Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (39 page)

A car pulls up just behind them. Sound of a door banging.

JULIETTE,
quietly
:
Voilà…Il est toujours plus facile de partir que de rester…

DAVIS
gets into the taxi. He turns round and stares through the rear window at Juliette (at the camera) with the look of a man being taken to jail.

JULIETTE
watches the taxi disappear into the traffic towards the Rue Bonaparte. She stands still for a long moment, then turns around and looks over at the church spire…

38. PLACE SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS.

…which now appears in colour.

(
All the final scenes are in colour.
)

Long take; hand-held camera. Medium zoom at distance: the life of the square: people, cars, bicycles.

Black screen.

Title
: ‘Five years on…’

39. WALDORF-ASTORIA, NEW YORK.

The grand hotel facade on Park Avenue; yellow taxis, doormen, etc. Expensive hotel carpet; door with shiny brass fittings and a spy-hole. Door opens.

JULIETTE
; her face is powdered and almost emaciated compared to her pudgier adolescent face; her nose is artificially thinner. She holds out her arms (speaking in English)
: Miles! I am so glad…

DAVIS,
features taut, eyes bulging, visibly stoned; dressed in a shapeless sports jacket
: Yeah, right. (
Looks nervously down the corridor, both ways.
) What did I tell ya? (
Looks past her into the room.
) They gave you a whole suite? (
Swaggering like a pimp. Looks back down the corridor.
) Here’s your room service.

Man in blue Waldorf-Astoria uniform arrives with trolley; sees Juliette and Davis, and freezes.

DAVIS,
taking the bottle from the ice-bucket
: What’s the matter with you, motherfucker? (
To Juliette
:) What did I tell ya? I told ya I never wanna see you in this country. (
Jerking his head. Unconvincing swagger.
) You got some money? I need some money right now!

JULIETTE,
looking shocked, searches in her bag, hands Davis some dollar bills.

DAVIS
grabs the money, pushes past the man. He heads along the corridor, takes a swig from the bottle.

40. HOTEL ELEVATOR.

DAVIS
in the elevator, surrounded by mirrors, staring wild-eyed at his feet; looks up, tears in his eyes.

41. CONCERT ROOM, WALDORF-ASTORIA.

JULIETTE
on stage–a slim, dark figure, and the microphone stand. She is dressed in black and her hair is long and straight, but it now looks designedly artless, and the stage lighting gives her an air of sophistication. She sings the whole song
, ‘Si tu t’imagines, fillette’–
from the orchestra intro to the audience reaction at the end. (Three minutes.) She gives a muted rendition, ice-cool and slightly winsome. The emotions on her face are those required by the song.

(
Subtitles:
If you think, little girl…They’re going to last forever…The days of love and passion…You’ve got another think coming, little girl…)

Cut twice during the song to
DAVIS,
in the hotel lobby, arguing with the clerk and being asked to leave.

End with
JULIETTE,
engulfed in applause, looking straight at the camera. A lingering close up of her face and fluttering false eyelashes.

Black screen.

42. PLACE SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS.

During this scene, the credits appear.

Film crew on the square. JULIETTE, wearing a corseted Dior coat; otherwise much the same as in the previous scene. ACTORS in gabardines and fedoras standing around, chatting and smoking.

Slowly fade in trumpet music, as in the title sequence.

MAKE-UP WOMAN
powdering Juliette’s face.

DIRECTOR,
with megaphone
:
À vos places!

JULIETTE,
pointing to two men, standing close by; she raises her hands at the director.

Close up: po-faced critic in black-rimmed spectacles talking to another critic
:

CRITIC 1: That’s not how she looked! She was just a
girl
…In fact, she looked like a juvenile delinquent…

CRITIC 2: What do you expect? This is what they call ‘reality’!…(
They laugh conspiratorially.
)

DIRECTOR,
to man with clipboard
: Get those idiots off the set!…(
Looking round, in exasperation
:) Where are the Gestapo?! (
To the actors in gabardines
:) Messieurs, when you’re ready…

ACTORS
drop their cigarettes, crush them under their jackboots, and walk towards a black Citroën. One of the actors, as he passes
JULIETTE,
tickles her waist
.
She turns, laughing, towards the camera. Despite the make-up, she looks happy and natural.

