The Monestiers’ only child, Claude de Laromiguière, mentioned above, as dear a relative as I have left in the world, was eighteen in 1936, and remembers that the du Plessix would go out with her parents at least once a month. They frequently attended the theater or concerts together and then would go to their favorite restaurant, the downstairs room of the Rond Point des Champs Elysées. “Tatiana would come down the stairs, éclatante d’élegance et de beauté, always dressed by Piguet,” Claude recalls, “and Bertrand would be very proud to see all eyes turned toward her—he would carefully observe the different persons who directed their attention to her. And then a few minutes into the evening she’d say something that exasperated him, and so it went, an evening punctuated by his alternation of pride and exasperation…but on the better evenings they acted like the greatest, most devoted of friends.”
The Monestiers were one of two couples my parents saw together. The other was Jacques and Hélène Dessoffy, who will also reenter my narrative later. The comte and comtesse Dessoffy were one of those well-to-do French twosomes of the prewar era who had enough money never to need to work, and they channeled most of their energies into buying and redecorating houses. Hélène was the daughter of a high-ranking naval officer, a horsy, long-legged, chain-smoking woman with a lean, boyish body, brown hair worn in a plain bun, and a wry, swift wit that delighted both my parents. Even at the age of thirty-eight or so, when my memories of her begin, she was suntanned to the point of leatheriness, and her voice, which was of naturally low, mannish register, was made even hoarser, deeper by her four daily packs of Gauloises. Although my parents never touched a mind-altering substance stronger than a glass of wine, like several of their friends both Dessoffys were considerably addicted to drink and drugs. Jacques Dessoffy, a spectacled, very cosmopolitan fellow from the minor gentry who had befriended my father at the École des Langues Orientales, spent much of his time in North Africa, where he could get the best opium swiftly from the growers themselves.
As for Hélène, her dependence on whiskey had increased since the end of her one serious love affair: She had had a liaison since the mid-1930s with an immensely handsome, charming German former diplomat, Hans von Dincklage, also known as “Spatz” (sparrow), who pretended to have been forced out of the diplomatic corps in 1934 because he was married to a Jew. My father, who had befriended Spatz in Warsaw, had helped him get a job as a journalist in Paris and had introduced him to Hélène. A torrid affair ensued, which in turn had to be terminated in the autumn of 1938, at the time of Munich, when my father advised all his friends to cut off relations with Spatz and any German nationals living in France. Hélène had followed his counsel. But her separation from Spatz and her growing awareness that he had all along been a spy—a suspicion initiated by my father and soon acknowledged by all her friends—had made her very mournful. It became clear that Spatz had used Hélène’s home near Toulon, an important naval base, as a center for his espionage activities. She was just beginning to get over her melancholy and her rage at her former lover (who throughout the Occupation years—the fellow had taste—would be the lover of Coco Chanel).
Tatiana’s closest friend, Hélène Dessoffy, and her lover Hans (“Spatz”) von Dincklage, who turned out to be the head of the Third Reich’s espionage network in France.
There was a very pleasant, benign, sunny absence to both Dessoffys: Wreathed in clouds of smoke and surrounded by their beloved schnauzers, they seemed to move in an euphoric world, somewhat beyond the domain of sexual contact, into which they seemed ever ready to welcome you, as long as you did not disturb their insouciant bliss. If they have enough money never to encroach on you, I learned through them, opium smokers can be most pleasant companions. The Dessoffys’ lovely villas in the south of France (they lived rather separate lives and usually inhabited separate houses) were comfortable in a modern, functional way—large chalk-white rooms with spacious sofas sensibly upholstered in linen and cotton. I remember air, lightness, joking, prancing happy dogs, perpetual sunniness around Hélène, and the mild, enduring smell of the best Scotch. My father had such brotherly devotion to her that in the spring of 1939 he bought a ramshackle old farmhouse a few minutes from her villa—in Sanary-sur-Mer, near Toulon—which he planned to remodel “as soon as the political situation permits.”
Another unusual trait about the Dessoffys was that they were rich enough and spaced-out enough to remain in a constantly partying mood and to welcome anyone who amused and interested them into their lives. In the early 1930s, they had formed deep bonds of friendship with both of the ever-so-amusing du Plessix; and they seemed to take to Alex with equal affection when he entered my mother’s life. So God only knows who was testing whom during the following episode, which occurred in the spring of 1939, when my father and I were staying with Hélène at her newest house in Sanary.
In this memory, we are in Hélène’s kitchen. It is shortly after Hitler has occupied the remains of Czechoslovakia, in flagrant breach of the Munich accords signed the previous fall. My father is giving one of his characteristically pessimistic monologues about the threats presented by Hitler and the French government’s incompetence in dealing with them, a diatribe that Hélène, in her state of habitual nirvana, nods at with absentminded approval. Why hadn’t France taken on Germany in 1936, Father is asking, when the Nazis had marched into the Rhineland? Germany was then only beginning to rearm, the French Army could have made mincemeat of them! That idiotic old general Gamelin is at fault, a coward if there ever was one. Not to speak of Léon Blum and all his Jewish pacifist friends, and the labor unions constantly striking and slowing up our rearmament! Le résultat? Munich, a debacle over which every Frenchman should hang his head in shame! Since then, the Germans have developed umpteen Panzer divisions, Messerschmitts speedier than any plane anyone has ever seen! And now they’ve just devoured the remains of our old ally, Czechoslovakia, without us even lifting a finger! What are those fools at the Elysée waiting for?
