The Ability to Kill (22 page)

The purser told us that they were on their honeymoon. The jokes began. Then it had
not
been Madame’s sea sickness which had kept the Gaumonts in their cabin. With that great ox of a husband to appease, no wonder the poor child looked frail.

As the days went by, other facts about the Gaumonts emerged. Although he was down on the passenger list as a Frenchman, they spoke together in German; she could speak no French. He was some sort of engineer. They were going to Saigon to live. He had been in Indo-China before; until now, she had never been out of Germany.

Soon, she began to learn a few words of French and her shyness abated a little. He was an enthusiastic deck-tennis player,
and although his big body moved clumsily, it also moved swiftly. He was never without a partner or an opponent. His good humour was inexhaustible and his solicitude for her charming. They were a popular couple.

The second night out of Bombay the commandant’s gala was announced. A special dinner was to be served. There would be gifts for the ladies, paper hats, competitions, prizes, dancing. Gentlemen were requested to wear evening dress.

In the tropics, this meant, for the ship’s officers, white drill, for the French army officers among the passengers, khaki drill, for the civilians, a white dinner jacket with black tie.

It was a hot night and I postponed changing as long as I could. When at last I went up, most of the other passengers were already there. However, they were not, as I had expected, preparing for the festivities in the bar. The majority, all of them French, were out on deck, clustered in groups and staring at the commandant of the ship. He was a tight-lipped man and a fervent Gaullist. Now, white with anger, he appeared to be denouncing his first officer and the purser. ‘It is an enormity, an affront,’ he was saying.

I asked a French army captain what the trouble was. ‘Gaumont,’ he answered. ‘In the bar. See for yourself.’

I went into the bar and ordered a drink.

Gaumont was sitting with his wife at the bar, chatting, in his usual good-humoured way, to an elderly Tonkinese couple. Some of the non-French passengers were there, too. I was puzzled for a moment. The only thing I could see wrong with Gaumont was that he seemed to have taken the request for formal dress too literally.

He was wearing a short white jacket of the kind worn by officers in some service messes, and he was wearing medals. I recognised a Croix de Guerre with palms, among others that I did not know. The decorations were suspended along one of
those loops of thin gold chain which Frenchmen commonly use for dress miniatures, and fastened across his jacket lapel. None of the other men was wearing medals, and obviously Gaumont was being rather silly, but I could not see why the French should be so incensed about it.

Then, he moved slightly and I did see. On his breast, immediately below the row of miniature French decorations, was a full size German Iron Cross.

The gala was not an unqualified success, although the Gaumonts appeared to enjoy themselves immensely. He seemed to be quite unaware of the hostility he had aroused. That he had not been unaware, I learned a day or two later. On the commandant’s orders the purser had requested him to remove the Iron Cross. Gaumont had refused on the grounds that, as he had earned it, he was entitled to wear it. He had earned the Croix de Guerre and was entitled to wear that, too. He told the purser why.

He had been a submarine officer in the German Navy at the beginning of World War II and had earned his Iron Cross sinking Allied shipping. Early in 1940, however, his submarine had been depth-charged by a French destroyer and blown, disabled, to the surface. He had been picked up and put in a prisoner-of-war camp at Lorient in Brittany. He had escaped once and been recaptured. When French resistance to the German Army’s advance had begun to collapse, he had escaped again, this time successfully, and made his way to Spain.

There, presumably, he had been interned. I say ‘presumably’ because there was a gap of five years in the story here. I wondered if he had been offered a chance of repatriation by the Spanish authorities, and had, for some reason connected with his old life in Germany, rejected it. But he was not disposed to discuss that period of his life. In 1945, he joined the French Foreign Legion in North Africa and was posted, after training,
to Indo-China. He remained there throughout his two periods of service in the Legion, and rose to the highest rank attainable by a legionnaire who is not a Frenchman, that of warrant officer.

A foreigner, whatever his nationality, who has done long-term service in the Legion, and has a record with it of good behaviour, may, if he wishes, take French citizenship upon his discharge. The German had elected to do so. He had also changed his name to Gaumont at that time. He had then gone back to Europe.

