by J. R. Lonie
Praise for The Woman From Saint Germain
‘This book is a dream. Eleanor Gorton Clarke is a character whose presence lingers long after the last page is turned. Brave yet vulnerable, intelligent yet fiercely moral, she’s a woman of her time and ours, a heroine rarer than a first edition of Finnegans Wake. I’d follow her anywhere.’
Lauren Chater, bestselling author of The Lace Weaver
‘Between liberty and death you can find a fellow traveller. A necessary murder, a race to freedom, James Joyce and a bookshop set the stage for a tautly paced and thrilling chase that hurls you towards a revelatory finish.’ Marta Dusseldorp
‘A thrilling game of cat and mouse and an unlikely alliance drive a desperate race across Nazi-occupied France.’
Tania Blanchard, bestselling author of The Girl from Munich
To Alex, with love
RUE DE MONTFAUCON, SAINT GERMAIN DES PRÉS, PARIS VI
Morning, Friday, 5th December 1941
‘Well that’s dead on arrival,’ Eleanor growled after reading the sentence her frozen fingers had just typed out. The almost empty page winding through the spool of her typewriter, it wasn’t a page at all but a naked pink tongue poking out at her, mocking and spiteful. She could have railed against the cold too, but what was the point when coal for heating wasn’t to be had, even on the black market. Everyone was in the same boat and everyone said the same thing. On her feet, she wore two pairs of ugly woollen socks, although not everyone was also sheltering in a mink coat. ‘A vulgar thing,’ her mother had written to dissuade her from buying it. Eleanor had refused to be intimidated by such stiff New England morality. It was her money, after all, and the times had been good. Now, during the second terrible winter in a row, she was glad of it. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. The contrast with the Delaunay portrait of her on the wall, painted only four years earlier, was mortifying. The tall, statuesque auburn-haired beauty in the painting gazed loftily down from that happier time to her present self, a cross between Minnie Mouse and a grizzly bear. She certainly felt as vexed as a grizzly.
She reached for a cigarette but resisted. She’d already had her morning ration of nicotine with her morning ration of coffee. She could have another before bed. Two cigarettes a day wasn’t proving as difficult as she’d feared. When she’d imported them, the French customs duty had been eye-watering, but how glad she was now, because the Germans had struck only days later. Her stash would see her through this dreadful winter at least, and with luck, into the summer. After that, she’d have to smoke straw like everyone else, but that day that problem. She rubbed a smudge off the shiny red skin of the little Olivetti that Claude had bought her before the war. It was yet to produce a novel or, the way she was going, any semblance of one.
On the shelves behind her, mocking her present incoherence, were her published works in their original editions with their French, Spanish, Italian, and even Polish and Czech translations. Walevska and Napoleon, her first to achieve success, followed by The Italian Serenade of Emma Michaelis, then The Lovers of the Île-de-France, Love in the Afternoon and The American Woman. Quite a haul, if she said so herself, especially once she had begun to sell back home in America. No one could say she had been after Claude’s money. She had plenty, and all her own work. Her physician father and mother had given their children as fine an education as was to be had in their neck of the woods, which was very fine indeed. But apart from a loving if narrow home life, that was it, because after raising six children even a Providence physician could afford little else.
For the first time, a man was her central character. But the real Claude, the self-made businessman, the man of action, infantry colonel and military innovator at a time of stagnation, one of de Gaulle’s pals, who, had he survived, would have gone over to London too, this real Claude crowded out Eleanor’s imagination. Everywhere she looked in her apartment, there he was: his tall spare frame along the sofa, his pipe still on the stand, his night-shirts in the closet with the clothes he kept for the mornings after, his hairbrush, his razor in the other bathroom, his laughter. Even the Delaunay painting, which he had commissioned, the dress she’d worn and the way she had her hair done for the sitting. They’d had such fun; their senses of humour were in harmony as much as their bodies. Best was how he had loved her. The worst, now, was the bedroom, where her ache for his touch was a torture.
