Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [200]
Up and down the rue de l’Odéon, the eccentric and unshaved Franco-American warriors attracted admiring attention. Hemingway introduced Sylvia and Adrienne to his bodyguard, a French maquisard named Marceau. ‘For the moment, hardly in a hurry to put down their arms, they had come to purge the Rue de l’Odéon of its snipers on the roofs,’ Adrienne wrote. ‘They had already climbed to the top of several suspect houses, which the onlookers vied with one another to point out to them; but really they had not yet found anything.’ Adrienne approached Hemingway’s freedom fighters and ‘invited them to come and drink the wine I had kept for them, like every good, self-respecting French person’. They declined, saying that other Parisians had given them too much to drink already. Hemingway, Marceau and a young American went with Sylvia and Adrienne up to the flat. The rest of the ‘Hem Division’ kept watch outside.
‘We went up to Adrienne’s apartment and sat Hemingway down,’ Sylvia wrote. ‘He was in battledress, grimy and bloody.’ She noticed ‘his clanking machine guns’, undoubtedly the first ever in the apartment. Hemingway, as playful as the hungry young writer he had been at Shakespeare and Company twenty years earlier, teased Adrienne. Adrienne recalled the exchange,
Hadn’t I, Adrienne, during those years of the Occupation, been brought to the point of collaborating a little? In which case he offered to draw me out of all possible danger. (Obviously, he must have thought, that fat gourmande couldn’t endure the rationing; she must have weakened.) I seriously examined my conscience. No, I swear I had not ‘collaborated.’ He drew Sylvia off to a corner and repeated the question to her: ‘Are you sure, Sylvia, that Adrienne did not collaborate and that she does not need a little help?’–‘Not at all,’ Sylvia answered. ‘If she collaborated, it was with us, the Americans.’ Hemingway seemed to show some regret at not being able to be the knight errant–a slight regret that flickered across his good face as it became serene again.
Sylvia and Adrienne offered to give Hemingway anything he needed. ‘He asked Adrienne for a piece of soap, and she gave him her last cake,’ Sylvia remembered. Adrienne confessed, ‘I gave him, without hesitating too much, my last piece. (Let’s be frank, it was the next to the last.)’ Hemingway took the much-needed soap and asked what he could do for them. ‘Liberate us. Liberate us,’ they said. Sylvia wrote that ‘the enemy was still firing from the roof. And the Resistance was firing also from the roofs, and this shooting was going on all the time, day and night. And especially on Adrienne Monnier’s roof.’ Hemingway called his comrades from the street. ‘He brought his men up, and they all went up on the roof. And we heard a great deal of shooting going on for a few minutes. Then the shooting stopped forever.’
When Hemingway brought his men back to the flat, Sylvia and Adrienne invited them to stay for a drink. ‘Oh, no,’ the author of For Whom the Bell Tolls said. ‘I have to liberate the cellar of the Ritz.’ The Hem Division trundled downstairs, jumped into their jeeps and roared out of the rue de l’Odéon. Having liberated Odéonia, they intended to do the same for the finest wines that the Ritz’s Swiss manager had kept from the Germans. Sylvia stayed with Adrienne in the rue de l’Odéon and waited for her other American ‘bunnies’ to come back to Paris.
At the American Embassy on the Place de la Concorde, housekeeper Simone Blanchard had everything ready. Thanks to electrician Georges Rivière and mechanic Paul Feneyrol, the telephones and electricity were in working order. The corridors and offices were as clean as they had been when Ambassador William Bullitt left in 1940. Waiting for the Americans to reclaim the property, Mme Blanchard took from a hiding place something