He had not stayed there long, however. By-passing France, he had made for West Germany. In two months he had not only found the job he wanted to do, but also met, wooed and won his German wife. Now, he was on his way back to Indo-China. His job was a good one. He was to be sole agent there for a German arms manufacturer.

The boat stayed three days in Saigon, and the Gaumonts lived on board while he made arrangements ashore to lease an apartment and an office. They were obviously looking forward keenly to their new life. Only one thing seemed to trouble him; the problem of buying a car. It was difficult, he told me. I could not see why. There were brand-new Peugeots, Renaults and Citroens by the dozen on the dock, and one had heard that they were being shipped elsewhere for lack of buyers. He shook his head doubtfully. I concluded that his other expenses ashore had left him short of money.

The day before the boat sailed I was going to lunch with some friends who lived on the other side of the city. I was taking the only taxi on the rank at the dock gate when he came out of the Port Commandant’s office and hurried over. He was breathless and obviously flustered about something. He asked if I would mind sharing the taxi with him. He had to get to the Cathedral at once.

As we started off, I tried to think of some way of satisfying my curiosity. Was he going to Mass? Not at that time of day, surely. Confession, then? I could not really believe it. To pick up his wife? But I had seen her on board as I had left. And why the urgency? In the end, I decided to ask him.

‘I’ only seen the Cathedral from the outside,’ I said. ‘What’s it like?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Like most cathedrals, I suppose.’ He leaned forward impatiently as the driver braked to avoid a cyclist, and told him to go faster. Then, he gave me a harassed glance. ‘There’s a garage along the street beside the Cathedral,’ he explained. ‘The Port Commandant says they had a Mercedes Two-Twenty for sale yesterday. I wouldn’t like to miss it. It’s just what I need.’

I still wish I knew why he became a Frenchman.

The Merry Widow
FRANZ LEHAR

There are probably as many cafés, restaurants and night clubs in the world called Maxim’s as there are hotels with the borrowed word ‘Ritz’ in their names. Certainly, there has never been another restaurant about which so many stories have been told.

Here is a recent example:

A young Frenchman, newly returned to Paris after his service in North Africa, is taken by a rich aunt to lunch at Maxim’s. It is the first time he has ever been there and the aunt looks forward eagerly to sharing his pleasure in the experience. He remains silent, however, and in the end she is forced to ask what he thinks of it.

‘The food is excellent,’ he replies politely.

‘Oh, the food.’ She shrugs. ‘Yes, it is good. However, one does not come to Maxim’s merely for the food. It is the atmosphere. Do you not find it marvellously sympathetic?’

‘Frankly, my dear aunt, I don’t. The decorations are old-fashioned in an ugly way. As you would expect in so expensive a place, the women are well-dressed, but mostly—forgive me—they are not of my generation. The men are clearly rich, but what else have they to recommend them? The food is excellent, but you tell me that that is not the important thing at Maxim’s. What is it then? To be seen here? I find such antique snobbery absurd and a little sad.’

The aunt bridles. ‘North Africa has made you insensitive. You do not understand.’

‘No, I don’t. You will have to explain. Why do people still come to this place?’

‘They come,’ the aunt replies with triumphant simplicity, ‘because it is a place where for sixty years people have been happy.’

Collapse of nephew, abashed.

Of course, he might have retorted that it is possible to hate as well as love in a restaurant, no matter how good the food; but stories about Maxim’s never seem to end that way.

This is how the myth began.

In the early eighteen-nineties the ground floor of number three, rue Royale was occupied by an Italian ice cream merchant named Imoda, who specialised in something he called ‘meat-juice ice cream.’ He had, too, a defective sense of self-preservation. One fourteenth of July, he was tactless enough to decorate his shop with the German flag. The result was that a patriotic crowd stormed the place and wrecked it. Shortly after that he went out of business. No more was heard
of him; nor, mercifully, of his meat-juice ice cream. In 1892, a waiter named Maxime Gaillard reopened the place as a café.

