Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [47]
Sylvia’s safe return at seven o’clock barely diluted Adrienne’s depression. Her diary for the day concluded, ‘I am resigned to defeat and fascism.’ Like most other Parisians on 18 June, she and Sylvia missed General Charles de Gaulle’s defiant speech on the BBC’s French service.
On Wednesday, more of Paris’s cafés and restaurants were opening. Adrienne, who made a long inspection of the city on foot, saw ‘Fouquet’s open with great style. The Triomphe and various others of lesser importance also open.’ Paris acquired an unexpected array of German musical bands. Adrienne heard one at the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées ‘composed chiefly of drums, brass instruments, and Chinese bells. Rather monotonous march.’ A little further on her promenade, near the Hôtel Crillon, was ‘another orchestra, playing somewhat lighter marches’. In the Place de l’Opéra, the Café de la Paix was ‘open with terrace: many Germans at the tables’. She ate lunch at ‘the Danish Patisserie, which never shut’. In the evening, she and Sylvia walked in the Luxembourg Gardens ‘to see the borders of pink flowers’. When Sylvia asked a woman with a dog whether she made drawings of her pet, she answered, ‘No, only when he is dead.’ On Thursday, things were better. Sylvia and Adrienne found ‘superb escarole and even tarragon and chives’ at the market in rue Mouffetard and ‘a bit of beef at the butcher’s’, but no butter or potatoes.
On Sunday, 23 June, the day after Germany and France signed the Armistice at Compiègne, Sylvia and Adrienne took afternoon tea at the apartment of a young American diplomat, Keeler Faus. Adrienne thought his flat was ‘ravishing, books in profusion, fine old furniture, etc.’. She observed, ‘Feeling of the embassy people, completely isolated, as if on an island, with the German police next to them (quartered in the Ministry of the Navy).’ Walking home, the two women saw ‘an interminable procession of vans and artillery pieces [on the] boulevard Saint-Germain’. But a ‘working class man’ there told them, ‘The game isn’t over; if the English were to beat them, that would give me pleasure, really.’ The next week set the pattern for their life under occupation: a Sisyphean quest for food that appeared as mysteriously as it vanished from patisseries, greengrocers, butchers and black marketeers. On Friday, 28 June, ‘Sylvia goes to Nortier’s (she had been told that there would be butter). No butter … No meat. Almost nothing on the market.’ On Sunday: ‘Nothing at the market, no meat. Still no butter or potatoes. Ate peas at noon bought yesterday at the Bon Marché; the most tender of the year … A few raspberries, like yesterday, a little bit mushy.’
Adrienne needed butter for her Savoyard sauces and to make pastry, which Sylvia called ‘her great amusement and indoor sport’. But there was never enough. On Tuesday, 2 July, she moaned, ‘This morning, saw at Nortier’s a queue of more than a hundred people [waiting] to have a quarter [kilogram] of butter.’ The monthly soap ration was only 100 grams, and women had to queue for that. Adrienne and Sylvia needed patience even to buy books to sell in their shops. ‘We often have to stand in line at the publishers,’ Adrienne wrote, ‘and most of them give us copies of the good titles one at a time.’
‘Parisians who survived the exodus came back,’ Sylvia wrote of the early months of occupation, ‘and my French friends were delighted to find Shakespeare and Company still open. They fairly stuffed themselves on our books, and I was busier than ever.’ Although busy, she was unhappy. Her world had been separated from almost everyone, apart from Adrienne, she loved. James Joyce was in eastern France at Saint-Gérand-le-Puy, awaiting a visa to enter Switzerland. Her oldest friend, Carlotta Welles Briggs, had moved to Altadena, a suburb north of Los Angeles, where Sylvia’s father and sisters already lived. The letters Sylvia wrote to them revealed a growing anxiety about her father’s health. The Reverend Sylvester Beach at the age of 88 was losing his sight and his hearing, and he was increasingly distracted.