And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (7 page)

Still, in one critical area, Daladier’s government was prepared. Already in September 1938, after Germany occupied the Sudetenland, the
Mona Lisa
and some other masterpieces were temporarily sent to the Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley. One year later, when war was declared, the Louvre had a plan in place to empty much of the museum. In less than one month, 3,691 paintings were taken down, carefully packed and trucked in thirty-seven convoys to the Château de Chambord, although the
Mona Lisa
would soon be moved to Louvigny, in the western Loire Valley. The Louvre had good reason to be pleased with its operation. Veronese’s gigantic painting
The Marriage at Cana
was removed from its frame and rolled up, while Géricault’s
The Raft of the Medusa
, only slightly smaller, was placed inside a large wooden container for transportation. The museum was obliged to leave behind many of its statues and sculptures, placing them in a basement before an air-raid shelter could be built. But exception was made for two Greek treasures,
The Winged Victory of Samothrace
and the
Venus de Milo
, which would spend the war in the Château de Valençay. In several cases, the Louvre was helped by the loan of Comédie Française trucks, which normally carried stage décor. After the evacuation was completed, with only empty gilded frames left in the painting galleries, the museum was closed.

A few weeks later, however, as the promised conflict with Germany began to resemble a “phony war” or a
drôle de guerre
, as the French tagged it,
^*
Paris as a whole relaxed. Schoolchildren returned home, restaurants and nightclubs reopened, and theaters, movie theaters and opera houses again came alive, albeit without many young performers who were at the front. Sacha Guitry, playwright, director, actor and full-time celebrity, was busy: he organized a charity ball for the ambulance service; he presented a new play,
Florence;
and he broadcast a New Year message to French soldiers. A boisterous song written for British troops stationed along the German border, “We’ll Hang Out Our Washing on the Siegfried Line,” became just as popular in translation, “On ira pendre notre linge sur la ligne
Siegfried.” Édith Piaf, Josephine Baker and Maurice Chevalier traveled north to entertain the troops. Chevalier even had a hit song, “Ça fait d’excellents français” (That Makes for Excellent Frenchmen), which somewhat mockingly portrayed France as a united country: it listed all the unlikely professions and political currents, from bankers to bakers, from rightists of L’Action Française to Communists, who were expected to defend France.

In a sense, he had a point. The Communist poet Aragon and the ex-Communist poet Éluard, as well as the Fascist novelist Brasillach and the anti-Semitic journalist Rebatet were all now in uniform, as were most artists and intellectuals of an age to serve. Breton and Céline were both assigned to the medical corps, the composer Olivier Messiaen was a medical auxiliary and the philosopher Raymond Aron was placed in a meteorological unit. Michel Déon, who would be elected to the Académie Française in 1978, was just twenty when he joined the infantry. “I was among those French who otherwise would never have met peasants, workers or waiters,” he recalled of the experience. “That helped a lot in my life of writing.”
⁵
Marcel Carné, the movie director, found himself digging trenches near the Maginot Line, punishment for his portrayal of the army in
Le Quai des Brumes
, where Jean Gabin, now also a soldier, played a deserter. But because actual fighting did not seem imminent, many had time to write letters and keep journals. Officers among them were also given leave to visit Paris and catch up with gossip.

“When I saw how these intellectuals were reacting, that is when I understood they were not worried by the war,” observed Stéphane Hessel, the son of the German writer Franz Hessel; Stéphane was raised in France and later became a distinguished French diplomat. “Protected by the Maginot Line, they thought Germany would not invade, that Germany would collapse with economic problems, that the French and British fleets still ruled the world, that the United States would enter the war sooner or later, that even the Soviet Union would not stay out. So intellectual life flourished around people like Joyce, Breton, Duchamp.”
⁶

