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By Root 2427 0

and declared war on Germany on 13 October. Five days later, Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun marked rather than celebrated her seventieth birthday. The matriarch remained vigorous, working daily at the library, helping its staff to endure occupation and completing her book on Shakespeare. Her son and his wife lived as if nothing had changed. In September, they had gone with Seymour Weller, the American manager of the Château Haut-Brion vineyards in Bordeaux, to watch the harvest and sample one of the world’s finest wines. René rarely missed a horse race at Longchamp, and Josée was a regular buyer of dresses from Elsa Schiaparelli. In Paris, the couple attended the premiere of Jean Delannoy’s film L’Éternel retour and, with the actress Arletty, opening night at the Comédie Française of Paul Claudel’s Soulier de satin.

Clara, struggling to keep the American Library open, bore her son’s vilification in the American press with characteristic stoicism. Friends in Cincinnati were reading that her family in France had somehow become traitors–a stain on a patriotic American family and on Lafayette’s descendants. Moreover, the Gaullists in London let it be known that there would be scores to settle with those who collaborated with the occupier. First on the list for retribution was Pierre Laval. His son-in-law was not far behind.

The American press campaign against René de Chambrun intensified in November and December 1943, when the New York Herald Tribune published three front-page ‘exposés’. ‘Count de Chambrun in His Role of U.S. Citizen,’ the first headline trumpeted on 28 November. The paper called his dual citizenship ‘nebulous’, although both his parents were American-born and he had demonstrated his right to American citizenship in court when the New York Bar Association admitted him in 1930. ‘At present he is attached to Fernand de Brinon, Vichy’s Ambassador to Paris, former public relations counsel of Nazi Germany in New York,’ journalist Paul Wohl wrote, without naming his source. René was an unofficial adviser to Laval, but he did not work for de Brinon. In the next article, ‘Laval’s Fortune Reported Safe in U.S.’, Paul Wohl claimed that Laval’s money was ‘brought to America in a diplomatic valise in September 1940, by his son-in-law and personal assistant, Count René de Chambrun, when he visited the United States for the second time after the French defeat with his wife, Countess José [sic] Laval de Chambrun’. No proof was offered that Laval had ever sent money to the United States. René admitted that he had taken cash the other way, from Americans like John Jay and Mrs Seton Porter, to friends in France.

Wohl’s articles accused René and Josée of engaging in ‘anti-British propaganda’ in the United States, although it was René who had campaigned for the United States to send weapons to Britain. The assault on his character extended to his family. Wohl wrote that Aldebert de Chambrun and his brother, Charles, were ‘shrewd opportunists’. He did not mention that the third brother, Pierre, had been the only senator to vote against capitulation in July 1940 and that Pierre’s daughter, Marthe de Chambrun Ruspoli, had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 for providing civilian clothes to escaping Allied soldiers. Clara was upbraided as well, because ‘she did not leave Paris in June, 1940’. The final proof of disloyalty was, ‘The Paris building of the National City Bank of New York, of which General Aldebert is the nominal head, now houses Marshal Goering’s staff. It was one of the first buildings turned over to the Nazis.’ Two floors of the building had been requisitioned, not by Marshal Goering, but by Joseph Goebbels’s Propagandastaffel. Its tenants, including the National City Bank and René’s law firm, were not consulted. (Goering’s Paris headquarters were in the Palais de Luxembourg opposite Clara and Aldebert’s house in the rue de Vaugirard.) The most likely source of the disinformation was British intelligence, which had clashed with René over food supplies to southern France. Although the charges against René de