Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [60]
Although Caffery had little experience of France, several members of his staff made up for this deficiency. His political counsellor, Douglas MacArthur II (nephew of the general and son-in-law of a former vice-president), had been in the Paris embassy before the war and then on Admiral Leahy’s staff at Vichy. Ridgway Knight, who had been one of Robert Murphy’s vice-consuls in North Africa, proved one of the best-informed members of the embassy, thanks to his contacts; he had been brought up in France and was completely bilingual. On the intelligence side, there was Charles Gray, a rich polo-player and man-about-town who had lived in Paris before the war, and Captain David Rockefeller, who held the official position of assistant military attaché, that internationally recognized fig leaf for intelligence work.
The relaxed and charming Gray, who was a member of both the Travellers’ and the Jockey Club, had little in common with his ambassador. One day in the Travellers’ after lunch, Gray looked up from the backgammon board to find two members of the Jockey Club in white gloves, standing to attention. They had come to deliver a challenge to a duel on behalf of a friend who felt that Gray had insulted him. Monsieur Gray had the choice of weapons. Would he please communicate his answer later?
News of the challenge spread so rapidly that Charlie Gray found, on his return to the embassy, a message summoning him to the ambassador’s office. Caffery told him in the severest terms that any member of his staff involved in a duel would have to resign on the spot. Gray was despondent. He loved his job, but if he declined to fight he would never again be able to hold up his head in Parisian society. The solution came to him just in time. He wrote a note accepting the challenge and informed the seconds that his choice of weapon was tanks – at any range they cared to select.
The diplomatic corps reassembling in Paris, perhaps inevitably for such a place and such a time, seemed to divide automatically between hedonists and puritans. The Canadian ambassador, General Georges Vanier, was an incorruptible Catholic. He at first stayed in the Ritz while the embassy was made ready, but, according to his military attaché, he ‘left in disgust, as it appeared to be full of war profiteers drinking champagne by the bucket’. Vanier also refused to have his office heated, as the French had no fuel for their homes, so he sat at his desk in his army greatcoat.
The Papal Nuncio, Mgr Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, was not a soldier-monk like Vanier. The food and wine at his little lunch parties were always good, but these gatherings were very discreet. He explained to Jacques Dumaine, the chef de protocole at the Quai d’Orsay, that he thought it wise to keep a low profile, though Georges Bidault and other Catholic ministers made de Gaulle’s government much less hostile to the Church than many in the past.
The Swiss ambassador, Carl Burckhardt, had been League of Nations commissioner in Danzig, then president of the International Red Cross during the war. His legation was the Hôtel de l’Abbé de Pompadour, at 142 rue de Grenelle. It had come into Swiss hands in the late eighteenth century, having belonged to Besenval, the captain of Louis XVI’s Swiss Guard and an entertaining diarist of court life.
Burckhardt, the humanist historian, was a worthy, albeit more serious, successor to Besenval. Tall and good-looking, his conversation could be highly intellectual – ‘I’m always in an agony of not understanding,’ wrote Diana Cooper, with whomhe had had an affair in the late 1930s. The Coopers and the Burckhardts remained firm friends; and he regaled her with all the wild stories which circulated about her and the British Embassy.
The British Embassy was decidedly unaustere, not so much with luxury, although the food and drink were always good, but in a refusal to take petty moral stands. As far as Duff Cooper was concerned, what was past was past. He would not invite any notorious collaborators – guest lists were privately checked with Gaston