Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [126]
Sylvia was pleased to meet ‘our lovely Drue Tartière’ and to see again ‘our genius sculptress’ Mabel Gardner ‘in a long cloak, her golden hair like the angels in the Italian pictures’. Drue called Mabel Gardner the ‘sculptress who had lived in Montparnasse for many years’ and saw her as ‘a middle aged woman who looked somewhat untidy, but was perfectly serene and had a detached, mystic air’. Sylvia introduced Drue to Katherine Dudley, ‘friend of my friend “Baron” Molet and of Picasso’. Through Katherine, Drue met ‘Noel Murphy, a tall, blond, middle-aged woman who looked like a Viking. She had studied lieder in Germany and sang in concerts in Paris. Mrs. Murphy had won the Croix de Guerre in 1940 for her work in evacuating refugees under shellfire.’ After meeting many old and new friends in the monkey house, Drue noticed an incongruous sight.
My attention was drawn to a woman who was sitting on the edge of a cot with an ermine wrap around her feet. She was passing around a five-pound box of chocolates to her friends. I learned that she was Mrs. Charles Bedaux, at whose château the Duke of Windsor married Mrs. Simpson. Mrs. Bedaux said in a very loud voice that she did not expect to be with us long, and that she was waiting for Otto Abetz, the Nazi fifth columnist in France before the war and the new Nazi Ambassador in France, to come and get her and her sister released.
Sylvia was surprised to see, as more and more women arrived, American nuns from convents all over the Occupied Zone. The community of American women in France, Sylvia wrote, was an extraordinary mélange: ‘There were Americans coming from every kind of milieu–a number of artists as it was Paris, a number of French war-brides of American soldiers from World War I, some teachers, some whores, some dancers, a milliner or two, a poet or two, a lady who lived at the Ritz, the wife of Bedaux the spy and quite a few crazy women whose case was not improved by capture.’
Sarah Watson was, in Sylvia’s words, ‘busy trying to make us all as comfortable as though in her pleasant hostel, which was with only these cots around the walls, close together, and as we discovered soon when it rained, water dripping from a leak in the roof on our faces’. The conditions affected some of the women more than others. ‘Sick women were lying on their cots, moaning,’ Drue wrote. ‘Nervous and anxious wives and mothers were walking up and down restlessly. Everybody was crammed together in this uncomfortable room, where puddles of rain had gathered from leaks in the glass roof.’ Worse, Nazi guards lurking in the bathroom ‘did not seem at all embarrassed at the duty of watching us’. Many of the women, including Sylvia and Drue, had doctors’ letters certifying that internment would damage their health.
After a dinner of ‘soup, meat loaf, and potatoes and German black bread’, the women retired to their dormitories. Some of them cried, until, as Drue noted, ‘this wailing gave way to a cacophony of snores’. In the darkness, leaking rainwater drenched Drue’s feet. German soldiers with flashlights stomped into the room to count the women. A few screamed, and one blurted, ‘Don’t look now. I’ve got a man in my bed.’ Drue wrote, ‘When the Germans had counted methodically up to a number, like forty-four, some of the women would shout, “sixty-four,” and get them so mixed up that they had to start all over again. The soldiers yelled roughly, “Sei still!” but it did no good. The women roared with laughter at them.’ Sylvia remembered, ‘All night long, they would flash the lights in our faces. To count us. They went around counting us, and we were never the same number. And they found this a great bore.’
In the early morning, soldiers woke the women and went to the gallery above the dormitory to watch them get dressed. Not every woman, Drue commented, was embarrassed.
As