Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [54]
In the late afternoon, the National Assembly reconvened in public. Observing from the visitors’ gallery were Ambassador Bullitt, Clara de Chambrun, Polly Peabody and the grandes dames of the emerging Vichy elite. Edouard Herriot, president of the Chamber of Deputies, rose to declare that the absence of the legislators most likely to vote against the motion made the exercise a sham. William Bullitt cabled President Roosevelt that Herriot’s speech was
the single example of courage and dignity during the dreary afternoon. He pointed out that the French Government had decided to go to North Africa; that [Edouard] Daladier, [César] Campinchi and others who had boarded the Massilia which had been placed at their disposal by the French Government, had done so thinking that the Government was going to North Africa to continue the war, and insisted that they should not be treated as men who had run away. His words made such a deep impression that Laval immediately took the platform and admitted that everything that Herriot said was absolutely true.
Laval added that he, Maréchal Pétain and other patriotic Frenchmen, in contrast, had refused to abandon the sacred soil. The implication was that parliamentarians, like Georges Mandel, who sought to carry on the war from North Africa were deserters. (When the deputies disembarked from the Massilia in Casablanca, the Pétain government’s representatives arrested them.)
In the early evening, the votes were cast: 509 for Pétain’s dictatorial powers against eighty opposed. Bullitt heard a lone voice cry out, ‘Vive la République, quand même!’ ‘Long live the Republic, just the same!’ He noted, ‘The last scene of the tragedy of the death of the French Republic was well placed in a theatre.’
Among the eighty dissidents was Pierre de Chambrun, the only senator to vote against abolishing the Constitution the day before. When Maréchal Pétain saw Aldebert de Chambrun, he called to him in the street, ‘Say there, Aldebert, your brother voted against my constitution. ’ De Chambrun replied, ‘Yes. You know, he has always been a liberal … the only one in the family.’
Senator Henry-Haye took Polly to meet Maréchal Pétain, who had been awaiting the result at his usual table in the Hôtel du Parc’s Chanteclerc restaurant. ‘I was introduced as the young American girl who had travelled through chaotic Europe doing a lot of things and who still wanted to do a little more for France,’ Polly wrote. ‘The Marshal arose and shook my hand, and said something about admiring American girls because they were so “débrouillardes” [resourceful] and, unlike French girls, managed everything by themselves, without any help.’ Pétain invited her to sit, and he told her, ‘I am going to Versailles in two weeks. This time I have quite made up my mind. I have sent word to the Germans to evacuate the premises.’ The 22 June Armistice Agreement permitted the French government to move to Versailles, but Pétain had no force with which to compel the German occupier to evacuate any premises. Perhaps he was bluffing to impress the débrouillarde American girl. He even told her that he ‘had had his suitcase more or less ready’. Like most of France that summer, Polly was sympathetic to the aged roué: ‘Of all the people, young and old, who were present, the Marshal was probably the oldest and yet he looked far younger than many of his juniors … he struck me as being what, for want of a better expression, I would call a “fine figure of a man”, and very alert to the happenings of the moment, that is to say, as many happenings as reached his ears, for I think that