The Rape of Europa (57 page)

Monuments work in and around Paris had none of the bucolic compensations of Lord Methuen’s territory; on the other hand, there were no tottering church towers or piles of rubble. The glorious palaces and monuments were generally unharmed, if often windowless; the Archives Nationales, for example, had lost no fewer than seven hundred panes of glass. Indeed, the intact dwellings of the French nobility were a terrible temptation to the American brass, who, feeling victorious, wanted to be lodged in style. Despite Woolley’s optimistic view that the Naples investigation had established MFAA authority, the Monuments officers again found themselves in the middle of a struggle.

Lieutenant James Rorimer had entered Paris with the entourage of the commander of the “Seine Section,” which included the city and environs. They arrived only hours after the German surrender to find that an Allied antiaircraft unit was setting itself up in the Tuileries, British signals groups camped in the gardens of Versailles had thoughtfully draped the statues with camouflage nets, and the empty-seeming Jeu de Paume, so conveniently located, was being requisitioned for a troop post office. After repeated urgings the Tuileries group did move, but not until the gardens had been bombed by German planes. Rorimer managed to block the post office, but, despite all, units were housed in the Petit Palais. All this paled beside the struggles for the great Royal Palaces of Versailles and Fontainebleau.
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It is not clear exactly why the advance teams for the Supreme Headquarters decided to lodge their chiefs in and around Versailles—they certainly did not consult their Monuments officers. For their commanders they wanted nothing but the best. An empty house in the town had been taken over for General Eisenhower. Town Major O. K. Todd decided it needed sprucing up, and sent Jacques Jaujard a request for furniture from the collections belonging to the Palace and the Mobilier National. Believing that this was a personal request from Eisenhower, Jaujard felt compelled to approve the list, which included eleven paintings (one a van Dyck and two by Oudry depicting fables by La Fontaine) as well as a superb eighteenth-century desk and equally superb carpets, sculptures, and engravings.

Both the French liaison officer and the chief curator of Versailles, who
had been approached by Todd, were unaware of the official military lists which put Versailles and its collections off limits. They wanted “to be helpful.” Rorimer heard of all this at 7:30 a.m. on September 16. A lieutenant does not normally remove the Supreme Commander’s furniture, but despite this discrepancy in rank the items taken from Versailles were on their way back within twenty-four hours. Over Rorimer’s protests the Mobilier National objects stayed behind in the house, which was still full of workmen; its director, M. Fontaine, saw nothing wrong with lending things to such a distinguished visiting dignitary, as he had done many times in the past. His goodwill turned out badly: the furniture disappeared, and five years later, charges were brought against him for its loss. Appalled, Rorimer, back at the Met, wrote in his defense, as did General Eisenhower.
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At Fontainebleau the problems were not limited to the gardens and surrounding houses. Eleven hundred troops bivouacked in the elegant park had to be removed to the forest and discouraged from using the ornamental canals to practice simulated Rhine crossings. It was harder to dislodge some of their officers from inside. A certain Colonel Potter had adamantly refused to vacate the Louis XV wing. When he was again asked to move, both by the Commanding General of the entire region and the French Beaux-Arts, he went over their heads and got approval to stay from the Deputy Theater Commander, which he did until his unit moved on.

French hospitality often made enforcement of the off limits policies more difficult. At the Château of Grosbois the grounds and stables had been approved for requisition, but not the house proper. The son of the owner, Prince Godfrey Tour d’Argent, had invited fifteen officers to stay in the château as his “contribution to the war effort and the comfort of the officers.” They had accepted without written permission from their superiors, who, nervous at the irregular situation, called in the MFAA. Roomer’s attempt to reason with one of the very comfortable officers was not a success:

