Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [52]
The bus dropped her in Clermont Ferrand, the industrial centre of the French midlands. The government had left only hours before. ‘“Where is everybody?” I asked, like the ostrich peering over the rumps of other ostriches whose heads were in the sand. But I couldn’t find out where the Government had gone to, although everybody seemed pretty sure they had gone somewhere.’ In the government’s wake, the Germans arrived.
The people were greatly impressed with the behaviour of the Nazi soldiers. They even bordered on enthusiasm. They had visualized the enemy as monsters who raped little girls and chopped off the ears of little boys and hung them on their belts. They were gratefully surprised when this did not happen; but they did not stop to think that had the enemy been ordered to turn all the inhabitants of France into sausage meat, they would have carried out their orders with just as much efficiency.
Polly Peabody was unaware that German soldiers who committed rape or pillage were subject to court martial and execution, a precaution the Wehrmacht had not taken in Poland. The Franco-German Armistice, signed at Compiègne on 22 June, carved France into four zones: the northern coast around Calais, administered from Belgium as a ‘forbidden’ area; Alsace and Lorraine, incorporated as provinces of the German Reich from which citizens of French origin were expelled; the bulk of France around Paris and down to Bordeaux, officially occupied territory; and the south, free of direct occupation by German troops. Because Clermont Ferrand fell south of the main line of demarcation between the ‘Occupied’ and ‘Free’ zones, the Germans withdrew from the city. Polly then noticed that ‘the Mayor had not waited until the last Nazi tank was out of sight before he ordered the French flag to be hoisted in the public square. Around it the townspeople quickly gathered and sang the Marseillaise with unrestrained emotion.’
Following the new Pétain government to Vichy, Polly chanced upon a French officer in the lobby of the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs. He had been military attaché in Norway, where they had met two months before. He offered to help her find lodgings, and he introduced her to the dapper Senator Gaston Henry-Haye. Senator Henry-Haye and the officer took Polly out to see ‘all the Vichy celebrities’ at the fashionable Restaurant Coq d’Or. ‘Stepping into the street, whom should I see emerging from a long black limousine, but Ambassador Bullitt? He looked so dashing and neat, just like the hero in the million-dollar picture, compared with all those who ogled him.’ Polly settled into ‘a questionable, small hotel’, which charged her twenty francs a night for a room shared with three other people. She remembered, ‘During the first few days in Vichy, I witnessed some of the saddest and most amazing pages of French history.’
Aldebert and Clara de Chambrun, after three weeks of privation at the Polignacs’ austere castle near Le Puy, were back in Vichy for their usual summer vacation. In their absence, the town had transformed itself from a bourgeois resort for rich hypochondriacs into the temporary capital of France. Vichy’s resident population of 50,000, while used to providing rooms for 40,000 summer visitors, was hosting almost 100,000 refugees, civil servants, soldiers, diplomats, legislators and journalists. All of them were clamouring for places to sleep, wash and eat. Polly Peabody observed ‘a French duchess–who for eight nights slept sitting bolt upright in an armchair, because she could not find a room’. Aldebert and Clara had, thanks to a longstanding arrangement with the Hôtel du Parc, their own room. But government officials found themselves running ministries from hotel bathrooms, receiving ambassadors in garrets and sleeping in corridors.
The American Embassy made its ambassadorial residence in a luxurious summer house, Villa Les Adrets at 56 rue Thermal, that it leased from Florence Jay Gould and her husband, Frank. The chancellery was in a doctor’s house, the Villa Ica, nearby. Most of the diplomats