Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [94]
Josée de Chambrun heard the news from Ralph Heinzen, the United Press correspondent and family friend in Vichy, at 8.30 p.m., an hour and a half before her father called. The car Laval sent drove her and her mother throughout the night. They reached 6-bis Place du Palais Bourbon, René and Josée’s magnificent house behind the Chambre des Députés, at ten the next morning. Aldebert, Clara and René took them immediately to the hospital, where Laval’s recovery was proceeding slowly. He had a high temperature, and the family worried he might not survive. By late Saturday night, though, Jeanne Laval decided that, as Josée wrote in her diary, ‘Papa is saved.’ His health improved rapidly, and René de Chambrun felt confident enough to spend Monday at the horse races. Josée stayed away. ‘I had taken a vow not to return there for a year.’ It may have been her trade with God for her father’s life. René, meanwhile, won a lot of money.
By the time Laval was well enough to leave Paris on 30 September and convalesce at home in Châteldon, the Laval and Chambrun families had become more intimate than ever. The association was costing Clara her reputation at home in America, but her first loyalties had always been to her family and to her obligations as she saw them. Her duty was to make life under occupation bearable for the readers at the American Library, the only public institution in German-occupied Europe where books in English circulated freely. She had helped to make the library ‘a haven for French historians, philosophers, journalists and students’. That, she believed, was a more meaningful defiance of dictatorship than assassinations and bombings. Others saw it, not as defiance, but as collaboration.
On Memorial Day, 30 May, Paris’s dwindling American community gathered in the American Cathedral on the rue George-V to remember their dead of the previous world war. Colonel Bentley Mott and the cathedral’s organist, Lawrence K. Whipp, led the service. Afterwards, they trudged through the rain to lay wreaths at the Chapel of American War Heroes in the Suresnes cemetery above the city. When the United States armed its merchant marine fleet and introduced a peacetime draft in September 1941 for the first time in its history, no Americans in Paris could doubt their country was preparing for war.
In French North Africa, Robert Murphy was installing a network of spies under cover as consular officers nominally monitoring US food shipments. The American consular service lacked personnel qualified in intelligence, so Murphy had turned to ‘General William J. (“Wild Bill”) Donovan, Medal of Honor winner hero of Rainbow Division of World War I fame’. Donovan was creating America’s first peacetime overseas intelligence agency independent of the army and navy, first called the Coordinator for Information (COI). Donovan hived off a part of the COI, called it the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and took the best agents with him. Murphy wrote, ‘We surely were glad to welcome his representatives, being ourselves rank amateurs in the Intelligence field.’ One of the twelve vice-consuls–or ‘twelve apostles’, as Murphy referred to them–dispatched to North Africa was Donald Coster, the ambulance driver whom Sumner Jackson had helped to escape from France in 1940.
The American Ambassador to France at Vichy, Admiral William Leahy, favoured