cat, or rather a she-cat, it is a kind of amorous languor and warmth.”
¹⁵
After his second lunch chez Florence on March 2, 1944, he offered a sketch of himself: “Truly, let me say immediately, I have no taste for these meetings. These shouts, this need to talk, this feeling of being invited as a rare object.” He added, “I am used to being alone, eating alone, my nose in my plate, reading a newspaper if I have one, or eating with someone I need hardly have to talk to.”
¹⁶

Nonetheless, he rarely turned down an invitation. In fact, some of Florence’s lunch guests suspected that he tolerated their company only so he could take leftover food to his animals. Certainly, unlike, say, Paulhan and Jouhandeau, Léautaud was poor, working for a meager wage in a collaborationist publishing house, Mercure de France, and writing occasionally for collaborationist weeklies to supplement his paltry royalties. His best-known novel,
Le Petit ami
, had been published forty years earlier, and his most recent,
Passe-temps
, fifteen years earlier. But he also took pleasure in exhibiting his poverty, occasionally appearing unshaven, often dressed in scruffy old clothes, once wearing slippers. And he evidently enjoyed having an audience for his sharp barbs, from which few people were spared—certainly not the Jews, but not even those around the table. In his
Journal littéraire
, he described Marie-Louise Bousquet as “odious”; Dr. Arthur Vernes, a scientist and occasional guest, as “an idiot and pretentious”; and Cocteau as “complicated, affected and
false.” Léautaud, who often noted that he had declined prelunch champagne, later compared the salon’s raucous afternoon debates, fueled by liquor, with those of “a bordel or an orgy.”
¹⁷

Heller, for one, was intrigued by Léautaud, noting, “Despite his maliciousness, his ferocious words, his apparent insensitivity to all humans, Jünger and I felt some sympathy for this old fellow whose whole life seemed to be expressed by two loves: for literature and for animals.”
¹⁸
But even Heller could not understand how, as Germany’s defeat became probable, Léautaud held on to his belief that “France’s political interest lay in a German victory and
entente
[with Germany].”
^*
19
Jünger raised Léautaud’s precarious economic condition with Vichy’s Abel Bonnard, albeit adding in his journal, “True, Léautaud is a cynic who is satisfied with his armchair and the company of his cats and by whom one risks being rudely rebuffed.”
²⁰
A few days later, he described Léautaud arriving for Florence’s lunch dressed in a 1910-style suit and wearing a thin tie knotted like a shoelace. But Jünger also spoke warmly of him: “He says many fewer useless things than all of his colleagues whom I have so far observed.”
²¹
The appreciation was mutual. “There are no frontiers for me in matters of the spirit,” Léautaud wrote, “and these two Germans have moreover displayed sentiments of sympathy for France and the French.” Jünger took particular delight in Léautaud’s dry humor. When he mentioned that Victor Hugo was one of the authors he had always neglected, Léautaud retorted: “You can continue doing so.”
²²

By all public appearances, Florence’s life seemed undisturbed by the fact that the United States was at war with Germany. Thanks to her German connections, she had a very rare permit allowing her to use her car at night during the curfew in Paris—at a time when very few Parisians were allowed to drive at all. She also had a permanent pass to cross the demarcation line to and from the unoccupied zone to visit her husband at Juan-les-Pins. Once she shipped some artworks, including a Goya and a Jordaens, from the Côte d’Azur villa to her avenue Malakoff apartment.

