Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [141]
When Dr Aboulker and the colleagues who seized Algiers for the Americans were finally released, the aged doctor told A. J. Liebling, ‘It is almost impossible for one of us to see Murphy. He shuns us like a case of an extremely contagious disease.’ Murphy, in the aftermath of the invasion, was also ignoring his former host and frequent source, Charles Eugene Bedaux. Bedaux’s letters to Murphy went unanswered.
The New York Metropolitan Opera opened its thirty-eighth season at the beginning of December with a lavish production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Daughter of the Regiment. The French-born soprano Lily Pons, wearing a demure white gown and revolutionary stocking hat, waved what Life magazine called ‘the Fighting French Cross of Lorraine instead of the Tricolor while the entire company renders the Marseillaise’. The Cross of Lorraine was the symbol used by Charles de Gaulle and the Free French in homage to the Lorrainers, who had endured German occupation from 1870 to emerge once again as free Frenchmen in 1918. The rousing anthem, which was not in Donizetti’s original, may have convinced some of the audience that, with American help, France would be freed of German troops as Lorraine was in 1918.
TWENTY-NINE
Alone at Vittel
ON 10 DECEMBER, Dr von Weber informed Drue Tartière that she could leave Vittel the next day. Dr Lévy took her aside and asked her to visit his mother in Paris. Drue thanked him for all his help, which he had offered at the risk of his life. ‘His eyes filled with tears,’ she wrote, ‘and he went out.’ Noel Murphy and Sarah Watson were released with her. Collaborationist friends in Paris had obtained Mrs Murphy’s release, while Sarah Watson’s patron had been the rector of the University of Paris, to which her American girls hostel was attached. A Hungarian priest with connections at Vichy may also have interceded for her. The three American women travelled under German guard on the overnight train from Nancy to Paris.
The departure of Sarah Watson and Drue Tartière left Sylvia Beach on her own in the hospital. Nights grew lonelier, and the German censor had still not returned her copies of the complete works of William Shakespeare. She read her bible. She wrote letters, most of which never arrived. And, as she wrote to Adrienne, she had ‘migraines toujours’.
‘Suddenly, on Christmas Eve, we were told that all Americans were to move to the hotel reserved for us,’ Sylvia wrote. The move was not much of a Christmas present.
Ours [the Hôtel Central] was carefully picked as very rundown, though it had been good in its days, apparently. It was a shabby, dirty old building, with plumbing out of order: the room I was to share with the other Sylvia, the Giraff, had dirty water over the floor which one of my fellow prisoners, the Princess Murat, was mopping up into a goldedged chamber pot with ‘Grand Hotel’ emblazoned on it. In the middle of the room, a large rathole. The kind of room in which my librarian friend said ‘you slit your wrists.’ … The bathroom, I discovered, had no water, and the tub was for some reason full of mud.
The ‘Giraff’ was released before she could share the room with Sylvia. Sylvia believed that the woman’s husband, a French colonel, had arranged it. Maurice Saillet sent Sylvia a Christmas hamper of treats from himself and Adrienne that Sylvia thought was ‘magnifique’. Adrienne’s sister, Rinette, sent her home-made gingerbread. Sylvia’s thank-you letter for the presents to Adrienne ended, ‘Dis à notre ami tu dors.’ Tu dors, you sleep, was her play on the name of their friend Tudor Wilkinson, an aged American millionaire from St Louis, Missouri, who was doing his best to obtain Sylvia’s release. A former thoroughbred