It was Maxime’s first business venture and he had a partner named Georges. They had virtually no capital—a wine merchant, a brewer, and other suppliers had undertaken to give them credit—and things went badly from the start. The public did not want to sit in a café in the rue Royale, preferring the more convivial atmosphere of the Grands Boulevards. Within a year, the business had failed, Georges had gone, and Maxime had taken on two partners of a more formidable calibre, one a cook and the other a maître d’hotel. The cook was Chauveau. The maître d’hotel was Eugène Cornuché. In 1893, having redecorated the premises and purchased an assortment of chairs and tables at an auction, the new partners reopened the place as a restaurant. At the time it was fashionable to anglicise French names; so they called it, after the founder of the enterprise, ‘Maxim’s.’ And there, for all practical purposes, Maxime Gaillard’s connection with the establishment ended. He had contracted tuberculosis and two years later he was dead.

A number of explanations have been given for the rapid success of Maxim’s. One story is that it was due to the intervention of a famous demi-mondairie, Mademoiselle Irma de Montigny. Weber’s was then the accepted meeting place for what is now called (though not in France) ‘café society.’ It seems that one evening the maître d’hotel at Weber’s neglected to keep a table for Irma. In a pet, she swept off down the street to Maxim’s, and took all her friends with her. Another version has it that the popularity of Maxim’s was due to the efforts of a sugar manufacturer, Max Lebaudy, who used to entertain wealthy men friends there. His own unerring taste in the selection of women companions for his guests was
attributed to the management of Maxim’s, who received in consequence a steady stream of valuable new customers.

That may be true. Certainly the Mademoiselle de Montignys and the Monsieur Lebaudys made their contribution to the character of Maxim’s. But the real reasons for its eventual success were simpler. It was managed by two exceptionally shrewd and able men; and it was in the right place at the right time.

At the turn of the century, the Great Paris Exhibition ushered in that brief period of French social history which was to become known as
La Belle Epoque.
In many respects a legacy of the bounding, brassy, luxurious Second Empire, it yet had something peculiarly its own; at atmosphere of elegance, of lightness of heart and of serenity. It was the time of Paul Bourget and Pierre Loti, of Sarah Bernhardt and Edmond Rostand, of the young Proust and the young Colette, of Renoir, Matisse, Monet, Rodin, Vuillard and Toulouse-Lautrec. It was a time of gaiety. Above all it was a time of certainty, of confidence in a social order and of absolute belief that so splendid a state of affairs must be permanent. ‘Frivolity,’ a young man was told by the famous Hortense Schneider, ‘is the secret of happiness. I have been a frivolous woman. I came from a frivolous period. Frivolous people are happy people. Take care, Monsieur, to remain frivolous all your life.’

In
La Belle Epoque
, if your name was in the Almanac de Gotha or you were very rich, or both, that was sound advice. It was also easy to take. A gentleman could begin by going to Maxim’s.

Not, however, with his wife; nor with any other woman of his own social circle. ‘When I passed Maxim’s I shut my eyes as my mother had told me to do—it was no place for any self-respecting girl.’ The writer of that sentence was no prim provincial
demoiselle but the great Mistinguett of the fabulous legs and the Folies Bergères. However, her disapproval was not wholly righteous. ‘That glittering assembly of demi-mon-daines, with their money, their jewels and their royal lovers,’ she went on resentfully, ‘queened it over Paris society.’

And they did. People came from far and wide just to see the
grandes cocottes
of Maxim’s in their plumes and jewels and voluminous silks, sipping champagne to the sounds of a string orchestra and the heady perfumes of syringa, patchouli and musk.

There was Carolina Otero,
La Belle
Otero, who used to appear so loaded down with the jewelled gifts of her admirers that it was said by the uncharitable that she had to be supported to her table.

There were Alice Gaillard and Manon Loty and Nine Desforets. There was Liane de Pougy, who sported two Arab servants and became the Rumanian Princess Ghika. There was Gaby Deslys, the lover of King Manuel of Portugal. There were Emilienne d’Alençon and Jeanne and Anne de Lancy and Cleo de Merode—they all had marvellous names. Sometimes it was even possible to catch a glimpse of the exquisite Lily Langtry as she hurried, veiled, from her closed carriage to a private room on the first floor, and a rendezvous with a future King of England.