Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [42]
In January 1945, Hemingway was visited by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. They found him in bed with a heavy cold, wearing a green newspaperman’s eyeshade.
Hemingway promptly grabbed Sartre by the hand enthusiastically. ‘Vous êtes un général!’ he exclaimed, embracing him. ‘Moi je ne suis qu’un capitaine: vous êtes un général.’ Bottles of Scotch were produced and the drinking began. Sartre later admitted that it was one of the few occasions when he had passed out from alcohol. Around three in the morning, he recovered and, opening one eye, watched in astonishment as Hemingway tiptoed round the room, collecting up the empty bottles to hide them from members of the hotel staff.
Allied officers benefited from what might be termed unofficial privileges in Paris. Establishments, including all the bonnes adresses of the Occupation, were compulsively generous to senior Allied officers. They were allowed to dine free at the Tour d’Argent, they were given scent for their wives by Guerlain, and shirt-makers fell over each other to offer them prices so special that they were almost free. Even the grandest institutions were not averse to political insurance in these uncertain times.
The Jockey Club, at 2 rue Rabelais, quickly offered membership to a number of senior American and British officers. The British military attaché, Brigadier Denis Daly, received ‘the impression that members of the Jockey Club had very probably supported the Pétain régime’ and that they felt it would be ‘wise to have the support of the British and the Americans during the months to come’. At lunch, the Duc de Doudeauville plied Daly with questions about the menace of the Red Army. When Daly said that there was no doubt that the war could not have been won without the Russians and that from a ‘realistic point of view’ the Allies should therefore be grateful, Doudeauville appeared ‘considerably shaken’.
This highly advantageous state of affairs for Allied officers was soon somewhat curtailed. For example, British officers were no longer allowed into restaurants in uniform, since most of the good ones depended on black-market produce. To circumvent this inconvenience, Maxim’s in the rue Royale was taken over as an officers’ club, and Albert, the maître d’hôtel who had bowed to their tables almost every German officer from Reichsmarschall Goering down, was soon doing the same for their enemies. The French army, not to be outdone, took over Ciro’s as an officers’ club, and Charles Trenet and Edith Piaf went to sing there.
With a large number of British and American officers avid for Parisian cooking, restaurants reopened with startling speed. For the richer officers, Prunier and the Méditerranée in the Place de l’Odéon were soon serving fresh seafood in a triumph of black-market enterprise over appalling communications. Lucas Carton in the Place de la Madeleine, perhaps the greatest of all Parisian restaurants, possessed an outstanding advantage over its rivals. Having bricked up its wine cellars (which run right under the Place de la Madeleine itself) just as the Germans entered Paris in 1940, it could still offer the very best vintages.
Parisian nightlife was in great demand, especially among those on leave from the front. At least 60 per cent of the audience at the Folies Bergère were in uniform. Soldiers were attracted to the bals publics or dance halls, which, having been banned throughout the Occupation, reopened with the Liberation. The most popular were the establishments on the rue de Lappe near the Place de la Bastille and the numerous bals musette around the edge of the city. The musicians were amateurs, working part-time, who gave rousing versions of popular songs on accordions and percussion instruments.
The next tier up –les dancings – included the more sophisticated dance halls and nightspots from the Moulin de la Galette to some of the smarter places on the Champs-Élysées, employing almost all the capital’s 1,500 professional musiciens de danse. At the top were