Freeze frame.

Fade out.

Credits continue.

1. SNIPER FIRE

N
O ONE WHO
was there that day ever forgot what he saw. The ceremony would have been memorable enough on its own; the dire emergency that plunged it into chaos gave it the aura of a truly exceptional, almost supernatural event. It was as though God had decreed that, at the end of the latest episode of the saga titled ‘France’, every plot-line should converge at Notre-Dame-de-Paris on the 26th of August 1944. The leading actor, appropriately named de Gaulle, was placed where he could be seen from every angle. He seemed to belong to the same field of vision as the towers of the cathedral. As the great bell tolled, dinning each historic moment into the collective memory, ten thousand brains whirred like movie cameras, recording every sight and sound for the benefit of future grandchildren whose procreation struck them there and then as a sacred obligation. The race would continue undiminished, massed behind a leader whose invulnerability had been tested before the eyes of the civilized world.

The man whose voice had resonated from the tomb of exile and emboldened his cringing listeners in their darkened rooms had stridden into Paris like a giant. Though his gauntness bore poignant testimony to four long years of London fog and English food, he still had the bearing of a leader. He had stooped beneath the Arc de Triomphe and laid a cross of white roses on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He had walked the full length of the Champs-É lysées, cheered from every tree and lamp post, saluted by officers whose cratered cheeks were moist with tears, and kissed by pretty girls who darted from the crowd waving handkerchiefs and ribbons. The tanks of General Leclerc had rumbled along at his side like the chariots of myrmidons. Only occasionally had he been obliged to ask his comrades at the front of the procession to remain a few steps behind him.

On the Place de la Concorde, the smiling generals climbed into cars and were whisked along the Rue de Rivoli to the Hôtel de Ville, where de Gaulle was received by the Liberation Committee as head of the provisional government. When he emerged on the balcony to address the crowd, the surge of officers behind him almost sent him tumbling over the edge. One of his subordinates later described how he had squatted at the General’s feet, embracing his knees to prevent him from falling headlong into the sea of faces. ‘The enemy is teetering’, said de Gaulle to the crowd, ‘but fights on on our soil. We who shall have seen our history’s finest hour must prove ourselves worthy of France to the very end.’

From the Hôtel de Ville, de Gaulle and his government-to-be crossed the river and reached the cathedral of Notre-Dame at 4.20 in the afternoon for the service of thanksgiving.

As so often happens when thousands of people witness the same event, no two accounts are the same. There is even some doubt about the identity of the villains who nearly ruined the hour of triumph. The file remains open to this day, but since disaster was averted and the final outcome has never been in doubt, even the most determined conspiracy theorists have shown little interest in the case.

The BBC’s Robert Reid, who had arrived from Saint-Lô a day before with the US Army, was well placed to observe the critical moments. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground, near the west door of the cathedral, holding his microphone. As soon as the emergency was over, he rushed to find his recording man, who was staring at the disc on his turntable: it was covered in tiny fragments of medieval stone. The two men hurried over to the Hôtel Scribe to submit the recording to the censors. There was a heated discussion about the desirability of telling the world that General de Gaulle had nearly been assassinated. Finally, permission was granted, and the recording was broadcast the next day on the BBC’s
War Report
, then retransmitted by CBS and NBC.

Spellbound listeners heard Reid’s hoarse, high-pitched voice above the cheers of the crowd: ‘
The General is being presented to people. He is being received…He’s being received…
’ Suddenly, there was the crackle of gunfire, voices crying out and the sound of a Yorkshireman and his microphone being trampled by a crowd of Parisians. There followed a few moments of silence. Then the mutedly ecstatic voice of Reid returned. He might have been narrating a novel by John Buchan, but the sounds of commotion all around him confirmed the veracity of his report:

