Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [125]
There was never any question of Passy embezzling funds for personal use. The main charge of irregularities in London was ridiculous. The BCRA had been so afraid of Vichyist infiltration that very few written records were kept. What Passy had almost certainly been trying to do was to build up a fighting fund. He shared with General de Gaulle a conviction that a third world war, this time against Communism, was inevitable; and, as the General had said to Passy only a few months before, ‘I hope we won’t set off as ill-prepared as we were the last time.’ Passy wanted to ensure that the Gaullist resistance would never again have to go cap in hand to the British or the Americans.
Passy was locked up without any form of trial or access to lawyers. Conditions were very bad, and he feared that his gaolers were drugging him. He went on hunger strike, lost twenty-three kilos, and his blood pressure fell alarmingly. When his wife finally managed to have him removed to the Val-de-Grâce hospital, the doctor told him, ‘You’ve been poisoned.’ When he asked what the poison was, the doctor replied laconically, ‘We’ll know after the autopsy.’
During his imprisonment, Passy passed a message to the Americans claiming that Gouin’s government was blackmailing him to hand over any written instructions from de Gaulle to do with the money. Such evidence would have enabled Gouin and his government to tarnish the General’s reputation and destroy his political hopes. This Passy refused to do. One thing was certain. The government did not want a public trial. ‘It appears that the more the affair is investigated,’ Caffery reported to Washington, ‘the more it becomes apparent that a number of important politicians belonging to different parties have either had their palms greased or have received money from secret funds.’
At the end of August, on an order from the Council of Ministers, Colonel Passy was stripped of his rank, the Legion of Honour and the Order of the Liberation, and suffered the confiscation of personal property to the value of the sum exported. (Most of his honours, including the Legion of Honour, were later restored.) Passy, with justification, protested angrily that the Council of Ministers was not a court of justice: if he was to be tried, it should be in front of a properly constituted tribunal. Even Teitgen, the Minister of Justice, was privately uneasy about the way the affair had been handled.
The Passy scandal may have been the talk of Paris, but it seems to have made little impact in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Simone de Beauvoir’s life was busier than ever, as the record of her afternoon on Friday, 10 May, shows. After lunch at the Brasserie Lipp, she went to the offices of Les Temps modernes, which Gaston Gallimard had lent them. Vittorini of the Italian Communist Party paid a visit. He was very put out to hear that Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were to be the guests of ‘un éditeur réactionnaire’ on their forthcoming visit to his country.
Gaston Gallimard arrived. Simone de Beauvoir went into his office, but found André Malraux and Roger Martin du Gard there too. Embarrassed at encountering a political enemy, she found herself obliged to shake Malraux’s hand. Then she had to listen to Gallimard’s explanation of Genet’s lost manuscript before she could escape. Back in her own office, she was buttonholed by an aspiring young novelist who had brought her his typescript to read. He naïvely asked if Sartre would vote for him on the jury of the Prix de la Pléiade. She then had a brief chat with Michel Leiris, and took the novelist Nathalie Sarraute’s manuscript to Jean Paulhan. He showed her a little painting by Wols – a painter whom Sartre greatly admired also – which he had just bought. Finally, at seven o’clock she left the office and went to meet Raymond Queneau