She considered making more coffee – it would warm her up and might stimulate her brain – but she remained firm. The alternative was chicory and roast grain of uncertain provenance, but while she had the cash, was frugal and the black market was still providing, if at great cost, this was another problem for that day of reckoning. Work was the only way out of this slough, and she was a Rhode Islander who had the ethic in spades. So she persevered and began again, but halfway across the page she noticed that while her fingers were working the keys, no words appeared on the page. She inspected the ribbon, which disintegrated between her fingers.
‘That’s just dandy!’ she exploded. She’d known it was on its last legs; she had been typing in hope. Like paper, typewriter ribbons were in short supply. But she was enjoying being annoyed. It provided an outlet for her many discontents and frustrations. She pushed back her chair, grabbed a fresh pack of Chesterfields, replaced the ugly socks with boots that needed repair and pulled on the fur hat that went with her coat. Then she stopped. It was one thing to wear a fur inside her apartment to keep warm, but going out in one, a mink of all things, on a mean day like today? You just didn’t do that, not unless you wanted to attract envious glances and resentment – or worse, for people to suspect you might be slinging yourself around one of those blond Fritzes who had even taken over the Café de Flore and the Deux Magots. While drawing a line at the mink, she refused to go out looking like a tramp, Germans or no Germans, so put on her cashmere coat and a matching toque hat. After a quick dusting of her face in the mirror and a spray of Schiaparelli, she set out.
Eleanor lived across from the local market, on the top floor of a building at the corner of Rue de Montfaucon. Facing south on one side, its high ceiling and large windows let in the light and she never tired of its joys, even now when the light was pale and unfriendly, the sun far away and her discontents many. She owned the lease on the place, having bought it after her second success. With rugs from Constantinople, paintings from New York, sculptures and glassware from the racier galleries in London, the apartment was a log of Claude’s business trips. His own home was much less exotic, he told her. His wife’s taste was for the French, and high bourgeois at that.
The cold outside was all the worse for being damp. The sky was grey and low but thin, so she doubted it would snow. She hiked along Rue du Four to the shop she figured might be her best bet. The woman was, rumour had it, pally with the Germans, so it would either overflow with typewriter ribbons or be empty because they’d taken the lot.
She entered and found the place unusually gloomy and thought the woman must be saving on electricity. All the lights were off except one over the counter. Maybe the Germans weren’t so pally after all. As Eleanor found out later, it turned out to be quite the opposite, which was why it was taking an age for the electrician to turn up to fix a faulty connection. Serve the treasonous bitch right.
The woman knew who Eleanor was but insisted on behaving as if they had never met.
‘Typewriter ribbons? Not for love or money, madame.’
‘Don’t give me that,’ Eleanor replied. Her French was Paris-pure, unless she was worked up, like now. At such times, she sounded a bit like the pre-war racy set of American literary tourists who if they spoke French at all, it was the French of Paris, Texas. She thrust her hand into her bag and drew
out the pack of Chesterfields, which she plonked onto the counter.
‘That should be worth at least ten typewriter ribbons,’ she said, and damn it all, she was right.
‘Alas, the Germans,’ the woman said, which was the excuse for everything these days, and while it was usually accurate, Eleanor’s dander was up. This woman was a liar, even when she said ‘and’ and ‘the’.
‘If you don’t believe me,’ her tormentor sniffed, ‘you’re at liberty to go to the Kommandantur.’
Eleanor scooped back the proffered pack of cigarettes. ‘I might just do that,’ she said. ‘And whom should I ask for?’
The woman was furious. ‘Go back to America before you run into real trouble,’ she spat as Eleanor stalked out. It was ages since anyone in Paris had said that to her and never, ever anyone French – always American or English, and always male.