In his more turbulent moods, my father, especially when he’s staying in the country with friends, often calms himself by cooking a good meal, which he here sets out to do as he finishes his invective. An accomplished gourmet chef (another maverick trait highly unusual to Frenchmen of the prewar era), he has recently taught me to make chocolate truffles; and while Father is at the stove, stirring a boeuf bourguignon he’s concocting for dinner, I am studiously rolling unctuous little balls of chocolate paste around a dish of cocoa powder to coat them evenly. This is an odd context for the conversation that follows: “Tu connais les Libermans?” Hélène asks my father. “Sales petits Juifs,” my father answers impassively, stirring his stew. “Oh, ils sont bien gentils, surtout le fils,” Hélène says. “Oui, le père est bien pire,” my father responds, and then repeats: “Sales petits Juifs.”
The words stung. For the first time, I almost hated my father. I had grown very fond of Alex. During my visits to his studio, he had utterly won me over with his unique blend of charm, thoughtfulness, and warmth. And I was also old enough to muse over the following questions, which I ponder to this day: Did Hélène set up this conversation to find out how aware my father was of Tatiana’s new affair? Or was she asking him the question in front of me in order to test my awareness of the situation? Hélène had no children to practice on—a deliberate choice, I suspect, for one could not imagine her being responsible for any creature more demanding than a schnauzer—but this was a very odd bit of child psychology testing indeed.
That was the last spring vacation I spent with my father. It was the last spring of a peace which the majority of the French, for the past two decades, had deemed to be eternal.
A half century after that episode in Hélène Dessoffy’s kitchen, I had the good fortune to come across the following passage from the novelist Maurice Sachs, which expresses with eerie succinctness the delusions the French nation had been steeped in throughout the Entre Deux Guerres era—delusions that my father, to his credit, was ever ready to battle.
Neither 18 Brumaire, nor the Empire, nor Waterloo…nor the Second Republic, nor the Second Empire, nor [the defeat of France at] Sedan, nor the Commune, nor the birth of the Third Republic shook France as profoundly, to the depths of its entrails, as the war of 1914 and the peace that followed…. [T]he peace of 1919 announced an eternal peace…. [T]he French, charmed by delicious illusions, were the first to think that this peace (which…differed from others only by the demented hopes it created) once more marked the Fatherland for a unique destiny…. Crowned as they were by the charming attributes of victory, this state of mind…authorized all excesses, all licenses, all follies.
NINE
1939–1940
Notwithstanding the grave threats posed that year by Adolf Hitler, in 1939 French citizens of all walks of life took their habitual summer vacations. Prime Minister Edouard Daladier sailed on a friend’s yacht off the Côte d’Azur in the company of his mistress, the marquise de Crussol. The president of the Republic, Albert Lebrun, vacationed in his home village in Lorraine, Mercy-le-Haut. Minister of Justice Paul Marchand spent twelve days at Evian, doing a liver cure. Finance Minister Paul Reynaud rested at Le Touquet on the English Channel before joining his longtime companion, the comtesse de Portes, at Arcachon on the Atlantic coast. The minister for the colonies, Georges Mandel, who had long urged his government to forcibly resist Germany’s increasing belligerence, was clearly more concerned than most others and took only three days off at Deauville.
As for the du Plessix family, we spent most of August 1939 at the estate in the Gorges du Tarn that my uncle André Monestier had bought a few summers back, La Croze. A secluded complex of rustic, gray stone buildings on the banks of the rushing river, it still remains a microcosm of romantic perfection for anyone attracted to untamed nature. For all practical purposes, it can be reached only by boat, for it perches on that steep, rocky side of the Tarn canyon on which there is no road for twenty kilometers, and no one in the family has ever attempted to cross the densely forested mountain to reach that road. On the bank opposite La Croze, the nearest village, La Malène, is five kilometers away. Other than the boat crossing, the only possible approach to civilization, occasionally undertaken by the adventurous and fit, is to walk upstream on a rough, steep forester’s path, toward La Malène, where the Tarn can be crossed by footbridge. La Croze is in keeping with the traditions of its region, the Lozère, where the legendary Boy of the Aveyron is said to have been raised by wolves, and which remains one of France’s most rustic areas. And it is a most beautiful site. (I am using the present tense for the estate, barely altered, still remains in the family.) Wildflowers grow in rich profusion here, the swift river below glimmers like a ribbon of platinum between rows of silvery poplars, the air is of a purity found in few places in Europe.