After the war, however, it became apparent that her life had been far more complicated. Sometime after June 1941, she found herself caught up in Göring’s art-looting fever. According to a report prepared by the
German army command in 1942, the cellars of the Gould villa in Maisons-Laffitte were searched for weapons.
²³
While nothing incriminating was found, “a valuable triptych and two precious single pieces,” all antiquities carved in ivory, were seized by an agent of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR, as the Nazi art police was known. The report went on: “Mrs. Gould declared on the spot that she wanted to contribute the entire stock of wine for the soldiers on the Eastern Front; all the copper and brass, which filled an enormous cellar room, was to go to German war industry.” The report said that agreement was subsequently reached with the ERR that the triptych would be dedicated to Göring, who would in turn donate it to the Cluny Museum in Paris, to which the Goulds had intended to will it. In gratitude for Göring’s gesture, Florence then offered him the two single ivory pieces as a gift. But this was not enough, according to the ERR’s representative in Paris, Kurt von Behr. The report said: “It has finally been possible to show the three pieces to the Reich Marshal; he was informed of the above offer by von Behr. The Reich Marshal, however, liked all three pieces and ordered that all three be brought to Germany.” In subsequent talks with Gould and her lawyer, the report’s author noted, “they beseeched me to refrain from any further undertaking in this matter in order to avoid any difficulties for Mrs. Gould such as the possibility of her being sent to a concentration camp.” The author added that he made further inquiries, suggesting that Göring was perhaps unaware that private property was involved: “Everywhere I met with a regretful shrug of the shoulders.”
^*

Florence had good reason to be worried. In September 1941, Vichy’s General Commission for Jewish Questions concluded that Frank Gould’s name was Jewish and, as a result, it appointed administrators to manage his Aryanized companies in both the occupied and the unoccupied zones. “I was all the more alarmed because my husband’s fortune awakened covetousness,” Florence told French investigators after the war.
²⁴
“If he were declared Jewish, his property would be confiscated, he would certainly be arrested and eventually deported.” It was eighteen months before Gould could demonstrate, with baptism certificates and other documents sent from the United States through Switzerland, that he was of Presbyterian Irish extraction. In March 1943, Vichy lifted the Aryanization order against
Gould’s property, but almost immediately the Germans seized control of the same property, including the hotels and casinos on the Riviera, on the grounds that Gould was now an “enemy alien.” Three successive German administrators then ran the companies until the liberation.

Florence, though, showed no outward sign of alarm, and there is no hint in Jünger’s journal or Heller’s memoirs that she mentioned either of these problems to them. In Paris, apart from her weekly salon, she maintained a busy schedule. She would be seen at the Concerts de la Pléiade at the Galerie Charpentier. Thanks to Paulhan, she was also introduced to modern art; together, they visited art galleries as well as the studios of Picasso, Braque, Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet. (She later invited Dubuffet to some of her lunches, and she commissioned him to paint portraits of several guests.) On more than one occasion, accompanied by the actress Marie Bell, Florence traveled across Paris to Montmartre to visit Céline. Once, in mid-March 1943, as she left his apartment, she slipped and broke her leg. In a letter to a friend after the war, Céline recalled—not entirely accurately—her visits and that accident:

Madame Frank J. Gould the wife (the 5th! I also knew very well the 2nd) of the old multimillionaire of the American railroads, she is a former manicurist, French by birth (Lacaze) whimsical and not dumb, snobbish, and she wished me
all the best in the world
, she would force herself on our modest home, with Marie Bell (of the Comédie Française) they would bring their own dinner! I who never receive anyone was forced to receive her! She wanted by any means to buy my manuscripts. I refused not wanting to owe anything to the American multimillionaire. But she was neither unpleasant nor stupid—In a hurry, at night and drunk, she even broke her leg at the bottom of my staircase on rue Girardon—I refused to visit her in her bed as she had invited me to look after her! By telegram.
²⁵

In the letter, sent from jail in Denmark, where he fled in 1945, Céline confessed his reason for remembering her. “What could she do for me now?” he asked.

Still, after her accident, others did visit her. Jünger stood at the head of her bed and heard her opinion of Céline: “She said that the reason this writer was always short of money, despite the importance
of his income, is that he gives it all away to street girls who come to consult him” as a doctor.
²⁶
Heller, who accompanied Jünger, recalled different details. The doorbell rang, he wrote in his memoir, and in walked a man in civilian clothes whom Florence welcomed as “Colonel Patrick.” Imagining that Florence might be hiding a British or American airman, Heller and Jünger were silent. When the conversation resumed, however, the man turned to them and said, “But, gentlemen, we can talk in German.”
²⁷
He introduced himself as head of the Lyon branch of the Abwehr, the German intelligence service linked to the Wehrmacht. Heller offered no explanation as to why this officer was visiting Florence.