Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [167]
Deserted by his colleague Ramond and his friend Ledebur, Bedaux turned to his family. On 22 January, he wrote to his brother Gaston, ‘I received your short card asking for news. I couldn’t write before. I can today. I don’t have your card with me, my papers are at the censor’s, but I think you wrote last February, I think so, that makes nearly a year and we are ageing at a crazy speed.’
He asked how Gaston’s son, François, was doing at the Polytechnic and whether ‘François should keep an eye open to succeeding you one day in running all of the Bedaux businesses’. The letter made clear that his reconciliation with his own son, Charles Emile, had not gone so far that he would bequeath his companies to him. He suggested that Fern make the Château de Candé self-supporting by turning it into a conference centre. The letter closed with a fraternal farewell: ‘It was always my intention to live to see the years and the centuries, but it’s war, and an accident can always happen. With a long lease [on Candé], the formalities would be easier for Fern. I live only for the day when I’ll join her as well as you and your family. Your affectionate brother, Charles.’
Bedaux’s lodgings above the garage were locked at night, but guards allowed him outside during the day to sunbathe on the grass and take walks. During one of his exercise periods, he told Patrolman Joseph Swank, ‘Well, one of these days, Charles E. Bedaux will be dead and buried and then the Bedaux case will be a closed file, won’t it?’ Mrs Waite stayed in Miami to be near him. Edmund Jones, his new lawyer from Washington, tried to prepare his defence without knowing what the charges were. In the meantime, Charles Bedaux waited for his second hearing to begin on Valentine’s Day.
On 14 February, the second hearing on the citizenship of Charles Eugene Bedaux convened at the Border Patrol Station in Miami. Unlike the first, which had taken four days, this one was brief. It began at eight in the morning and would adjourn in time for lunch. Presiding officer John L. Burling announced that the Immigration and Naturalization Service had determined that Charles Bedaux was indeed an American citizen entitled to remain in the United States. After delivering the verdict, Burling reverted to his other job, that of prosecutor for the Department of Justice. In that capacity, he officially charged Charles Bedaux, US citizen, with ‘treason against the United States’. The penalty for treason, as Bedaux knew, was death.
In his flat above the garage that evening, Bedaux conferred with his lawyer, Edmund Jones, for about an hour. At ten o’clock, he said good night to his guards and went to bed. In the morning at eleven o’clock, Mrs Waite and Edmund Jones came to visit him. Unusually for a man who began his days early, Bedaux was still asleep. Mrs Waite went into his bedroom to wake him, but he could not be roused. His eyes stayed closed, and his tongue was enlarged. But he was breathing. On the bedside table lay a letter addressed to Isabella Waite:
Dear Friend,
I cannot defend my good name now without endangering those I love.
After the war my beloved wife and my son will prove that I am a good, honest, deserving American. I want you to give her this letter as a token of my undying love.
Give my thanks to all those who have faith in me.
To you dear friend my eternal gratitude for your absolute faith and devotion.
I kept the Luminal the authorities gave me.
Charles Bedaux
The Associated Press reported from Miami on 17 February that Charles Bedaux ‘is seriously ill at the Jackson Memorial Hospital’. The unsourced story continued, ‘Bedaux has been in technical custody here since late December, when he