Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation (7 page)

Two days earlier, Miss Reeder had received an unexpected visit from the American Library’s first vice-president, Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun. The two women conferred in the darkness of a library whose windows were obscured in brown paper as a precaution against bombing. The rest of the library’s board were preparing to leave France altogether, but Countess de Chambrun was going that afternoon to the country–imperiously informing Miss Reeder that she would return as usual in September. Miss Reeder, the countess recalled, ‘promised to remain on the spot and continue to wave the flag of neutrality. Meantime, she appeared to be getting what she termed “quite a kick” out of the position in which she was left as sole guardian of the premises, and with authority to negotiate the most delicate questions with the occupants, certain that the American Embassy would back her decisions.’ Miss Reeder herself wrote, ‘Was it really Paris whose streets I walked through the 11th, 12th and 13th of June 1940? I do not think so. It was a dead city. Everything was closed, locked and deserted. Even the fall of a pin could be heard.’

Clara Longworth de Chambrun was reluctant to abandon Paris. Her husband’s employers, the National City Bank of New York, had a ‘theory that, should the enemy enter Paris, certain French directors might be held as hostages and endanger the interests of the establishment’. So, Count Aldebert de Chambrun, the Marquis de Mun and six French employees were ordered to move the bank south of any imaginable German penetration to Le Puy. Clara told Aldebert that he could leave Paris without her. She refused to desert their house at 58 rue de Vaugirard, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens and the Senate’s ornate Palais du Luxembourg, in the 6th Arrondissement. A few dozen yards away was the Théâtre de l’Odéon, where Clara staged plays. Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company was just around the corner. Clara was obstinate: ‘My temperamental dislike of retreating from danger when others less capable of facing it remained behind caused me to protest vigorously against this mandate [from the bank to leave].’

Her husband reminded her that she would be alone in Paris. Aldebert himself had to be in Le Puy with the bank. Their only son, René, was in Washington on a mission from the French government at the request of Ambassador Bullitt to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt, a distant cousin by marriage, to send emergency military aid to Britain. Her husband’s brothers had also left. Pierre, who as the eldest had inherited their father’s title of Marquis de Chambrun in 1891, had gone to his country seat, the Château l’Empery-Carrières, in Lozère. As representative of Lozère in the Senate, he was the only American citizen in the upper house. With him was his wife, Clara’s cousin, Margaret Rives Nichols. Aldebert’s younger brother, Count Charles, known as Charlie and formerly French Ambassador in Rome, took refuge with relatives in Brittany. ‘My husband argued that, if I remained in Paris and saw the hideous swastika replace the tricolor, I would be cut off from everyone and everything I loved except the house itself and a little grave [of her daughter] nearby. I gave in before the inevitable and busied myself with the practical arrangements for that hated flight.’

On 12 June, after her visit to Dorothy Reeder at the American Library, Clara met her husband for a last lunch at home. Their chauffeur having disappeared in the chaos, an American employee of the bank, Mr Hunt, drove the count, the countess with her Japanese dog, Tsouni, on her lap and the Chambruns’ house maid out of the city that afternoon. With a million other Parisians, they found themselves in a disorderly procession that disrupted military convoys heading to the front. Their car crawled southwards along National Route Seven to Juvisy. There, where the highway joined regional roads, the traffic halted.

Further along the road, Clara noticed people setting out picnics. One man and woman in particular caught her eye: ‘I recall the silhouettes of a distinguished-looking couple in well-cut clothes seated at a tiny folding-table which formed part of their Rolls-Royce equipment. She was dressed in printed crepe de Chine with silver fox boa; he, in impeccable grey jacket with decorations. His carefully trimmed beard recalled Leopard II.’

Mr Hunt drove them for twenty-five hours on a journey that normally took seven. They had to sleep overnight in the car. On the second night, they reached Vichy, where the Hôtel du Parc gave Aldebert and Clara a room. They were lucky. Most of the other displaced Parisians who survived Luftwaffe strafing on the highways were sleeping rough in barns, on roadsides and in cheaper hotels and inns, several families often crowded into the same room. The rambling, white-porticoed Hôtel du Parc was the best that the spa town had to offer. Its management knew the Chambruns, who had summered there to ‘take the waters’ since 1926. Their July reservations were simply pushed forward to June. The couple took baths and settled in for their first good sleep in three days.

