Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [87]
In Algiers, Murphy saw Bedaux several times, and in February they called together on Weygand. Bedaux’s presence may not have been an asset. Weygand called Bedaux a bandit, because his bill to the French government for installing the Bedaux system at Kenadsa was exorbitant. Bedaux kept Murphy informed of his work at the coal mines, but it seems he did not tell him of Abetz’s proposal to Weygand. Murphy referred to it neither in his messages to the State Department nor in his memoirs, Diplomat among Warriors. When Bedaux told Abetz that Weygand had declined his proposal to replace Pétain, Germany ordered Pétain to dismiss Weygand. If he did not, the Germans would occupy the Unoccupied Zone. Weygand’s loyalty to Pétain earned him dismissal by Pétain. He retired to his farm in the south of France. Soon afterwards, the Germans arrested him.
Bedaux returned to Paris to brief Dr Franz Medicus on Kenadsa. Medicus agreed to push the military to release more heavy machines to augment the mines’ coal production. It was as much in Germany’s interest as France’s to produce coal for the trains of French North Africa. With Medicus’s support, the Germans handed over more than $200,000 worth of compressors, diggers and other equipment. Bedaux needed thousands of workers to build a new rail line and mine the extra coal, and the Nazis helped with that as well. To supplement Berber and African labourers in the Sahara, the Germans sent Polish and Czech prisoners of war. From Spanish Sahara, Franco contributed Loyalist prisoners who had fought against him in the Civil War. Bedaux was about to go beyond speeding up low-paid workers in American factories to using slave labour in one of the hottest terrains on earth.
In January 1941, Sylvia Beach received news of the man to whom she had given attention and love for most of her adult life, James Joyce. With his wife and son, he had finally crossed the Swiss border and settled in Zurich on 17 December 1940. Although safe after six months’ waiting to exit France, Joyce was consumed with worry. He had left his daughter in a French asylum, and he was short of money. The hostile critical reception of his recently published book, Finnegans Wake, preoccupied him. His health, never robust, deteriorated. After emergency surgery for an ulcer and peritonitis on 13 January, the author of Ulysses died. To Sylvia, the loss combined with the death of her father in California two months earlier to send her into depression. Her dearest friends, Adrienne Monnier and Françoise Bernheim, offered some consolation. But the deaths of those she loved outside France hurt more than anything in her own precarious existence in occupied Paris. It was a cruel winter.
Although some Americans were leaving France in early 1941, René de Chambrun was returning. He had completed his second and final wartime journey to the land of his parents’ birth. But his mission was only half accomplished. On his first visit, he had persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to send arms to Britain. On his second, however, cousin Franklin rebuffed his request for American government food shipments to hungry French and refugees in the Vichy zone. René left New York dejected and, after a rough thirteen-day sea crossing, arrived in Lisbon. On 6 February, Josée was waiting for him just over the Spanish border in Toulouse. They spent the night together before flying to the Laval chateau at Châteldon. Josée noted in her diary that René brought her presents from America: ‘Bunny gave me a lovely little dress, a sweater, a magnificent golden cigarette case and some cigarettes.’ Two days later, the couple went to Paris to see Clara and Aldebert. The next few days’ lunches and dinners were spent in the new Paris with German Ambassador Otto Abetz and his French wife, embassy counsellor Ernst Achenbach and his American