And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (48 page)

*
Le Figaro
moved to Lyon in June 1940 and suspended publication after Germany took over the unoccupied zone in November 1942.

*
Jean Guéhenno was not the only opposition writer who cited Jouhandeau, Brasillach, Montherlant, Bonnard, Lifar and Cocteau as evidence that homosexuals were more likely to be collaborationists. This theory often blended with the view that, like a woman, France surrendered to Germany’s masculine force. At the same time, even in artistic circles, there was widespread homophobia, with
pédéraste
frequently used as a generic insult.

*
Deutschland-Frankreich
was published by the German Institute in Paris.

*
One German who did not appreciate Céline’s writing was Bernhard Payr, a literature representative in Alfred Rosenberg’s bureau of Nazi indoctrination. While Payr also applauded Céline’s anti-Semitism, he was shocked by his obscenities, all of which “reduce to nothing the author’s intentions, which are certainly good” (Loiseaux,
La Littérature de la defaite de la collaboration
, p. 181).

_·
CHAPTER 13
_·
Chez Florence

WITH THE PARISIAN ELITES
enjoying their cultural and social lives as best they could, the peculiarly French institution of the salon once again became fashionable. Born in the seventeenth century, when aristocratic ladies of leisure opened their homes to men of power and letters, the salon served as a kind of neutral territory where politics and art could be discussed in genteel surroundings by people who might otherwise avoid one another. Such a formula was evidently suited to the occupation. The key to drawing worthy guests lay with the hostess, often an attractive and cultivated woman of means who lived alone—perhaps a widow—and who maintained her place in society through a salon. In the early 1940s, several Paris hostesses were well practiced in this art. Marie-Laure de Noailles, the interwar muse of the Surrealists, threw lavish parties and held concerts at her large home on the place des États-Unis—and still had time for a love affair with a Wehrmacht officer. Princess Marie-Blanche de Polignac, heiress to the Jeanne Lanvin fashion house and a leading socialite,
was an important patron of musicians and artists. Marie-Louise Bousquet, the editor of the French
Harper’s Bazaar
, who had long held court in her sumptuous apartment overlooking the place du Palais-Bourbon, chose to offer musical evenings.

For German guests, too, these soirées offered a good opportunity to socialize with prominent cultural figures. Indeed, it was at one such concert, given by the cellist Pierre Fournier in early 1941, that Gerhard Heller met Marcel Jouhandeau, later to be his traveling companion on the writers’ visit to Germany. Heller in turn introduced Ernst Jünger to Madame Boudot-Lamotte’s salon
^*
on the rue de Verneuil, where one evening in February 1942 they—and
le tout-Paris intellectuel
—heard Cocteau read his new play,
Renaud et Armide
.

The most memorable salon of the war years, however, was that of a beautiful American named Florence Gould, who was born to French parents in San Francisco in 1895. Her father, Victorien Maximilien Lacaze, had moved to the United States sixteen years earlier as a penniless immigrant and had prospered as the publisher of a French-language newspaper in the Bay Area. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, fearing for the safety of his two young daughters, Lacaze sent Florence and Isabelle to boarding school in Paris. By her late teens, Florence was back in the United States, where she married for the first time. But she was already divorced when she returned to Paris in 1917, hoping that her promising soprano voice could lead to a career as an opera singer. Instead, in 1923, she met—and became the third wife of—Frank Jay Gould, the son of Jay Gould, the American robber baron and railroad magnate.

Frank had two homes, an apartment in Paris to facilitate his dalliances and a large villa at Maisons-Laffitte, to the northwest of the city. Florence soon lured him away to Cannes. Until the mid-1920s, rich Parisians who wintered along the Côte d’Azur would flee its summer heat. But the Goulds—along with some British aristocrats, Russian exiles and American millionaires—now helped to turn Cannes into the year-round fun capital of the Riviera. They bought two villas—one, Le Patio, in Cannes; the other, La Vigie, in nearby Juan-les-Pins—and filled them with fine art. Frank also added to his fortune by investing in new hotels and casinos along the Côte d’Azur. However, as a recovering alcoholic who was eighteen years
older than his new wife, Frank could not match Florence’s social energy. Young, striking and athletic, she introduced waterskiing to Cannes and took tennis lessons from the legendary champion Suzanne Lenglen. She was also at the heart of the Riviera’s party life, which Frank tended to avoid. Often in bed by eleven p.m., he left Florence to enjoy herself with her many admirers. According to one story that did the rounds, Frank’s only rule was that she join him for breakfast every day.