At four o’clock in the morning, while the Germans were about to occupy Paris, the urgent banging of a gong woke them. The incessant racket worsened when ‘an excited servant thundered at our door, and commanded us to dress and pack without delay as all guests must be out of the hotel by five o’clock’. The military staff of General Maxime Weygand, France’s new minister of national defence, had requisitioned the hotel. ‘We argued, but to no avail,’ Countess de Chambrun recalled. The hotel servant ‘compromised by giving us a cup of coffee before the start’. Despite their age, their wealth and Aldebert’s status as a retired army general, they packed and left the hotel before dawn.

Clara Longworth de Chambrun, a stalwart American matron of 66 years, and her American-born husband did not complain. ‘I must say for our personal honor,’ she wrote, ‘all thought of self was totally forgotten in the magnitude of national disaster. Even my little dog seemed to understand that no attention could be paid to him. Instead of balancing himself on my knees to supervise the chauffeur or admire the landscape, he crept down on the floor of the car and lay between my feet.’ They left Vichy for Le Puy, where the National City Bank had arranged lodging for its Paris staff.

This was Clara’s third war since she left Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1901. She took it in her stride. Four years before the Battle of France, she had written, ‘By birth and education, my life–which began on October 18, 1873, was predestined to adventure, tragedy, romance and mirth.’ By the time her third war began in September 1939, she was an accomplished Shakespearean scholar and had written sixteen books, eight each in English and French. These included the memoir of her life to 1935,
Shadows Like Myself
, and
The Making of Nicholas Longworth
, a biography of her brother. Nicholas Longworth III had been a Republican congressman from Cincinnati and was twice Speaker of the House of Representatives. His marriage to President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, at the White House was
the
American social event of 1906. Born into a rich and respected Cincinnati pioneer family, Clara Eleanor Longworth was, by her own admission, no beauty. ‘Why should any man wish to marry a woman who is not extremely beautiful?’ she asked in her first memoir. Clara nonetheless had bountiful chestnut hair that she tied back to reveal a striking face that exuded patrician self-confidence. Her fiercely independent, intellectual temperament had probably made her unsuitable to the Ohio boys who congregated at her family’s mansion on Grandin Road. In 1895, her cousin, Margaret Rives Nichols, married a French aristocrat, Pierre de Chambrun. Clara met his younger brother, Count Aldebert, at the same time.

Although the Chambrun brothers had an impeccably French pedigree, they were American twice-over. Aldebert and Charles had been born in Washington, DC, where their father, Adolphe de Chambrun, served as legal counsel to the French Embassy during the administrations of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. The Marquis de Chambrun’s Washington memoir,
Impressions of Lincoln and the Civil War
, recounted his friendship with President and Mrs Lincoln, who invited him to join them at Ford’s Theatre on the night Lincoln would be assassinated. The Chambruns were direct descendants of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of American independence and loyal friend of George Washington. Under an April 1788 act of the Maryland legislature, all of Lafayette’s male heirs were automatically citizens of the state and, thus, of the United States. Aldebert’s favourite sport, dating to his Washington boyhood, was baseball. Clara said that Aldebert ‘never considered the United States, where he was born and passed his early school-boy days, as foreign soil’. She also thought that he looked at moral problems ‘from a more American point of view’ than she did. Their differences were many: ‘Like all his family, he upholds a woman’s right to vote; I am firmly and temperamentally against it … His ultrahumanitarian views condemn the practice of capital punishment while my baser and more practical mind considers that in our present imperfect state of civilization it is a necessary evil.’ They wed in 1901, a Cincinnati ceremony presided over by the Episcopal Archbishop of St Paul for the Longworths and the Catholic Archbishop of Ohio for the Chambruns. Aged 27, she was not a young bride for her generation. Aldebert, born in Washington on 23 July 1872, was a year older.

