Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [99]
Sylvia and Adrienne’s friend and supporter, 69-year-old Paul Valéry, was publicly at odds with the Nazis. When the philosopher Henri Bergson died on 4 January 1941, Valéry bravely delivered the eulogy. He praised his Jewish friend and Nobel Laureate at the Académie Française on 9 January in full view of collaborators who would report his words to the Germans. He said of Bergson, ‘He was the pride of our company.’ Born in France in 1859, Bergson was the son of an Anglo-Irish mother and a father who was Polish, Jewish and a musician. When Vichy offered to make Bergson one of the ‘special’ Jews whose cultural and scientific accomplishments exempted them from discriminatory laws, he declined. Arthur Koestler admired him, and the Nazis hated him. Valéry said Bergson was a ‘very pure, truly superior figure of the thinking man, and perhaps one of the last men who had exclusively, profoundly and exceptionally thought, in an epoch when the world goes on thinking less and less’.
Sylvia, who had supported the Nazis’ enemies in Spain, neither cooperated with nor appeased the occupiers. She consorted with intellectual opponents of the Nazis like Valéry and résistants like Violaine Hoppenot and Jean Prévost. At Shakespeare and Company, she refused to dismiss her Jewish volunteer assistant, 27-year-old Françoise Bernheim. Bernheim was taking a degree in Sanskrit until the University of Paris acquiesced to German pressure to expel its Jewish students. A sympathetic professor allowed Françoise to continue her studies clandestinely.
Françoise and Sylvia politely served Germans who came to Shakespeare and Company in search of English books. Some of the browsers were from the Gestapo. ‘I wasn’t on good terms with these Germans,’ Sylvia said. ‘But they came to my shop before we closed and asked to look at my theatrical books. And I showed them all Gordon Craig’s books. Then I said, “You know, it’s a disgrace for you to have imprisoned Gordon Craig and his wife and little child.” And they said, “Oh, we’ll get him out.”’ The son of famed English actress Ellen Terry, Edward Gordon Craig was a respected actor and theatre critic. Shakespeare and Company had sold his theatrical magazine, Mask, until it ceased publication in 1929. The Germans had interned him, although he was nearly seventy, along with the other British subjects in France at the beginning of the occupation. The Gestapo men returned to the bookshop with another officer, who told Sylvia to prepare a report on the Craigs that verified they were not Jewish and bring it to Gestapo headquarters. Sylvia complied, and the Gestapo officer promised her the Craigs would be freed by Christmas.
Sylvia and Adrienne closed their shops for the summer holidays. Adrienne joined her family in their thatched cottage near the village of Rocfoin north of Chartres, and Sylvia went to La Salle du Roc. On 14 August 1941, she wrote from Bourré to Carlotta Welles Briggs in California, ‘While Rome burns, and everything else, I think you can’t do better than play the fiddle. Meanwhile I am a war profiteer. That’s plain enough, what with all my holidays in your beautiful place.’ She was pleased that a neighbour named Baptiste was supplying her with fresh vegetables for which she did not have to queue for hours. ‘It is cool and windy and sometimes rainy here but the flowers in the border are as gay as can be and you know how the fountain and the green-lawn and the trees are swell at this time of year–and at all times.’ Alone in the country, Sylvia catalogued Carlotta’s books. Country life had minor inconveniences: ‘There’s a magpie in the village who is going to be for someone’s dinner if it doesn’t stop flying into rooms and stealing anything it can lay its hands on. Trinkets or a whole cheese, the coiffeuse