Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [188]
The three Chambruns waited in the gravel forecourt of the Matignon with Josée. Upstairs, where the only light in blacked-out Paris shone weakly from rows of candles, Laval said farewell to a few friends and fellow politicians. He came down holding his cane and wearing his familiar white tie and dark hat. René watched his father-in-law kiss Josée goodbye as he got into a sleek black Hotchkiss car. A moment later, Laval opened the car door, stepped onto the running board and rushed back to Josée. Giving her another kiss, he said, ‘Toi, encore une fois’ (‘You, one more time’). The palace’s iron gate opened, and the Lavals disappeared into the night. Now, the Chambruns would have to save themselves.
The occupation was ending ignominiously for Count René de Chambrun, who had bound his destiny to Pierre Laval’s. Only later would he admit the possibility of a different life. If he had married an American he loved before he met Josée, he would not have collaborated with Laval. To Josée’s biographer, Yves Pourcher, he confided, ‘I was in love with the daughter of the chief of the Federal Reserve Bank, who was originally Jewish and German. I would not have been happy, because she was so oriented to art, to music. Not me, apart from do-re-me-fa-so . And in Cincinnati they [the Longworth family] were anti-German and anti-Jewish.’ He did not tell Pourcher the name of the woman, whom he had met when he lived in New York between 1930 and 1934. The Federal Reserve chief at the time was Eugene Meyer. Meyer, son of a German-speaking immigrant from Alsace, was the Reserve’s first Jewish head since its founding in 1913. Meyer had two daughters, Katharine and Florence. In 1930, his younger daughter, Katharine, was thirteen, and the elder, Florence, was nineteen. Florence Meyer was undoubtedly René’s first, albeit secret, love. René explained to Pourcher that the Longworths’ objections to her were ‘strictly American’, in that Cincinnati’s large German community had opposed his Uncle Nicholas Longworth in elections. There was also an aversion in conservative, Christian circles to what were called ‘mixed marriages’. If René had married Florence Meyer, the Free French, American and British forces approaching Paris would be celebrating Bunny de Chambrun as the soldier who persuaded his cousin Franklin Roosevelt not to abandon Britain in 1940. Instead, all three reviled him as a collaborator and confidant of the despised Pierre Laval.
After the Gestapo left the Hôtel Matignon with Pierre and Jeanne Laval, René and Josée returned to their magnificent duplex apartment at 6-bis Place du Palais Bourbon. A hundred yards from their front door, German troops in the Chamber of Deputies were digging in and erecting bunkers to defend themselves from the Allies and the Resistance. René reflected that only Laval’s harsh look had prevented Josée and himself from ending up imprisoned at Sigmaringen castle in Germany with Maréchal Pétain, Laval and most of the Vichy regime. Paris would soon be no safer: ‘We had risked spending the last days of the occupation in a German prison, and being transferred at the liberation to a French prison. We had to disappear quickly, which is what we did, the next day, in going to seek refuge in the rue d’Andigné at the house of our American friend, Seymour Weller.’ René had envisioned Weller’s flat as a hiding place for Edouard Herriot, but things happened so quickly that he took it for himself and Josée. While Parisians prepared to welcome their American, British and Free French liberators, the younger Chambruns