Years later, Reid wrote a more detailed account of the incident. It was published by his grandson in 2007. The snipers appeared to have taken up position inside the cathedral–in the upper galleries and behind the great organ–and also on the roof. A man standing very close to Reid was hit in the neck, and others were injured as they tried to hide behind pillars and under chairs. Estimates of the number of casualties vary from one hundred to three hundred. He remembered the reek of cordite mingling with the smell of incense, and ‘the crazy scene’ of modern warfare in a twelfth-century cathedral. And, like everyone else, he marvelled at the sight of General de Gaulle standing bare-headed before the altar like a man sent from God: ‘There were blinding flashes inside the cathedral, there were pieces of stone ricocheting around the place.’ ‘Heaven knows how they missed him, for they were firing the whole time.’

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, two questions were asked: who were the snipers, and–a largely rhetorical question–how on earth did General de Gaulle survive the hail of bullets? Eventually, when peace had returned to Europe and the heroes of the Liberation were mired in domestic politics, a third, insidious question was asked, though only in private: was the identity of the snipers somehow connected with de Gaulle’s miraculous survival?

None of these questions has ever been answered to everyone’s satisfaction. Reid himself saw four ‘raffish-looking’ gunmen being led from the cathedral: they were dressed in grey flannel trousers and white singlets, and appeared to him ‘very obvious Germans’. Meanwhile, across the square, a nine-year-old boy, whose father worked as a chauffeur at the Préfecture de Police, had climbed out of the window of his fourth-floor apartment onto a sloping zinc roof. Crouching behind the stone parapet, he looked over at Notre-Dame and observed shots being fired from the top of the towers. Some moments later, ‘a few suspects’ were marched onto the square. The boy, whose name was Michel Barrat, identified them as ‘
miliciens
’, which is to say, members of the French paramilitary force that had served as auxiliaries of the Gestapo. As he leaned over and peered down at the square, he saw one of the arrested men being beaten up, and perhaps killed, by the crowd. ‘That brutal scene is still engraved on my memory’, he wrote in 1998.

While these arrests were taking place, sporadic gunfire was still scattering the crowd, though no one could tell whether the shots were being fired by German snipers or by trigger-happy soldiers of the Résistance.

The Liberation of Paris was a bloody and protracted affair. On 26 August, when de Gaulle marched down the Champs-É lysées, the city was still swarming with German soldiers, Gestapo officers, Vichy militia and other
collaborateurs
. Some of those desperate men may have hidden in the cathedral, seeking sanctuary or vowing to die in a blaze of vengeful glory. Anyone familiar with the story of Quasimodo would have known that, apart from the sewers, there was no better hiding place in Paris. When he was asked why no one had thought to conduct a search of all the stairways and galleries of the cathedral before the service of thanksgiving, the
gardien
of the towers replied, ‘It’s like the catacombs in there!’ A thorough search
was
conducted after the shooting, but according to a lieutenant-colonel serving with the Second Armoured Division, the officers who were sent up into the towers to investigate ‘found no one there but policemen’.

De Gaulle himself suggested a third possibility in his
Mémoires de guerre
. He, more than anyone else, was aware of the dangerous vacuum created by the retreating tide of fascism. He knew that yesterday’s comrades might be tomorrow’s political rivals, and that, despite the presence of the American army, a coup d’état might occur at any moment. In his memoirs, written in the 1950s, when he was preparing his return to power, he asked himself and his readers, ‘Why would a German soldier or a
milicien
have shot at chimneys instead of aiming at me, when I was exposed and in the open?’ He hinted, none too delicately, that the mysterious snipers were members of the French Communist Party: ‘I have the feeling that this was a put-up job, perpetrated with the political aim of spreading panic in the crowd and justifying the continued imposition of a revolutionary power’.

If the communists had been hoping to prove themselves indispensable by maintaining a state of terror, the attempt failed completely. The gun-battle at Notre-Dame only established Charles de Gaulle as the uncontested political and spiritual leader of the new republic. By striding up the aisle and standing at the altar in a hail of bullets, he had written himself into every future history of France. Some of the men who were trying to elbow their way into the new regime thought that de Gaulle had effectively conducted a coup d’état of his own, but any sly insinuations were silenced by the glorious outcome, and the unanswered questions would soon be of purely academic interest: What had those policemen been doing in the towers, and how had the snipers in the cathedral eluded the search party? Who were the arrested men seen by Robert Reid and the boy on the roof? And why did the official inquest that was held immediately afterwards find no trace of any arrest?

