Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [202]
Shortly after the liberation, some of Sylvia Beach’s former ‘bunnies’ returned to Paris. T. S. Eliot, Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender crossed the English Channel to visit their favourite bookseller. Eliot gave her soap and Chinese tea, both as scarce as they had been during the occupation. She moved into the fourth floor apartment where she had hidden her books and mementos from the Germans. Adrienne gave Sylvia lunch every day in her kitchen, as she had during the war. In October 1944, Sylvia wrote to her sister Holly, ‘We eat quantities of soup as there is no meat–no milk–no eggs–no butter–no chocolate. There ain’t no hot water, nor light nor coal.’ Life in the first years of liberation under the Free French administration was nearly as bleak as it had been under the Germans. Adrienne’s spirits flagged, as Sylvia told Holly: ‘She is sad, has lost her father and now her mother is dying.’ Adrienne suffered from increasingly painful rheumatism and was diagnosed with Ménière’s syndrome of the inner ear. Sylvia found her, as she had found her own mother in 1927, in a coma from a barbiturate overdose on 19 June 1950. Her closest friend and former lover died the next evening.
In an article on resistance literature that Sylvia wrote for the Paris Herald Tribune in January 1945, the editors noted that Shakespeare and Company was ‘closed for the time being’. It never reopened, and the site became an antique shop. Sylvia joined the board of the American Library, her old rival, in 1950, and gave it 5,000 volumes from her American literature collection. Her translation of Henri Michaux’s Barbare en Asie earned her the Denise Clarouin Award. Other honours followed, including an exhibition of her memorabilia in 1959, The Twenties: American Writers in Paris and Their Friends. On Bloomsday, 16 June 1962, she dedicated the Martello Tower near Dublin as a centre of Joycean studies. Four months later, she died at home, four floors above her great nursery of Franco-American letters, at 12 rue de l’Odéon. She was 75.
In 1964, an American bookseller in Paris rechristened his eccentric Le Mistral shop on the Left Bank of the Seine facing Notre Dame ‘Shakespeare and Company’–a name he called ‘a novel in three words’. George Whitman had come to Paris in 1947 and met Sylvia during a reading in his shop by the British author Lawrence Durrell. He was too shy to ask her permission to borrow her shop’s name for his own, so he waited until her death to pay the homage. He called his daughter, to whom he entrusted responsibility for the shop in 2005, Sylvia Beach Whitman.
On Sunday, 27 August 1944, Aldebert de Chambrun received an urgent call from the concierge at his son René’s house in the Place du Palais Bourbon. Résistants were about to kill the family’s cook, Elie Ruel. Aldebert went straight there. A few minutes later, one of René’s neighbours called Clara to come as well. Clara talked her way through a checkpoint of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieure (FFI), whom Clara and their other detractors called the ‘Fifis’, to enter the square. She saw her 72-year-old husband standing between a terrified Elie Ruel and a firing squad. The general warned the armed men, ‘You will have to shoot me first.’ Clara walked over to her husband. Someone brought her a chair. She sat down, and the situation seemed to calm sufficiently for Aldebert to search for an officer. ‘I must say,’ Clara wrote of the