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tons of dynamite beneath the Palais de Luxembourg so that, when the order came, they would destroy the seventeenth-century palace with its Senate chamber and its fabulous collection of paintings. General Dietrich von Choltitz, whom Hitler had personally named commander of Grossparis on 7 August, had instructed army engineers to set demolition charges throughout Paris. ‘Whatever happens,’ General Alfred Jodl, the army’s chief of operations, reminded von Choltitz, ‘the Führer expects you to carry out the widest destruction possible in the area assigned to your command.’ Von Choltitz ordered explosives to be planted under every bridge, electricity station and water-pumping plant as well as the most famous monuments. Marked for destruction were the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Hôpital des Invalides with Napoleon’s tomb and the Palais du Luxembourg. Blowing up the palace would take Clara’s house and much of the rue de Vaugirard with it. The explosion would not spare the apartments of Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier close by in the rue de l’Odéon.

‘Going to and fro was getting too unpleasant,’ Sylvia wrote of her daily walks from Sarah Watson’s student hostel to Adrienne’s flat. With the sudden eruption of street violence in August, the Germans had more important concerns than arresting Sylvia Beach. So, she moved back into her flat in the rue de l’Odéon. German troops patrolled the streets with more fear and hostility than they had before the Normandy landings. ‘In the mornings, towards 11 o’clock,’ Sylvia wrote, ‘the Nazis sallied forth from the Luxembourg with their tanks and went down the Boulevard Saint Michel, shooting here and there. Rather disagreeable for those of us who were lined up at the bakery at the bread hour.’

A straight line of only 500 yards separated Sylvia Beach’s apartment from Clara de Chambrun’s house. For four years of occupation, the two American women had shared the Sixth Arrondissement and a love of books. Yet they inhabited different worlds. Clara, 70 years of age and friend of men she believed had shielded France from the worst of German occupation, distrusted the mobs that were forming to take over Paris when the Germans left. They were, in her eyes, ‘wartime profiteers’, ‘ruffians’ and ‘urchins.’ Sylvia, 57 and a friend of résistants and Jews murdered by the Nazis, saw the same militants as heroes. Negotiating the moral maze of occupation, even Sylvia had thanked a Vichy police minister, Jacques Benoist-Méchin, for her release from internment in 1943. And Clara, whatever her sympathy for Vichy, looked forward to the arrival of the American army and never doubted her loyalty to her native and adopted lands. The Countess from Cincinnati and the publisher from Princeton represented, as well as differing French reactions to occupation, opposing American conceptions of right and wrong. To Sylvia, liberty came first. Clara believed liberty was impossible without order.

Clara and Sylvia watched the same armed men and women erecting roadblocks in their Sixth Arrondissement, not that they saw them in the same way. Clara wrote, ‘Amateurish barricades sprang up at about every six or ten blocks, which embarrassed regular traffic, but which meant nothing to a tank.’ The same barricades symbolized defiance and courage to Sylvia:

The children engaged in our defence piled up furniture, stoves, dust-bins, and so on at the foot of the rue de l’Odéon, and behind these barricades youths with F.F.I. [Forces Françaises de l’Intérieure] armbands and a strange assortment of old-fashioned weapons aimed at the Germans stationed on the steps of the theatre at the top of the street. These [German] soldiers were rather dangerous, but the boys in the Resistance were fearless and they played an important part in the Liberation of Paris.

In the midst of the random shooting in late August, Sylvia received heartening news:

We heard that ‘they’ were leaving us, and we joined a jolly crowd of Parisians walking down the Boulevard Saint Michel singing and waving w.c. brushes. We were feeling very joyful and liberated. But