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Secretary of State Cordell Hull sent an urgent telegram to the American Minister in Switzerland, Leland Harrison, on 25 August. ‘Telegraph exact location Moulin [sic] and request Swiss to report urgently latest known whereabouts of Jackson family.’ The Americans were out of date, Sumner and Phillip Jackson having been sent from Moulins to Neuengamme concentration camp a month earlier. The State Department put together what information on Sumner, Phillip and Toquette that it could from a variety of sources. Minister Harrison informed Cordell Hull on 28 August that all three Jacksons might have been moved to Germany ‘as hostages’. Hull fired back instructions that the Swiss insist, on America’s behalf, that the Germans reveal their whereabouts. The Germans did not respond.

PART SEVEN

24–26 August 1944

FIFTY

Liberating the Rooftops

‘IT WAS SATURDAY THE 26TH, the day of the assassination attempt on General de Gaulle,’ Adrienne Monnier, who spent that morning with her sister, Rinette, and Sylvia Beach, remembered. ‘We had left the house with the intention of going to Notre-Dame, but the gunfire caught us in the Boulevard du Palais and obliged us to turn around and go back the way we came.’ That morning, Charles de Gaulle had relit the flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe which had been extinguished in June 1940 and marched with Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division to symbolize the resumption of French sovereignty. He went to a traditional Te Deum of thanksgiving at the Cathedral of Notre Dame, where he attracted a crowd similar to the one that had welcomed Maréchal Pétain only four months earlier. As he walked towards the cathedral’s open Door of the Final Judgement, gunmen started shooting. The general stood erect, while most of those around him hit the ground. Firing continued inside the church, where the congregation dived under chairs. De Gaulle strode in and took his seat.

The wild shooting, whose source was never determined, stopped Adrienne, Rinette and Sylvia from reaching the cathedral. ‘The way back,’ Adrienne remembered, ‘was punctuated by splendid bursts of fire from the rooftops.’ When they reached Adrienne’s flat, it was impossible for them to tell from her window which snipers were German and which résistants. The three women waited indoors for the shooting to stop. Suddenly, in the afternoon, they heard a voice in the street calling, ‘Sylvia! Sylvia!’ It was Maurice Saillet, the young writer who worked downstairs in Adrienne’s bookshop. Cupping his hands around his mouth, he bellowed, ‘Sylvia! Hemingway is here!’

Sylvia ran down the stairs and rushed outside. For Sylvia and Adrienne, the most glorious moment of the war had arrived. Sylvia wrote, ‘I flew downstairs; we met with a crash; he picked me up and swung me around and kissed me while people on the street and in the windows cheered.’ Adrienne watched the scene from above: ‘Sylvia ran down the stairs four at a time and my sister and I saw little Sylvia down below, leaping into and lifted up by two Michelangelesque arms, her legs beating the air. I went downstairs myself. Ah, yes, it was Hemingway, more a giant than ever, bareheaded, in shirtsleeves, a cave-man with a shrewd and studious look behind his placid eyeglasses.’

With Hemingway were four jeeps and sixteen irregular fighters, French and American, whom he called the ‘Hem Division’. Hemingway had returned to France after the first waves of the Allied invasion as a correspondent for Collier’s magazine. On the way from Brittany to Paris, he collected a small Resistance band that did some fighting. ‘War correspondents are forbidden to command troops,’ he admitted, ‘and I had simply conducted these guerrilla fighters to the infantry command post in order that they might give information.’ His ragbag comrades took part in the liberation of Rambouillet, but the real prize for him was the city where he became a writer, the Paris of his Moveable Feast. The day before reaching the rue de l’Odéon,