Eleanor strode up to the boulevard but headed towards the Odéon rather than the Saint Germain des Prés metro, not for the exercise but as a test to see if her anger would last long enough for her to go through with this escapade. And it did, lasting even as the train failed to stop at Sébastapol to allow passengers to change to the other line. No explanation, but no explanation was needed. The Boches did this all the time, suddenly closing this metro station or that. On she rode. The carriages were dimly lit and full. No one spoke, but people seemed cheerful, mostly because packed in together they were at least warm. Because the Boches travelled free and always crowded out the first-class car in the middle, they at least had a break from the occupier.
Eleanor’s defiance, not so much against the Germans as against the woman at the stationery shop on the Rue du Four, began to run out of puff at Place de l’Opéra. But now she was here, she was determined to go through with it, although what she was exactly planning to go through with wasn’t clear, least of all to her. Fury and resentment were enough to propel her forward. At the top of the steps out of the metro, the cold embraced her like death, and there in front of her at number 2 was Death Central itself, the Kommandantur, the German commandant’s office. This was where all Parisians had to go for any permit or allowance, even to breathe. Hanging limp on this mean day under a mean sky, the red-and-black swastika flags in their ordered ranks looked especially sinister and intimidating. At the entrance were the occupiers in their grey steel helmets, their shiny boots and their rifles, like turds on a gold plate to Eleanor’s eyes.
They were just the sight to boost her courage, or her foolishness. She seemed not at all mindful of the possible consequences of her haughty demand to see General von Stülpnagel himself. To her astonishment, this got her inside.
SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY, 12 RUE DE L’ODÉON, PARIS VI
Afternoon, Friday, 5th December 1941
‘Some major agreed to see me,’ Eleanor said as she parcelled up The Grapes of Wrath for a Shakespeare and Company subscriber. Steinbeck was allowed by the Germans but not Hemingway, although only in English. ‘I demanded he give me a permit to buy typewriter ribbons so that I could continue my work as a writer, whereupon he took out a large book, opened it presumably at the page for T or whatever the German is for typewriter ribbons and said, “No, not permitted,” whereupon – ’ Eleanor stopped. ‘You sure you want to hear this?’ she asked.
‘Are you kidding?’ Sylvia said.
‘Whereupon,’ Eleanor continued, ‘I told him they were all thieves, they’d stolen not only the food from our mouths but every typewriter ribbon this side of the Rhine. He had me physically thrown out and threatened to arrest me if I ever came back, American passport or no.’
‘You can be very you sometimes,’ her friend Sylvia said, laughing.
‘A fool?’ Eleanor replied.
‘No, you goose, pig-headed.’
‘I’ve forgotten how to be me,’ Eleanor muttered. ‘Does anyone still borrow my books?’ she asked.
‘Stop being pathetic.’
These days, Sylvia’s hair was streaked with grey and she admitted exhaustion from the strain of keeping the bookshop going, especially since the war began, but her face was still like a pretty bird’s and her eyes remained bright and intensely curious. Eleanor kicked herself now and then for having let her fears get the better of her. Sylvia wasn’t at all intimidating. Her girlfriend was – Adrienne, whose dress and plumpness made her look like a stern abbess.
Since late ’39, just after the war began, Eleanor had been coming in a couple of afternoons a week to help. The English and the Canadians were all gone, and most of the Americans. Many of the French subscribers had dropped away, although some were now returning, a token act of resistance against the invader. Germans came in, always in pairs or threes, never alone. They were like schoolboys doing something illicit, as if the shop sold dirty postcards. Few purchased anything, and they always asked if Sylvia or anyone minding the shop was a Jew. The Gestapo came regularly with the same question. Until the invasion, Sylvia had employed a Jewish girl, a Canadian, which was a black mark against her. ‘We’ll come for you one day,’ said the Gestapo. This obsession with Jews went beyond the prejudice most French imbibed with their mother’s Catholic milk. Everyone knew it was the Germans who’d set off bombs in all those synagogues two months before. The Fritzes thought the Parisians would cheer, when all it did was gain the Jews sympathy, including Eleanor’s.
