Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [79]
Charles Bedaux returned from North Africa a few days later to hear first-hand from Laval what had transpired at Montoire. Gaston Bedaux, who attended dinner in Paris with his brother and Laval, wrote, ‘I was placed to the right of the President [Laval retained the title ‘President’, having been President of the Council of Ministers, or prime minister, several times before 1936], my brother was at his left.’ Laval recounted at length that evening details of his meeting at Montoire. Laval, who had kept ‘careful notes’ of the meetings on 22 and 24 October, told the Bedaux brothers of ‘his differences with the Maréchal and the efforts he made to save the French in explaining to the Germans what one meant by collaboration. He also told us particularly how he succeeded in taking out of German hands some Frenchmen who, in the course of a football match, had mistreated their German neighbours after a conversation purely about sports.’
Laval did not seem to understand that, whether or not he cajoled Germany into minor concessions, much of French, as well as American, public opinion perceived him as a German puppet. ‘Laval was happy with the success that he achieved in this affair in declaring that collaboration was not subordination,’ Gaston Bedaux recalled, adding Laval’s view ‘that it was necessary to live together and it was not necessary for one blindly to obey the other. The partner had to understand that to collaborate did not mean to exclude contradiction, discussion and even dispute.’ Laval, who was proud of his skill as an orator, assured the Bedauxs, ‘So long as I have my vocal cords, I’ll get out of trouble.’ Charles Bedaux was bored by Laval’s exposition of the politics of collaboration. When Laval criticized Vichy’s recent decision to reduce civil servants’ salaries, Charles the efficiency engineer came to life. He argued that only increased productivity would achieve both higher salaries and a reduction in the cost of living. Gaston took from the dinner the impression of Laval as ‘a lively intelligence and a man who sought to perform a difficult task’. He was also a valuable ally for Bedaux in the Vichy administration.
Charles Bedaux left Paris again, with German permission, for The Hague to apply for a Dutch patent on a new method of analysing industrial productivity. At this time, according to Bedaux’s biographer Jim Christy, a Bedaux engineer named Gartner colluded with the Germans and Albert Ramond, who had replaced Bedaux as director of his American companies in 1937, to deprive Bedaux of his Netherlands interests. The Germans seized the Bedaux companies’ global headquarters in Amsterdam as ‘enemy’ property. When Bedaux heard of the confiscation a few days later in Paris, he informed the Nazis that, as an American, he was not an enemy of the Reich but a neutral. The Germans kept the headquarters anyway, declaring it ‘alien’ property, also subject to confiscation.
Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier had a few compensations for the hardships of life under the Germans. One was a reading by Paul Valéry of his unfinished masterpiece, ‘Mon Faust (Ebauches)’, ‘My Faust (Sketches)’ in the rue de l’Odéon. ‘With unconcealed pride,’ Adrienne Monnier wrote, ‘I shall say here that the poet gave a reading of it to us–to Sylvia, my sister Marie, and myself, in September 1940; I shall even say our own ears were the first to hear it’. Valéry’s words and voice captivated the women. Adrienne observed that Lust, ‘the feminine character of the play’, was ‘an ingenuous intellectual. She is a spirited, a lively spirited girl, very free with her master … There are many girls and women like Lust, there are many of them in France. This capacity for being smitten with genius and loving