Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [62]
In September, the Germans introduced food rationing at a mere 1,300 calories a day, about half what an adult needed to survive. The concierge began cooking for staff in the Library. Miss Reeder remarked, ‘It is enough to say that the first day she gave us fried chicken, so you can imagine our joyfulness. The only bad part is that we are all gaining weight.’
Clara had the ‘rare opportunity of sending a letter out of the zone where we are now living’ to Edward Alleyne Sumner in New York on 26 September, eight days after the Library reopened. Sumner had been the Library’s third vice-president. Before his departure from Paris with his wife Ernestine in June, he had lent cars from his American Radiator Company to evacuate staff, particularly the British and Canadians who would be interned, from Paris to Angoulême. In New York, he became chairman of the executive committee with responsibility for the library’s survival in the most difficult moment of its existence. Clara wrote to him on her personal writing paper with ‘58, rue de Vaugirard, VIe’ printed at the top. The typed letter reached Sumner’s New York office on 29 October 1940.
I want particularly that you know what remarkable work Miss Reeder has done during these troublous times. There has never been a day when she has not been at her post at the Library, more than that, except for about twelve days, our institution has been open and accessible to all those who really needed it. For the last week, we have been and shall continue to be open to the public. What I most particularly want to say is this: we on the spot are the only possible judges of what can and must be done; without flattering Miss Reeder or myself, I may say that we are both people of intelligence and are extremely well advised [‘extremely well advised’ is underlined in black ink]. What is done here has been, and will be, the right thing to do, and if you can persuade those who are interested over there to realize this, we shall succeed in keeping the American Library in Paris going and maintain its spirit alive until better times. I am afraid that you will be much shocked upon seeing our president who will whortly [sic] arrive in New York, if not already there. He has had what I fear will prove a knock out blow in all these happenings.
The president of the American Library was Dr Edmund Gros, who was also director of the American Hospital. Directing the two primary American institutions in Paris, at the same time operating on war wounded alongside his surgical colleagues, had taken a toll on a man of seventy years. Dorothy Reeder wrote on 19 September, ‘Dr. Gros has been quite ill and plans to go to the States.’ By the time he left Paris later that month, he had suffered an emotional and physical breakdown. With his departure, the library fell to the charge of Dorothy Reeder and the hospital to Dr Sumner Jackson. Clara worked with Miss Reeder at the library, and Aldebert de Chambrun, for years on the hospital’s board of trustees, assisted Dr Jackson. Edward Sumner found Clara’s letter reassuring, as he did the earlier one from Miss Reeder, and he circulated both to the other trustees. He sought library funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute. Without financial support, Dorothy Reeder’s and Clara de Chambrun’s hard work would not be enough to preserve the American Library.
TEN
In Love with Love
AT THE CHÂTEAU DE CANDÉ among his diplomatic and unofficial guests, Charles Eugene