Florence also liked the nightlife of Paris, where Frank bought her an apartment at 2 boulevard Suchet, beside the Bois de Boulogne. When war was declared, she sent food packages to French soldiers and volunteered as a nurse in a Paris hospital (she would arrive in her blue convertible Bugatti), but she was back in Juan-les-Pins when the Germans entered Paris. Although the Goulds had boat tickets to return to the United States, she refused to leave. Frank would spend the war years in Juan-les-Pins. By early 1941 Florence had returned to Paris. And since the boulevard Suchet apartment and the Maison-Laffitte villa had been requisitioned by the Wehrmacht, she settled into the luxurious Hôtel Bristol, on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

Now forty-five, although looking far younger, she was soon inviting friends and acquaintances for lunches, teas and dinners at the hotel, which seemed unaffected by the new food shortages in Paris. That the Bristol was supplied by the black market was taken for granted. Colette once accepted Florence’s invitation for afternoon tea on one condition: “I will come if you replace the petits fours with Camembert and the tea with champagne.”
¹
Florence’s evenings might also include dinner at Maxim’s, the floor show at Chez Carrère or an appearance at Marie-Louise Bousquet’s salon. It was there that she met—and became instant friends with—Jouhandeau. It was also chez Marie-Louise that she came to know Heller.

On March 28, 1942, with no small pride, Heller brought Jünger to meet Florence and Jouhandeau at the Bristol. It was the eve of the novelist’s forty-seventh birthday, and they had a lively discussion about literature over a delicious dinner, Jünger noted in his war diaries.
^*
Then there was a blackout. “Air-raid alert,” Jünger noted in his journal. “Sitting around a lamp, we drank 1911 champagne while
the planes buzzed overhead and the noise of the cannons shook the city. Small like ants. We talked about death.”
²

It was around that time that Bousquet suggested that Florence host her own salon, one devoted to literature. Florence was hardly an avid reader, but she liked the idea of presiding over a gathering of witty and intelligent authors. As she once put it, “I may not know much about literature, but I know a lot about writers.”
³
In April 1942, she rented a large apartment on the third floor of 129 avenue Malakoff, near avenue Foch in the 16th arrondissement. Its decoration demonstrated that everything was still available—at a price. She chose silk-covered furniture and Persian carpets for the sitting room and several black lacquer tables for the dining room. Naturally, she also had a cook and a butler. Her new friend Jouhandeau, who lived one block away, on the rue du Commandant-Marchand, effectively became her cohost. The salon was even scheduled for Thursdays because that was the one day of the week that Jouhandeau was not teaching in a Paris high school. And it was convened around lunch so that the meal and a prolonged
après-déjeuner
would not be cut short by the curfew. Florence herself was, of course, the main attraction, with her green eyes often hidden behind dark glasses, her strings of pearls, large emerald ring and yapping Pekingeses completing a portrait of sophisticated wealth. And to her guests, she offered not only her stylish beauty, sparkling personality and comfortable home, but also excellent food—obtained, naturally, on the black market. No one ever worried that her supply of vintage wine and cognac could run out.

To Florence’s close friends, like Bousquet, Cocteau and the Académie Française’s Pierre Benoit, who fell in love with her when they first met in late 1935, Jouhandeau added his own crowd, including his closest friend (and secret
résistant)
Jean Paulhan;
Comoedia’s
editor in chief, René Delange, and its book editor, Marcel Arland; and the painter Marie Laurencin. Jouhandeau, who had acquired an intense affection for Heller, also invited the blue-eyed young German to the avenue Malakoff apartment. Among other guests were the playwrights Montherlant, Guitry and Giraudoux and the decorator Christian Bérard. Each in turn occasionally brought along friends for what resembled auditions to join Florence’s salon. On some occasions, Florence had as many as fifty guests. There were moderate collaborators,
attentistes
, at least one
résistant
and a few Germans,
but none of France’s most viciously Fascist writers—Brasillach, Drieu La Rochelle, Rebatet or Céline—ever attended.