The Left Bank, though, was not as jolly as it had been. Working on her first novel,
L’Invitée
(She Came to Stay), Simone de Beauvoir had already learned that she liked to write in cafés and would alternate between Le Dôme in Montparnasse and Café de Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, but she was often almost alone. Across the boulevard, the Brasserie Lipp was still crowded, but now with
elderly politicians and their young mistresses rather than the traditional artist clients. The Latin Quarter seemed strangely deserted, since university students at the Sorbonne were among the first to be mobilized. Gaston Gallimard, the head of France’s most prestigious publishing house, Éditions Gallimard, even closed up his Left Bank offices at 5 rue Sébastien-Bottin and left town. Fearing that Paris could be bombed if hostilities broke out, he moved his files and much of his staff to a family mansion at Sartilly, near the Atlantic coast in western Normandy, and kept on publishing. Jean Paulhan, who, like Gallimard, was in his late fifties and too old for the army, was expected to shuttle between Paris and Sartilly to put together the monthly
Nouvelle Revue Française
. And he did: the journal’s last issue before the occupation was dated June 1940.

As a Spaniard, Picasso was not an
étranger nondésirable
, but as an opponent of Franco, he was understandably nervous. In the days before war was declared, accompanied by his mistress Dora Maar, he headed by car to Royan in southwestern France, where, not accidentally, another mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, was waiting with their three-year-old daughter, Maya. He placed the two women in different hotels and then rented the top floor of a beachfront villa as a studio. He also found himself looking after Breton’s wife, Jacqueline Lamba, and her daughter. On leave from his unit, Breton visited them at the resort and, on one occasion, learning that he was broke, Picasso gave him a drawing to sell.

From Royan, Picasso made frequent trips to Paris. He had to prepare his first American retrospective, Picasso: 40 Years of His Art, which, remarkably, opened on time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in December 1939. He also had to ensure that his French residence papers were in order. When war was declared, he and Matisse were offered asylum in the United States, but they both turned it down. As a foreigner, though, Picasso was more vulnerable than Matisse. He therefore decided to seek French nationality and, on April 3, 1940, he filed his application. He was interrogated by a police commissioner near his Paris home at 23 rue La Boétie, and the initial verdict was positive: “Good information. Favorable recommendation.” Then, in late May, with German troops already on French soil, his application was rejected. A confidential report said he had been “identified as an anarchist” in 1905 and had “retained extreme ideas evolving towards Communism.”
⁷
The following month, now virtually
stateless, Picasso watched German troops pass through Royan on their way to Bordeaux.

Other artists also used the phony war to prepare for the worst. Piet Mondrian, the Dutch abstract master, had already left for En gland in 1938 and then moved to New York when war was declared. In 1940, Dalí and his wife, Gala, followed Mondrian to New York, while Miró returned to Franco’s Spain. Matisse, Bonnard and Maillol had long ago chosen to live and work far from Paris and, as such, were relatively safe. But others stayed in Paris, struggling in a depressed art market to raise funds to move to the provinces or abroad.

Then, for some, an angel of sorts appeared. The American heiress Peggy Guggenheim had been living in London and had exhibited Cocteau, Kandinsky, Picasso, Braque and Tanguy in her new Mayfair gallery, Guggenheim Jeune. She also frequently visited Paris, where Duchamp introduced her to the art world. In early 1940, she was back in Paris, but this time with a mission. “My motto was ‘Buy a picture a day’ and I lived up to it,” she later wrote in her memoir,
Out of This Century.
⁸
With Victor Brauner, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Hélion, Man Ray and Constantin Brancusi, she bought directly from the artists, ignoring their complaints about the low prices she was offering. Other art was acquired on the market or through Duchamp’s connections. Shortly before the Germans reached Paris, she shipped her collection to Grenoble, in southeast France, and then, many months later, out of the country. By then, Peggy Guggenheim’s trove also included works by Kandinsky, Klee, Picabia, Braque, Mondrian, Miró, Ernst, Carrington, Dalí, Chirico, Tanguy and Léger. This collection would serve as the foundation stone for the museum she opened on Venice’s Grand Canal in 1951.