Captain Beasley was very unpleasant about “historic buildings” when I explained to him the reason for my visit. He was still in his bath at 1130. Two electric heaters were going in one room and another was in his bedroom. There were three bottles of Cognac on his dresser and a box with about a dozen wine bottles on the floor. When I explained the situation of the famous building and magnificent collections … and that it might happen that the General would not want the Château used by our forces in view of existing directives—which I placed in evidence, Captain Beasley told Captain Smyth to be sure
to get my name and said that if the General ordered him to move out he would “move out and then in.” … Neither the Prince nor the officers knew who was paying for the additional current consumed by our units.
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The gentry were not shy. As soon as it was known that Rorimer’s office was the one which dealt with “damages done to the palaces and castles of France, my office was besieged with broken-down countesses, German sympathizers, compassion-seeking victims of German brutality, all as difficult to deal with as the exacting American officers who also had complaints to register. It soon developed that the enlisted men in the outer office were no match for the exasperated art collectors and château owners whose wild gesticulating and deafening presence gave my office all the aspects of a madhouse.”
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To deal with this onslaught he hired a tough upper-class French secretary and sent the soldiers away.

The problems were serious. In the fall of 1944 coping with the billeting of troops and the damage they caused would consume much of the time of the MFAA men responsible for the vast areas inhabited by Allied troops. The lists so carefully prepared beforehand did not include hundreds of less famous châteaux in the countryside; the most responsible billeting officer therefore felt free to requisition them and objected to troops, once installed, being moved. Units passed through in series and each one would have to be newly informed of what was off limits. As the winter, which would set records for low temperatures, came on, more and more shelter was required. This increased tenfold during the Battle of the Bulge, as continual reinforcements were poured into the theater. Soon the complaints were so numerous that the situation was described in one report as “explosive.” Directives on the subject, issued at regular intervals, had little effect on the cold and exhausted combat troops. As one normally gentle soul explained to Walker Hancock, “If right after the battle you came into a beautiful room in a château, you
had
to shoot the chandeliers.”
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Fortunately the two to three thousand U.S. Infantry troops who had first taken and then had to defend the château of Haute Koenigsbourg north of Colmar, where the Germans had stored some of the greatest treasures of Alsace, had been relatively restrained. They had trashed the former bedroom of Kaiser Wilhelm II, stolen some banners, and used tapestries from the Château de Rohan as rugs and blackout curtains. But a series of rooms filled with the greatest profusion of medieval and Renaissance paintings and sculpture were untouched, and this “astounding array,” Monuments officer Marvin Ross reported, “paled in contrast” to the multiple panels of Grünewald’s great Isenheim altar, which he found in a dry and airy cellar
“well placed in the center of the room, heavily braced by large timbers” and guarded by a M. Pauli, who had “slept in the room at all times.”
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The MFAA men determinedly travelled about in response to reports of damage by both sides, and kept track of the many incidences of wholesale looting by the enemy. From the Château of Chamerolles the Germans had carted off 1,700 paintings and drawings, 150 rugs and tapestries, and a carload of silver. The floors were littered with wine bottles and broken furniture. No two places were alike. Human frailties and strengths were everywhere revealed: at Gien, GIs had taken objects from the château and bestowed them on the more available ladies in the village. Another house, its magnificent collections in perfect condition as its owners had collaborated with the Nazis, was endangered not by Allied troops, but by the locals who, after the noble lords had been sent off to jail, became “excited by conditions” there. The proprietor of Vaux-le-Vicomte refused to put his château off limits and wrote that “our deep desire to welcome our allies will cause us to use this restriction only in case of true necessity. On the contrary, we look forward to many visits ‘très sympathiques’ after these years of another occupation.”
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There was a certain amount of keeping up with the Joneses. The American-born Countess Gourgaud, a recent widow, told Monuments officers that she would like to have “a few rooms used by visiting officers as her contribution to the war effort. All the neighbors have troops, and she is anxious to have some too.”
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Certain cases were not so straightforward. At the unfortunate Château of Dampierre, the Germans not only had built a bar right in the salon in front of a large Ingres but had used a collection of manuscript letters of the seventeenth-century prelate Bossuet for toilet paper. A truly devoted retainer had salvaged these, purified them, and returned them to the library. No sooner had the Nazis left than a boisterous, if less imaginative, group of GIs appeared and began driving nails into the boiseries and building fires indiscriminately. Monuments officers were puzzled when, after all this, the owner, the Duc de Luynes, still wanted to have “a group of senior officers or some exclusive Allied unit” in the house. His Grace, it seems, wished to protect his domain from “the seething communism in the neighborhood.”

