Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [83]
Nancy Cunard reached Paris at the end of February 1945 and embraced a rather bewildered porter in blue overalls, the most accessible representative of the city’s working class. Over the next few days, she walked back and forth across the city, looking and remembering, and saw friends from the past, such as Janet Flanner and Diana Cooper, whom she had known before the First World War. But when she returned to her house at Réanville in Normandy she found that it had been looted and defiled, not by the Germans but by neighbours she had considered friends. The Hours Press was badly damaged, along with all her primitive statues. She was left in no doubt as to how much the locals had secretly disapproved of her left-wing causes and her lovers, especially her black lover, Henry Crowder.
Samuel Beckett returned from his hiding place in Provence, where he had often listened to music composed by Henry Crowder, played on an upright piano. Nancy Cunard thought he looked like ‘an Aztec eagle’ and that he had a ‘feeling of the spareness of the desert about him’. Peggy Guggenheim, with whom he had a brief affair shortly before the war, described him more prosaically, but no less accurately, as ‘a tall lanky Irishman of about thirty with enormous green eyes that never looked at you’. He was so modest that after the war very few people knew that he had been awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance.
Others took longer to return home. Julien Green booked his passage back across the Atlantic on the Erickson, a former troopship which had lost little of its discomfort, but the poems of John Donne took his mind off it. Even if the danger of submarines was over, mines still floated in the English Channel. But what struck him most was the advice he received on reaching Paris when he asked after friends: ‘It’s better not to ask after this person or that.’
André Gide, whom he went to see, was scarcely more encouraging from another point of view. He told Green that he would die of cold and hunger in Paris. To escape such misery, he himself was off to Egypt.
Foreigners returning received a slightly different impression; not one of external dilapidation, but of an internal decay while the exterior remained untouched. Isaiah Berlin wrote to a friend: ‘Paris seemed terrifying to me – so cold and abnormally clean and empty and more beautiful than I have ever seen a city to be – more so than Leningrad, and I cannot say how much that means – but empty and hollow and dead, like an exquisite corpse; the metaphor is vile and commonplace, but I can think of nothing else.’ And Susan Mary Patten, the wife of an American diplomat, wrote that ‘it was like looking at a Canova death mask’. But the city’s empty elegance soon began to be filled with those who regarded it as the most civilized setting for their entertainment.
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor reached Le Havre on the liner Argentina on the morning of Saturday, 22 September 1945. Their first concern was to smuggle ashore their little Cairn terrier, Pookey, who had been brought on to the ship with the help of an American general. Now they needed to get himpast the French authorities. ‘H.R.H. asked me to smuggle Pookey ashore,’ wrote Brigadier Daly in his diary that night, ‘as I was the most unlikely person to be caught. I hope nothing is ever heard of it.’
The Duke spoke to the large group of waiting newspapermen of the terrible damage around them, and the Duchess said that she hoped to join a relief organization for helping war victims. Finally, after the 134 pieces of luggage and packages had been dealt with, the Windsors climbed into the British Embassy Daimler with Daly. Their staff – the Duchess’s secretary, a maid and their black butler Sydney – were put in the car behind. Meanwhile, the drivers of an American military escort in five jeeps revved their engines impatiently.