Clara moved with Aldebert to France and tackled French life with the determination that her late eighteenth-century forebears brought to settling the Ohio frontier. She perfected her French, took a doctorate at the Sorbonne and became a figure in the conservative world of the French aristocracy. The couple had a son, René, whose godfather was President William Howard Taft; and a daughter, Suzanne, who died of an accidental electrocution in Paris at the age of 19. In 1910, Aldebert was dispatched to Washington as French military attaché and became with Clara part of what the press called President Taft’s ‘golf cabinet’. Taft, a jovial and rotund Ohio Republican who had been governor of the Philippines and vice-president under Theodore Roosevelt, called Aldebert ‘Bertie’. The Longworth and Taft families had been friends in Cincinnati, where Taft had taught her brother Nicholas at law school. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt challenged Taft, his former protégé, for the presidency, splitting the Republican vote and handing the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The Longworths and Chambruns, almost alone in Washington, remained close to both the Roosevelt and the Taft families.

The Chambruns returned to France in time for the Great War in 1914. Aldebert, a career soldier who had worked his way through the ranks to become a colonel, commanded the French 40th Regiment. At Bar-le-Duc during the Battle of Verdun in 1916, his entire unit was cited in dispatches for bravery. The award was presented by Aldebert’s former military academy instructor, General Henri-Philippe Pétain. Clara used her privileged position to visit her husband near the front. When she was forced to return to Paris and feared she might never see him again, she wrote, ‘But there is an end to everything, even tears.’ Her family’s sense of
noblesse oblige
led her to work for French refugees from the Meuse Valley battle zone and her mother to come from Ohio and nurse the wounded at the American Hospital of Paris. When the United States entered the war in April 1917, Aldebert was made French adviser to the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, General John Pershing. Clara preserved three images of the war: ‘the appearance of General Pershing on the balcony of the Hotel Crillon, the arrival of the [American] First Division, and the salute to Lafayette at Picpus Cemetery’. It was said that an American officer arrived in Paris, went straight to Lafayette’s simple grave at Picpus in the east of the city and announced, ‘
Nous revoilà, Lafayette!
’ This was America’s answer to Lafayette’s famed ‘
Nous voilà!
’ on reaching the rebellious American colonies 140 years before.

After the war, the Sorbonne awarded Clara, then aged 48, a doctorate in literature. Her interests included staging plays at the Comédie Française and helping to manage the American Library. The library had been established to provide books to doughboys, as the American soldiers were affectionately known, and remained open after they went home. Its members were mainly American residents of Paris and French students studying English. Among Clara’s American friends on the library board were its only other female members, Edith Wharton and Anne Morgan. The American Library, like Clara herself, had little contact with the Left Bank ‘lost generation’ writers who congregated at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company.

Aldebert was posted to Morocco in 1922, where Clara experienced her second war three years later. ‘In the spring of 1925,’ she wrote, ‘the storm that had been brewing over the Rif broke with full force against the French outposts.’ Her husband, promoted to general, helped Maréchal Pétain to crush a war for independence that she called the ‘onslaught of more than 50,000 warriors of the fiercest description’ and capture their leader, the legendary Abd el-Krim. The French exiled Abd el-Krim to Réunion in the Indian Ocean, and the Chambruns returned to France. The French Academy awarded her its Bordin Prize for her Shakespearean scholarship in 1926, and in 1928 she became a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. Aldebert retired from the army as a general in 1933.

Two years later, their son, René, returned from practising law in New York to marry Josée Laval. Her father, Pierre Laval, had served in several French cabinets and had recently been prime minister. At the Laval–Chambrun wedding in Paris on 19 August 1935, the best man was General Pershing. Among the witnesses was René’s Aunt Alice Roosevelt Longworth. ‘Bunny’, as family and friends called the 6-foot, dark-haired René, opened law offices at 52 avenue des Champs-Elysées, where his father’s National City Bank maintained its French headquarters. René was the first lawyer admitted to the bars of both New York and France.