Writers who were neither called up nor arrested as
étrangers nondésirables
also lived in uncertainty. Irène Némirovsky, a novelist born in Kiev in 1903, had come to France as a teenager when her wealthy Jewish parents fled the Bolshevik Revolution. In the 1930s, after the success of her novel
David Golder
, which was soon made into a movie, Irène became part of the Paris literary scene, with many right-wing writers among her friends. In the late 1930s, she and her banker husband, Michel Epstein, converted to Catholicism; nevertheless, they were subsequently refused French nationality.

As a precaution, fearing that she and Michel might be interned, Némirovsky sent her two small daughters, Denise and Élisabeth, to
Issy-l’Évêque, a quiet village in south Burgundy that was home to the children’s governess and where Irène and her family had spent the previous two summers. At the same time, she told a French magazine featuring women authors that she was writing articles for foreign newspapers “which make known the magnificent morale of France, which portray the quiet determination of combatants, the quiet courage of women.”
⁹
She also wrote articles for
Marie-Claire
, offered excerpts of a new novel,
Les Chiens et les loups
(The Dogs and the Wolves), to
Candide
, and published short stories in
Gringoire
, a political and literary weekly that was now opposed to war with Germany. Even after German soldiers entered France, Némirovsky kept hoping for a French counterattack. Once defeat looked unavoidable, she left Paris to rejoin her children in Issy-l’Évêque, which would become her home for the next two years.

Gide, who was in the south of France, chose to stay out of the limelight. “No, decidedly, I shall not speak on the radio,” he wrote in his journal on October 30, 1939. “I shall not contribute to pumping oxygen into the public. The newspapers already contain enough patriotic yappings. The more French I feel, the more loath I am to let my mind be warped. If it regimented itself, it would lose all value.” But the entry also strongly suggested that, if he did choose to speak or write, he was not sure what position he would take. “I do not want to blush tomorrow for what I should write today,” he noted, adding: “My unseasonable thoughts, until better times, I will store up in this notebook.” Some three months later, on February 7, 1940, he worried about the consequences of war: “One must expect that after the war, and even though victors, we shall plunge into such a mess that nothing but a determined dictatorship will be able to get us out of it.” Then, on May 21, with German forces advancing rapidly into France, Gide despaired of the French, writing, “O incurably frivolous people of France! You are going to pay dearly today for your lack of application, your heedlessness, your smug reclining among so many charming virtues.”
¹⁰

Drieu La Rochelle, the Fascist writer, had been wounded in World War I and was exempted from army duty on health grounds, which allowed him to continue writing fiction and for the
Nouvelle Revue Française
. But while he was outwardly self-confident, his private war journal, published decades after his suicide in 1945, portrays him as confused and insecure in the countdown to open war. Jews remained an obsession, and he repeatedly speculated about whether his longtime
friend and ideological foe, Aragon, was Jewish.
¹¹
A tall, good-looking man, he wrote boastfully of how women had always loved him, then expressed shame that he had never been a “real man” of courage.
¹²
He even recalled that he had married his second wife, Olesia Sienkiewicz, “persuaded by the idea that she was a lesbian and could never truly love me.”
^*
13
But when Drieu La Rochelle managed to look beyond himself, he took France’s pulse accurately. “The war has changed nothing, quite the contrary,” he wrote in December 1939. “The French are more divided than ever, behind the façade of general agreement resulting from their lethargy.”
¹⁴

Sartre was also writing, but from the front. Stationed as an army meteorologist at Marmoutier, less than twenty miles from the German border, he exchanged almost-daily letters with Beauvoir, who also came to visit him. He filled notebooks with reflections on literature, history, politics and philosophy; these would serve as the groundwork for his existentialist treatise
L’Être et le néant
(Being and Nothingness), published in 1943. He also offered acute observations of military life, mocking an order to denounce anyone who displayed defeatist tendencies, an order that he promptly violated by questioning the usefulness of the war. “And what are we fighting for?” he wrote on October 20, 1939.