One soap opera that provided background noise to the lunches was Jouhandeau’s endless complaining about his overbearing wife—except when she was present. Heller, who described her as “a kind of bloodthirsty, proud and cruel tyrant,” was not alone in feeling sorry for the writer.
⁴
Now in her fifties, Élise Jouhandeau had enjoyed a successful career as a dancer, using the stage name of Caryathis, before she married Marcel in 1929. Since then, while failing in her principal mission to woo him away from homosexuality, she had pushed him further to the right, encouraging him to write his notorious anti-Semitic pamphlet,
Le Péril juif
, in the late 1930s. In April 1942, perhaps out of jealousy of her husband’s “best friend,” Élise even denounced Paulhan to the German military police, an unpardonable act since Paulhan had already been arrested once by the Germans. By good fortune, the complaint was not passed to the Gestapo and the case was dropped.

Ernst Jünger, an interesting addition to the group, was brought by Heller on March 4, 1943. Dressed in the uniform of a Wehrmacht captain, he was charmed to see Florence again and, he noted in his journal, they continued their conversation of one year earlier about death. After another lunch a week later, he quoted her poking fun at Jouhandeau’s wife: “It’s a fact, I feel comfortable in a state of matrimony because I have been married twice and have been very happy. The only exception that I’d make would be for Jouhandeau because he likes awful women.”
⁵

Did Florence also make a real exception for Jünger? The novelist certainly appreciated women and, despite the absence of solid evidence, some historians have stated categorically that they became lovers.
⁶
More certain is that Jünger, whose wife, Gretha, remained in Hannover, had a serious relationship with Sophie Ravoux, née Koch, a German-born doctor whose mother was Jewish and whose husband was a prisoner in Dachau. In his journal, where Jünger variously referred to Sophie as La Doctoresse, Dorothée or Charmille, he described spending long hours with her. But he also made frequent visits to Florence’s home, where he celebrated his forty-eighth and forty-ninth birthdays with her (as he had his forty-seventh birthday at the Hôtel Bristol). On one occasion, she gave him a letter from Thornton Wilder to add to his collection of autographs. On
another, she told him she had given her husband a copy of his novel
On the Marble Cliffs
, which had just been translated into French. After reading it, Frank had responded, “There’s someone who goes from dreams to reality.” Jünger observed that this, “for an American multimillionaire, is not a bad judgment.”
⁷

Among Florence’s many rumored lovers, however, one was particularly close to her heart: Ludwig Vogel, an engineer who worked for a powerful German aircraft manufacturer, Focke-Wulf, and who moved in Luftwaffe circles in Paris. It is not known how or when they met but, using a false name, she joined him on two trips to Germany to visit the company’s main factory in Friedrichshafen.
⁸
Vogel usually called on Florence outside the customary hours of her Thursday salon, but on one occasion Jünger met him at her home and they discussed the outlook for the war. In a journal entry in August 1943, Jünger said that a German aeronautical engineer named Vogel told him that the Luftwaffe had phosphorus bombs but Hitler had chosen not to deploy them. Using his nickname for the Führer, Jünger commented in his journal, “That would be worthy; but given Kniébolo’s character, somewhat surprising.”
⁹

Jünger made no suggestion that Vogel might be Florence’s lover, but her friendship with Germans of influence was no secret. One Nazi with a notably sinister reputation who would visit her was SS-Standartenführer Helmut Knochen. He was Paris commander of the Security Police, itself part of the Security Service, and as such played a central role in organizing the deportation of Jews to death camps. Knochen, for one, knew all about Vogel. During questioning by French police after the war, he named the German engineer as one of Florence’s lovers.