All this soon became routine, but there was nothing routine about the frantic calls which came into Rorimer’s office in November. It appeared that the villa of a M. Robert de Galea, located on the Seine near Paris, had been requisitioned. Both the owner and Paris museum officials were distressed, as the house apparently contained a large number of works from the former collection of the famous dealer Ambroise Vollard, who had left half his estate to Mme de Galea. Vollard had died in 1939, just before the
war started, since which time there had been no news of the collection; nor did anyone know just what it had contained. (The confiscation of more than six hundred items from it which Martin Fabiani had tried to ship to the United States [see pages 92—93] was still a secret.) Rorimer went off to investigate, expecting an impressive number of works, but he was not prepared for what he found: on the walls of the freezing villa more than a hundred unframed paintings by Renoir, Cézanne, Degas, and other masters were tacked up in overlapping layers. Many more were stacked up around the house.

Rorimer could not reverse the requisition order, as the villa itself was not a historic building, and all procedures had been properly followed. He offered to take all the paintings to proper storage in Paris, but M. de Galea, for reasons known only to himself, refused. When Rorimer came back a few days later, everything had disappeared. Nothing more was heard until late March, when M. de Galea appeared once again, this time in a terrible state. He had, it seems, hidden his collection in a small and carefully camouflaged lodge used for duck shooting on an island in a lake surrounded by swamps near Chantilly. This wild place was now about to be used for bombing practice by the U.S. Air Force. Rorimer was able to divert the bombers with an emergency call. The documents do not relate exactly where the pictures went next; but, despite all, they did survive.
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The SHAEF planners in their long winter of preparation for D-Day had expected to find Paris a starving city riven with social unrest and threatened with disease. They were quite amazed, therefore, to find the inhabitants of the City of Light orderly, healthy, chic as ever, and sitting in their usual cafés. The food, scanty to be sure, was still tasty, and gas and coal were lacking, but Paris, statueless, bullet-pocked, and festooned with German street signs though it might be, was just fine. It was also very expensive. In order to prevent inflation, Allied forces had been given an extremely low exchange rate of fifty francs to the dollar and could not compete with the heavy spending in public places, such as nightclubs, by French civilians. On the black market, which flourished, the dollar brought anywhere from 125 to 225 francs.

The GIs were not the only ones to be shocked by the prices. Kenneth Clark and John Rothenstein, imagining French collectors and dealers would be impoverished and anxious to sell their pictures, rushed to Paris soon after its liberation to look for bargains for the National Gallery and the Tate, respectively. They found instead “a sense of prosperity and social gaiety, which made London seem very drab. The only difficulty was a shortage of fuel. This meant that the skies were clear of smoke and that
the streets were empty of traffic, except for a few Army jeeps. Never again will Paris look so beautiful.”
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The art market, of course, they found to be booming. “The Germans were the best customers the dealers had ever had. When I visited the dealers I knew, including Jews, I was laughed at,” Clark wrote.
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The trip was not entirely casual. The two museum directors had been sent over in an RAF bomber with the approval of British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and Ambassador Duff Cooper, who felt that the Americans were trying to keep British subjects out. Rothenstein, undoubtedly referring to the visit of Francis Henry Taylor and influenced by German propaganda, had heard “persistent rumors that the Americans were taking unfair advantage of the presence of their forces in Paris and that large numbers of their officials and businessmen, including art officials and dealers, were actively pursuing their national or personal interests.” He too found little he could afford at the dealers’.