Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [93]
Via a Morgan & Cie internal cable on 9 July, de Chambrun told Dean Jay, ‘June deficit francs 20,000 owing legal salary increase. Clara grateful remittance for library. Arrangement with [French] Information Center gives complete assurance protection. Inform [Max] Shoop.’ The telegram arrived in Jay’s office the next day, 10 July, two days before Max Shoop was scheduled to take the Pan Am Clipper to Lisbon. Shoop, as chairman of the hospital’s legal committee, wrote to Jay on 10 July, ‘Since the hospital has a registered office here [New York], and since most of the governors and officers are here, the corporation can be considered as being in the United States.’ The US corporation would not be able to send financial support to the hospital if the United States and Germany went to war. That task would be assumed by René de Chambrun’s French Information Centre in Paris.
Max Shoop was heading back to Europe to work for the American Red Cross. Covertly, he was employed as an agent of America’s fledgling wartime intelligence bureau, the Coordinator for Information. Its London chief was Allen Dulles, one of Shoop’s law partners at Sullivan and Cromwell. Dulles hated the Nazis so much that he had persuaded the firm in 1935, over the objections of his brother and senior partner, John Foster Dulles, to close Sullivan and Cromwell’s Berlin office. America was not a belligerent, but gathering intelligence on German-occupied Europe seemed sensible for a country whose policies in Europe and the Far East were making its combat role in the Second World War all but inevitable.
On Wednesday, 27 August 1941, at seven in the evening, Clara and Aldebert were at home in the rue de Vaugirard when their telephone rang. It was an urgent call from the Versailles hospital. Their in-law, Pierre Laval, had been shot and was in a critical condition. A car came to the house a few minutes later to take the general and the countess to his bedside. ‘His breathing was very difficult and prevented him from speaking clearly,’ Aldebert remembered. ‘The bullet had penetrated very deeply between his lung and his heart.’ Clara had been fond of Laval since their first encounter before their children’s wedding in 1935. ‘He always paid me the courtesy of speaking in my presence as though I were a member of his family,’ she said, ‘and the very strong admiration I came to feel for him before my son married his daughter soon changed into respectfully sincere affection.’ Now, Laval might be dying. He had taken, not one bullet, but two, from a 6.35 mm pistol. One hit his shoulder, and the other came within an inch of his heart. The culprit was one of the résistants of whom Clara already disapproved. This trespass on her family’s safety made her even more critical of the violence that the Germans called ‘terrorism’.
René de Chambrun joined his mother and father at the hospital. His wife, Josée, was at home with her mother in Châteldon. At 10 p.m., passing through a throng of journalists and Laval supporters, René was admitted to his father-in-law’s room as the former prime minister asked his physician, Dr Barragué, for the telephone. ‘The car has left for Châteldon,’ he whispered to his wife, Jeanne. ‘See you tomorrow. Kiss Josée.’ To Aldebert, he said, ‘I don’t know how I’m getting on, but above all tell them that no harm must come to the man who shot me. He is young … He was certainly not the one responsible. ’
The young man who had attempted to assassinate Laval a few hours earlier was Paul Colette, a militiaman in the collaborationist Legion of French Volunteers Against Bolshevism. Time magazine called him ‘a tough 21-year-old patriot from Calvados, the applejack section of Normandy’. On the eve of the Legion’s departure for the Russian front,