And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (50 page)

Florence herself left no written record of the war years but, despite the Nazis and anti-Semites she received, there was never any suggestion that she herself expressed pro-German or anti-Jewish opinions. Certainly, those in her circle appear to have had nothing but fond memories of the salon. Although Heller regretted not being able to say farewell to her, Jünger lunched with her on August 10, 1944, and noted, “Perhaps this is the last Thursday.”
²⁸
On August 13, he went for a final walk along the Seine with his mistress, Sophie. The following day he left Paris. Two weeks later, Allied troops entered the city, but somehow the Thursday salon survived. Florence was lucky: many Frenchwomen had their heads shaved and were publicly humiliated for courting Germans. During the days of the insurrection in Paris, she was apparently able to distract attention from her eclectic circle of friends by making a donation to the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, the united resistance movement.
²⁹
Some of her French guests, though, were temporarily absent: Benoit was jailed for six months, while Jouhandeau went into hiding for several months before agreeing to face interrogation. For others, the lunches soon resumed, now with occasional American guests, as if the war had been no more than a passing storm. In late 1945, Heller received a letter that, he recalled, read, “Come quickly, the Thursdays await you.”
³⁰
It was signed by Florence, Paulhan, Léautaud, Jouhandeau and Arland.

Before Florence could turn the page, however, she had the tricky job of explaining why she had invested in a Nazi-financed bank in Monaco during the weeks before the Allied landings in southern France on August 15, 1944. When interrogated on the subject by a French investigating magistrate in March 1945, she said in sworn testimony that she was blackmailed into becoming a partner in the
newly constituted Banque Charles.
³¹
If she had refused, she said, her husband’s companies would have had to pay a far larger sum to the Aerobank, a Luftwaffe-controlled bank that was behind the Banque Charles. Given the expectation of an Allied invasion of the Riviera, she also feared for the safety of her husband—“67 years old and in delicate health”—in Juan-les-Pins. As part of the agreement, she said, her husband and her sister were promised refuge in Monaco, a supposedly neutral principality. She added that she sent 5 million francs, her share of the bank’s capital of 80 million francs,
^*
only once she had confirmation that Frank and Isabelle were in Monaco. Florence noted, “Had I acted freely and with a pecuniary interest, would I have committed the folly of interesting myself in a German bank at a moment when no one, neither in Europe nor America, believed any more in a German victory? I was obliged and forced to invest these funds, I paid a kind of ransom to the enemy, and I am certain, that by doing so, I fulfilled my duty towards my husband; I had then and still have today the conviction that I did nothing against the interests of the Allies.” And with that, it seemed, the investigation was over.

But three years later, with the discovery of new documents revealing a far more complex operation, the case was reopened. A fresh report by the prosecutor’s office of the Département de la Seine, dated September 20, 1948, said that Johannès Charles, a Swiss banker, obtained a license to open a bank in Monaco from the enclave’s ruler, Prince Louis II, in 1943.
³²
From the beginning, Karl Schaeffer, the Paris representative of the Reichsbank, was involved in what was planned as a German bank controlled by the Aerobank disguised as an international bank working in a neutral country. The report said the bank’s purpose was not to help the German war effort but, rather, to channel German money abroad in anticipation of a Nazi defeat in the war. Along with Florence, the other investors were a German banker by the name of Gaussebeck and a French Fascist, Guillaume Lecesne, although both were front men for other interests. Documents also showed that Prince Louis expressed willingness to participate in the bank and that Schaeffer and Charles met Frank Gould in Nice on August 11, four days before the Allied landings. At that point, the report confirmed, only Charles and Florence had deposited their share of the bank’s capital. The Allied landings sank the project.
After this new investigation, the prosecutor’s office again decided not to press charges, but it seemed unconvinced that Florence had acted under duress. Its conclusion was harsh: “But this Franco-American appears to have enjoyed singular protections during the occupation, and if it is not certain that she committed the crime of intelligence with the enemy, it is certain that we have no reason to congratulate her for her attitude.”

Florence herself never wavered in insisting that everything she did was to protect her husband. In any event, by the late 1940s she was again the reigning patroness of the Paris literary scene. Although she now spent more time in the Côte d’Azur, her literary lunches continued in her 16th arrondissement apartment. Then, after her husband’s death, in 1956, she moved into an apartment in the Hôtel Meurice overlooking the Tuileries Gardens, where she now held court on Thursdays. As before, she remained loyal to her old friends, like Jouhandeau and Léautaud, financing their publications and using her influence to promote favored candidates for election to the Académie Française. In 1963, when it was Paulhan’s turn to become an
immortel
, he scribbled at the top of his acceptance speech: “This little speech for Florence, who does what she wants with me, even making me an academician.”
³³
A few years later, when Jünger translated Léautaud’s wartime memoirs,
In Memoriam
, he dedicated the book to Florence. Younger writers, too, were in her debt, among them Alain Robbe-Grillet and Françoise Sagan. She also created numerous literary prizes, including the Max Jacob Poetry Prize, named after the Jewish poet who died at Drancy in March 1944. The United States named her a commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in 1954, and she was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur in 1961. Since her death in 1983, thanks to her legacy, the Florence Gould Foundation has continued to play a central role in Franco-American cultural relations. Over the years, Florence’s wartime salon and her questionable choice of friends have been quietly forgotten.

*
Boudot-Lamotte’s daughter Madeleine was Gaston Gallimard’s secretary and therefore also knew many writers.

*
In the first edition of his journal, he does not name Florence, referring to her instead as Lady Orpington or Armance.

*
This was possibly Heller, since Colette would have considered Jünger’s name worth mentioning.

*
Forty years later, during a live television broadcast of the literary program
Apostrophes
, Heller reminded Claude Mauriac that they had met at Florence’s apartment, but Mauriac said he could not remember.