Sylvia wanted to put up a sign, NO GERMANS ALLOWED, but with the company she kept, she was already on thin ice, and Adrienne, with her outspoken views on the Nazis and what they were doing to the Jews, even more so.
*
When Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia’s English-language bookshop on the Rue de l’Odéon, opened after the first war, Eleanor had been a shy, gawping American girl with ambitions but no achievements apart from driving an ambulance for the American forces during the last year of the war. This had been her excuse to get to France. Patriotism was permitted; wanting to be a writer was not, not when you were only eighteen.
After war’s end, she’d gone home to Bryn Mawr. The moment she graduated, she married a young American who also had literary dreams of Paris, and back they came on the SS George Washington to the City of Light, where they mixed in those heady circles that became famous. While he broadcast his dreams to whomever he met, she kept hers to herself and suffered the patronising smiles of Miss Gertrude Stein and her arty pals in silence. Eleanor had been too intimidated by them to admit her aspirations. Their haughty disdain would have driven her back to the States, and that was the last thing she wanted.
With its higgledy-piggledy shelves stashed with books, photographs of authors squashed in where there was space on the walls, chairs and large pillows, and a stove to keep the place warm in winter, Shakespeare and Company was both shrine and refuge for Eleanor, whose visits were always shy and solitary. Meantime, she wrote in secret while her lovely husband talked but never wrote a word, until she was published and he, unsurprisingly, wasn’t. That was that. She’d betrayed him, so he claimed. She wouldn’t go that far but still, when push had come to shove, in a choice between being married to Fred or writing, writing had won. No contest.
How she’d hurt him, he complained, how she’d broken his heart. He really had loved her. Yet, as Eleanor had countered, his love hadn’t stretched to allowing her to be a writer when he had failed. Young as she was, she’d recognised that as ego. At least she got a book out of it, eventually, her most recent, The American Woman, and her best. It was also her most successful, helped by its brush with the Lord Chamberlain in Britain and being banned in every state south of the Mason-Dixon Line and then some, as well as causing a United States senator to call for her passport to be taken away. Even her mother had defended her against that outrage; she’d first taken the precaution of having the book explained to her by Eleanor’s sister Muriel, rather than having to read it herself.
The novel’s main character, Selina, had been inspired by the young American woman in Mary Cassatt’s painting ‘Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge’, which Eleanor
had seen many times in a collection of one of Claude’s friends. Selina is a talented artist who moves to Paris with her young artist husband, inspired by Fred, and their young child. Like Cassatt, she ignores the prejudices against women and is taken up by Degas and his circle. While her husband fails, she succeeds. Given his ultimatum, she chooses art, so he throws her out. Worse, she then scandalises Degas and his weekend bohemians by her passionate love for a young artist from Brittany, whose miraculous talent is divided in equal parts between sculpture and trouble. She finds him in La Santé prison, where he has briefly landed himself after killing a rival in love. That’s the last she sees of her child.
What a dream it had been to write, in great contrast to her present creative stew. But that was before the invasion, before Claude’s death.
*
Eleanor had contributed anonymously to the Friends of Shakespeare and Company, which was set up to keep the shop open during the tough times after the Depression. She’d taken another couple of years to own up to her contributions. She knew what jolly old Gertrude and Miss Toklas, with her moustache and pickled mouth, said about her books, although they’d never read them, and of the opinions of the other literary and artistic Americans who moved excitedly around the Left Bank like raptors from the future. They dismissed her as a mere woman’s writer, which meant not a real writer at all.
When The American Woman was published, oh how they and their critic pals had erupted. ‘Karenina gets away with it,’ bellowed literary headlines filled with the rage of these standard-bearers for the rights of women. ‘Karenina lives happily ever after!’ How dare Selina choose artistic calling over husband and child; how dare she run off with a killer? How dare they love and live and make beautiful art? Just as infuriating, how dare Eleanor make so much money out of it? They, her critics, refused even to grace her with her name. She was just ‘that woman from Saint Germain’, with all its inferences, cheap and trashy being among them.
