Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [32]
‘Bullard, what river flows through Columbus?’
‘The Chattahoochee, sir.’
‘What’s the name of the town across the bridge from Columbus?’
‘If you turn right, Phenix City. If you turn left, Girard, Alabama.’
‘That’s good enough for me. I know Columbus. But it’s not good enough for Washington. Wait over there.’
Fortunately for Bullard, two prominent members of the American community in Paris, Colonel James V. Sparks and R. Crane Gartz, came to the consulate and vouched for him. McWilliams approved Bullard’s passport, but he had no authority to issue it. He told Bullard to go to the consulate in Bordeaux. Bullard cycled there through the night and most of the next morning. Consul Henry Waterman was helpful, advancing him $30 and issuing him a passport. At five o’clock in the evening, as Bullard left the consulate, ‘My bicycle had vanished –c’est la guerre–so I did unto someone as someone did unto me and just rode off south on another bike.’ He returned to Biarritz. Charlie Levy, a friend from Paris, who was driving ambulance loads of Americans to the Spanish border, offered Bullard a lift. On 12 July, Bullard left Lisbon harbour with more than seven hundred other Americans and their dependants on the liner Manhattan bound for New York.
FIVE
Le Millionnaire américain
‘WE WANDERED LIKE MANY OTHERS on out-of-the-way roads that we had to take to go from Paris towards Touraine,’ Gaston Bedaux recalled of his escape from Paris with his American older brother, Charles. Their destination was the Château de Candé, the fabulous estate that Charles had bought in 1927 and restored with some of the millions he made as an ‘efficiency engineer’ in America. The Renaissance castle was about 20 miles from Tours, capital of the Touraine region. Charles had been reluctant to leave Paris, until Gaston called from Beauvais, about 50 miles to the north, warning him to flee. Living and working as an engineer for the Department of Bridges and Highways nearer the front lines, Gaston knew that radio reports of French victories were false. But Charles, Gaston wrote, ‘didn’t want to believe me and called me a pessimist’. When Charles insisted that he had to remain in Paris for an important rendezvous with French Minister of Armaments Raoul Dautry, Gaston informed him that the French government, including Minister Dautry, had already left the capital. As the Germans deployed their forces around Paris, the two brothers, together with Gaston’s Beauvais staff, drove southwest to the Loire Valley in cars that Gaston had arranged for such an emergency.
Charles Bedaux’s exquisite country house, the Château de Candé, had been converted into the temporary quarters of the American Embassy. Ambassador Bullitt and Counsellor Murphy rented part of the Renaissance castle in September 1939, when the Anglo-French declaration of war on Germany raised the possibility of fighting in Paris. Bedaux, who granted a lease for the duration of the war to First Secretary Hugh Fullerton, charged the US Treasury only $30 for the initial year’s rent and did not cash the cheque. The lease benefited Bedaux as well as the embassy. Under American diplomatic protection, his chateau, unlike those of his French neighbours, could not be requisitioned legally as a billet for German troops and was less likely to be bombed. For the embassy, Candé was an ideal location if Paris became a battle zone: it lay in the southwest, far from Germany’s invasion routes of 1870 and 1914, in 1,200 hectares of woods, farm and gardens that could not be easily disturbed. Moreover, Bedaux had equipped the property with modern American conveniences unknown elsewhere in the French countryside: US plumbing fixtures in lavish art deco bathrooms, a $15,000 telephone system for twenty-four-hour international calls and a private golf course. Its vaulted stone cellars, one of which had a fully stocked bar while another stored 40,000 bottles of wine,