*
In his journal, though, Léautaud said he looked forward to the end of hardship promised by an Allied victory, even noting—overoptimistically—that he had no need to store coal for the coming winter.

*
The report’s critical tone reflected the German army command’s well-known disapproval of the ERR’s looting of art.

*
In 1944, 80 million francs was worth around $1.6 million, equivalent to close to $20 million in 2010 dollars.

_·
CHAPTER 14
_·
“On the Side of Life”

IN THE END
, even if writers refused to accept the occupation, what were their options? Since it was evident that the Nazis would not be driven out by the power of the pen, many anti-Fascist writers felt the best strategy was simply to provide the French with some intelligent diversion. At the same time, given their prestige in France, at least some writers felt honor-bound to resist, but how? Until Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Communists found their hands largely tied by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. France’s most prestigious writers were also hardly of an age—André Gide was seventy-one, Paul Valéry sixty-nine—or physical condition to engage in active warfare. Even putting out clandestine newspapers was dangerous, and sometimes fatal, as the leaders of the Musée de l’Homme network and the cofounders of
L’Université Libre
and
La Pensée Libre
discovered in 1942. Initially, then, resistance by writers was more of a process than a sudden decision.

Yet, gradually, more and more chose to be “on the side of life,” as Jean Paulhan put it, answering complaints that
résistants
were dying
in vain. “You can squeeze a bee in your hand until it suffocates,” he wrote in February 1944. “It won’t suffocate without stinging you. That’s precious little, you will say. But if it didn’t sting you, bees would have been extinct a long time ago.” Many writers chose to sting with words, some did so in the armed resistance, a few gave their lives for their beliefs. When the liberation came, the world of letters had its heroes and martyrs, too.

What few were willing to do, though, was to abandon writing. The majority of writers also wanted to continue publishing, whether out of economic necessity or vanity or perhaps believing they were keeping alight the flame of French literature. Among non-Fascist writers alone, those who gave their manuscripts to publishers authorized by the Germans ranged from the poets Aragon and Éluard to the novelists Colette and Camus. Some distinguished between publishing books, which was considered acceptable, and writing for the collaborationist press, where their names might appear alongside pro-German or anti-Semitic columns. Nonetheless, a few wrote for weeklies like
Comoedia
and
Gringoire
because they needed the money. Others had salaries—Paulhan and, later, Camus worked at Éditions Gallimard; Guéhenno, Sartre and Beauvoir taught in lycées; and Desnos was a journalist for the collaborationist daily
Aujourd’hui
—and they, too, wrote books for publication. Even the most distinguished names of the literary establishment were slow to show leadership. Gide and Valéry provided texts for early editions of Drieu La Rochelle’s
Nouvelle Revue Française
, while Mauriac published
La Pharisienne
in 1941. Yet, by the end of the war, most of these writers—Claudel, Colette and Beauvoir were exceptions—were identified with the resistance.

One who stood by his early decision not to publish in any officially approved outlet was Guéhenno, an essayist who taught at the Lycée Henri IV. He wrote only for the clandestine newspaper
Les Lettres Françaises
and the underground publishing house Éditions de Minuit. In his
Journal des années noires
, which was published in 1946, he was deeply disapproving of those who published under their own names. “Why write now? It is impossible to question how ridiculous it is to pursue such a personal profession. These times call for modesty.”
¹
He went on: “Now is the time to write for nothing, for pleasure. Here we are, reduced to silence, to solitude, but perhaps also to seriousness. Whether our cell is to be filled with light depends entirely on ourselves.”
²
He also worried that the idea of keeping
French literature alive played into the German hands. “What,” he asked, “should we think of those writers who, to be sure not to displease the occupying authority, decide to write about everything except for the one thing the French are thinking about. Even more, those who out of cowardice favor this authority’s strategy of making everything in France appear as it was before.” Surprisingly, he did not lose hope. “But French thought in fact continues. Against them, despite them. The republic of letters holds its ground, after all, quite well. The ‘collaborators’ are rare, a few old unsatisfied troubadours, always eager for glory or money.”
³

In truth, the collaborators were not so rare, but France’s best writers were not among them. Further, with relatively few exceptions, the best stayed in France. Georges Bernanos, a conservative, had already immigrated to South America in 1938, and he spent the war years in Brazil, where he edited a pro–Free French journal. Benjamin Péret, a Surrealist poet, was guided out of France by Varian Fry and ended up living in Mexico until 1948. Jules Romains, a writer and poet who was elected to the Académie Française in 1946, went first to the United States, but then also chose to live in Mexico.

The exiled writer with the most tormented relationship with France, however, was Saint-Exupéry. Dismayed by France’s humiliation but unwilling to join de Gaulle in London, he went instead to the United States, where he wrote
Pilote de guerre
and
Le Petit prince
. But it is a short text called
Lettre à un otage
(Letter to a Hostage), addressed to a Jewish friend he believed to be trapped in France, that most reveals his anguish. A small-format book of just seventy-two pages, it was published in French by Brentano’s in 1943, with a first printing of one hundred copies. In it, Saint-Exupéry recalls his own departure from Lisbon by sea and imagines occupied France as a silent boat, its lights extinguished, exposed to the perils of the sea. “That night,” he says, “he who haunts my memory is 50 years old. He is sick. He is Jewish. How will he survive the German terror?”
⁴
Later, Saint-Exupéry addresses this friend: “If I fight again, I will fight a little for you. I need you so I can better believe in the coming of this smile. I need to help you to live.” He adds, “You who are so French, I feel you twice threatened with death, as a Frenchman and as a Jew.”
⁵
Finally, when the writer-aviator speaks of the entire French population as “forty million hostages,” he seems to be announcing his decision to return to Europe to fight the Germans.