Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [46]
Reynaud’s mistress, Countess Hélène de Portes, had long urged capitulation–persuading her lover to appoint the ministers who would finally throw him out of office and end the battle. When Pétain called on France to quit, the Germans held only 10 per cent of the country. France still had its empire and a vast armada. Reynaud, de Gaulle and Churchill were urging the government to move to North Africa and fight on. Many Frenchmen had already gone to Algiers, including Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The famed aviator and writer recruited forty other pilots, commandeered a plane in Bordeaux and flew to North Africa to continue the struggle. Some French forces were counter-attacking, and the Germans were taking heavier casualties than at the beginning of the invasion. But Pétain, Weygand and the rest of the new leadership called an end to the war. Eleven days after Pétain’s armistice broadcast, Mme de Portes died in a car accident.
A. J. Liebling and many other Americans went to Lisbon to take the Pan Am Clipper home. The Clipper had limited capacity only, and hundreds of Americans were waiting in Portugal for a flight. Others booked passage on ships that usually called first in South America. The neutral Portuguese capital was filling with Allied and Axis spies, as well as refugees. Liebling was staying at the Grand Hotel do Mont Estoril on 18 June, when the radio in the lobby broadcast a message from London. It was the first time Liebling heard the clear French of Charles de Gaulle: ‘The voice spoke of resistance and hope; it was strong and manly. The half-dozen weeping Frenchwomen huddled about the radio cabinet where they had been listening to the bulletins of defeat and surrender ceased for a moment in their sobbing. Someone had spoken for France; Pétain always seemed to speak against her, reproachful with the cruelty of the impotent.’
In the hotel bar, an Englishman, who proudly claimed to be a fascist and to support Franco in Spain, declared, ‘Within three years all Democrats will be shot or in prison!’ Liebling considered knocking out the man’s brain ‘with an olive pip, adapting the size of the missile to the importance of the target’. Instead, he drank a glass of Vermouth and remembered something that Jack McAuliffe, ‘the last bare-knuckle lightweight champion of the world’, had told him: ‘In Cork, where I was born, there was an old saying: “Once down is no battle.”’
PART TWO
1940
SEVEN
Bookshop Row
SYLVIA BEACH AND ADRIENNE MONNIER heard Maréchal Pétain’s appeal for an armistice over the radio at lunchtime on Monday, 17 June. Afterwards, they reopened their bookshops until six in the evening. Adrienne sold only one book, appropriately, Gone with the Wind. Sylvia’s business was little better. Her landlord, who did not want the Germans to requisition his building and would not easily find another tenant, helped by waiving her rent. In her diary that evening, Adrienne wrote, ‘Gloomy evening. I feel defeat and that it’s going to be fascism.’ The next day, Tuesday, her concerns were more personal: ‘No meat, no butter, only a bit of pork.’ At four o’clock that afternoon, the concierge at Sylvia’s apartment and bookshop, Mme Allier, hurried across the street to tell Adrienne something was wrong. Adrienne wrote in her diary,
Sylvia, who left this morning around 9.00 on bicycle, has not yet come back. Seriously worried. Telephone the American Embassy, tell Mme Allier to go to the police station. Around 6:30 Marthe Lamy arrives on bicycle (she feels her Spanish blood rising), tell her my worry about Sylvia; she telephones the Hôpital Marmottan, where they bring those who are injured in street accidents, and the American Hospital. Around 7.00 Sylvia arrives. She had gone to Carlotta’s apartment on the boulevard Suchet, then to the American Embassy. [Carlotta Welles Briggs, Sylvia’s childhood friend, had left for the United States and asked Sylvia to guard her Paris