Only a man who begrudged de Gaulle his hour of glory would have bothered to ask such questions, and only a man who hoped to emulate his triumph might have wondered what lessons could be learned from his masterly manipulation of what appeared to be a totally unpredictable event.

2. OBSERVATORY GARDENS

L
ATE IN THE EVENING
of 15 October 1959, a man who looked rather pleasantly self-satisfied, though perhaps a little nervous, sat in the famous Brasserie Lipp on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, guarding the remains of a delicate sauerkraut and a bottle of Gewürztraminer. The waiters who buzzed about his table showed by the swift discretion of their gestures that this was a regular and honoured customer. He had the good looks of a man who, though well into his forties, is cheered by the sight that greets him in the shaving-mirror every morning. In the evening (as on that evening), the merest hint of dilapidation–a kink in his thin black tie, a slightly rumpled collar, the five-o’clock shadow on his upper lip–suggested a day devoted to matters that transcended personal appearance but without posing any serious threat to elegance. He had what he might have called an air of quiet dignity. An occasional crinkling of the eyes and a boyish pout that a novelist might have described as ‘sensual’ and ‘indicative of a strong will’ endowed him with a certain charm that, until recently, had served him well.

The Brasserie Lipp was François Mitterrand’s favourite eating-place. It was half a mile from the Senate and half a mile from the apartment that he occupied with his wife and two sons in the Rue Guynemer on the quiet side of the Jardin du Luxembourg. Though he enjoyed a reflective stroll through the streets of the Left Bank, he had apparently decided that evening, for safety’s sake, not to walk home. His blue Peugeot 403 was parked across the road, ready to be driven away at a moment’s notice. It was close to midnight, and, although the Flore and the Deux Magots were still busy, the traffic had thinned out and there was little danger of his being trapped in one of those interminable Chinese puzzles of tightly parked cars which, to foreign visitors, are one of the wonders of Paris.

He sat downstairs, near the door, in the brittle, tinkling light of mirrors and ceramic tiles depicting huge, fleshy green leaves and parrots paradoxically camouflaged by their vivid colours. On the ceiling, smoke-cured Cupids twisted their little brown bodies to aim their arrows at invisible targets. Even at this late hour, he was half-expecting his former colleague, Robert Pesquet, to turn up at the Lipp. For a moment, a man with Pesquet’s build had stood in the shadow of a doorway across the road, but then had disappeared. It would not have been surprising if he had changed his mind. With the confusion that now prevailed, one often found oneself associating with unreliable, slightly sinister fools like Pesquet.

Fifteen years had passed since the day he had saved the General from falling off the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville. Naturally, de Gaulle had not looked to see who had saved him, and Mitterrand himself had told the story so many times with slightly differing details that he was not even sure that it had actually happened. On the following day, General de Gaulle had summoned him to the War Ministry and, recognizing the man who had refused in 1943 to merge his own resistance group with the Gaullists, had said, like an impatient headmaster, ‘You again!’ Instead of confirming him as the self-appointed Minister for Prisoners of War, de Gaulle had informed him that his services would not be required in the new government.

With de Gaulle’s retirement from politics in 1946, his own career had taken off. He already had the velvety charm that later earned him the nickname ‘the Fox’. The devious road-map of his past, which had taken him from xenophobic nationalism to almost simultaneous distinction in the Vichy regime and the Résistance, and then to that broad domain of opportunity called the centre-left, now looked almost like a bold itinerary based on long-held convictions. He had been the youngest Minister of the Interior in French history. Recently, he had served as Minister of Justice, which had enabled him to amass a considerable treasure of experience, friends, contacts and compromising dossiers on all sorts of people, though not, as it happened, on Robert Pesquet. But then Pesquet was able to compromise himself without anyone’s assistance.