• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Wednesday afternoon they were back again, and Wednesday evening while we were in the garden the officers came!! They were furious at not finding us, so my husband went to the mayors where they threatened to requisition the whole house–and told us we must clean the Welles room at once.

Gertrude’s maid from Paris, Maria, and Mme Julia, Carlotta’s housekeeper, spent the whole day sweeping and polishing the house for the Germans. With Gertrude, they carried chairs and curtains down from the attic to make two rooms habitable for a captain and lieutenant who were to be quartered there.

The most dangerous time was Friday noon, when the Colonel came himself to see the house–we had guests, so he had the discretion not to come in on the drawing room floor, but he was quite pleased with the Welles room. He told us we didn’t need two homes–that we had a domicile in Paris. My husband insisted it was his office–and after showing him the rooms downstairs (he also looked into the drawing room) and learning we were to have officers he did not insist again. But he had come determined to turn us out!!!

Gertrude advised Sylvia to ‘be thankful you haven’t had to face soldiers and officers again and again as we have here’. In Paris, Sylvia confronted other difficulties. Merely to eat, she and Adrienne became scavengers, chasing the latest rumour of butter, eggs or fresh fruit in one shop or another. Shakespeare and Company no longer received periodicals and books from the United States. The Germans were censoring her favourite authors, including André Gide and Ernest Hemingway. Adrienne had ceased publishing her Gazette des Amis des Livres, because most of her authors were either banned by the Germans or could not pass German censorship. The writers who had fled from France or been forced underground were being replaced in the main journals and publishing houses by a clique, including Marcel Jouhandeau and Robert Brasillach, who were either fascists and anti-Semites already or adjusted their philosophies to German Kulturkampf. Symbolic of the change was the appointment of one of France’s most anti-Semitic authors, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, to edit André Gide’s prestigious Nouvelle Revue Française.

Odéonia, whose literary giants had been left-wing and pro-Jewish, was giving way to the salon of Florence Jay Gould. In the American beauty’s suite at the Hôtel Bristol, followed by the move to her flat at 129 avenue Malakoff in 1942, collaborationist French writers socialized over champagne with the celebrated German author Ernst Jünger and Propagandastaffel officer Gerhard Heller. The French writer Claude Mauriac wrote in his memoirs of one of Mrs Jay Gould’s parties that he was ‘stupefied to be shaking hands with one of those [German] officers whose contact I find so repugnant on the metro … The champagne and the atmosphere of sympathy and youth made everything too easy. I should not have been there.’ Florence’s friendship with the German Ambassador Otto Abetz was so intimate that he gave her a long-term Ausweis to travel freely between Paris and her winter house at Juan les Pins, where her husband Frank was living. Gerhard Heller was charmed by Mrs Gould and was honoured to be welcomed into her ‘sanctuary’. He reminisced, ‘She was beautiful, great, with chestnut hair; a very attractive woman in her thirties; she had a great knowledge and a great love of literature. She deployed another lure, very important for the period: her table ignored rationing.’ One writer, who smuggled an anonymous ‘Letter from France’ to Cyril Connolly’s London magazine, Horizon, described the new bookmen of the right:

Among the collaborationists the best known are Jacques Chardonne … Abel Bonnard–now more commonly known as Abetz Bonnard, a degraded and corrupt academician who has long been a public laughing stock; [Pierre] Drieu La Rochelle, a clever and talented Fascist; Ramon Fernandez, a professional Fascist and drunkard; Henri Bidou, an able journalist; and Bernard Fay, a professor who