The postal system at La Croze—and the delivery of groceries—is characteristically eccentric: Mail, food supplies, and day-late Le Figaros arrive in a large wooden crate, strung on cables, which is hauled over the river by cranking on a large cable wheel. Most communication with the other side of the river is done through a lot of shouting. “Monsieur Legrand,” one bellows to the grocer, “could you be kind enough to find us a good gigot for the weekend?” And in the days when there was no phone, unexpected guests from all parts of France hollered across the river to announce their arrival: Cousins drove up, parked at the other side of the river, and yelled: “We’re the du Plessix (the la Laurencies, the d’Argenteuils) from Perpignan (Nantes, Angoulême), can we come for lunch?” “Of course” was the inevitable reply. Throughout the decades, Aunt Simone and, later, my cousin Claude, both brilliant cooks, have overseen a sizable staff of village girls in the kitchen. To this day, the region is poor, domestic helpers are happy to work for pittances, and rare are the meals at which there are fewer than twenty at the table. La Croze has always aspired to be a refuge from the humdrum world, a private kingdom of sorts. And with the exception of the weekly trip to La Malène for Sunday Mass (there are some joyous Sundays when a priest is a guest at La Croze and can say Mass at home), an expedition to the village is looked on as a capitulation.
The same adventurous streak of character that had incited the Monestiers to buy La Croze had led them to form close friendships with my mother’s relatives. They had revered Babushka. They had much admired Sasha Iacovleff and collected his works. They equally loved my gentle, melancholy great-aunt Sandra, who was now trying to make ends meet as an opera coach. So it was natural that in 1939, the summer after Babushka’s death, they invited Aunt Sandra to come with us to La Croze for a month, wishing to console her in her deep mourning.
It was with this happy group of loved ones that I spent most of that month of August, in the last summer of the long armistice that had lasted since 1919. My parents’ overlapping schedules at La Croze were as complex as ever. Having dismissed my governess for the month in hopes that I would fare better in my aunt’s care, my father had driven Aunt Sandra and me to La Croze on August 1. He had stayed for two weeks, gone off in midmonth to “see some friends” (the lady in red, I suspect), and was scheduled to drive us back to Paris toward the end of the month. My mother had arrived on the thirteenth, the day before he left, with the intention of staying a week before returning to the south of France (and surely to Alex). La Croze and Mother were hardly a perfect match. However much she adored the Monestiers, she loathed oil lamps, the dearth of bathtubs, and the general rusticity of the place. She kept rowing across the river and getting into her car—which terrified us, since she’d gotten her driving license only the previous spring—under the pretext of finding special foods for me, especially a powder called Banania, intended for underweight children. But she was obviously also looking for nearby villages in which she could peacefully write and send her postcards to Alex.
“It’s so wild and beautiful here, Auntie says it reminds her of the Darial Gorge in the Caucasus,” she wrote Alex on August 17.
There is a total lack of comfort, neither electricity nor roads. If you were here with me it might be very charming, but without you it is very desolate. I’m finding my solace in Francine and the serenity of the place…. I love you so tenderly and endlessly and guard you inside me like my own life. Write to me and I will meet the mail myself, hauling it in on the rope.
“It is so sad that you haven’t written,” she complained on the nineteenth in one of four postcards she wrote him that day alone.
We have a lot of thunderstorms here but I still go for swims and walks in order not to lose my sanity without you. Auntie is so nice, and I exploit her completely. Unfortunately Froska doesn’t look too well, no better than in Paris, and the children’s games tire her out very much.
“At last, I received your letter,” she exulted the same evening in yet another card,
and Aptimtim [a code name Mother and Alex had developed for each other] it was such a nice delicious letter…. My life, in two days I will be with you….[O]ur love is a happiness so undeserved that we have to guard it as the world’s greatest treasure.
I have only a few precise memories of that last summer of the peace, when I was not quite nine. I remember the general bliss of being surrounded with the five people I most deeply loved: my mother and father, Uncle André and Aunt Simone, Aunt Sandra. I remember waking to the sound of my uncle’s voice crying out his welcome to the postman. “Bonjour, Monsieur Lefèvre! I’ll haul it over!” I remember sitting at the long oak table at breakfast, watching my mother, who was hopeless in a kitchen, struggling to make me a cup of Banania and softly saying “Merde” as she spilled a quart of milk. I had not yet learned to swim, my governess having looked on that skill as too perilous; and I recall wading knee-deep in the river with Sandra, looking up at her face and being dazzled—heaven knows why at that particular moment, since it was one of the dearest sights of my childhood—by the blazing operatic whiteness of her teeth, the sheen of which she maintained with a delectably scented pink dentifrice called Toreador. I also recall the endless
conversations between my father and my uncle concerning the threat of war—France and Great Britain’s urgent need to sign a pact of nonaggression with the Soviet Union, the negotiations undertaken for that purpose since March of that year, Daladier’s incompetence and foot-dragging. And I recall my parents, on the one day they were both at La Croze, sitting on the banks of the poplar-lined, glimmering river, my mother regaling the Monestiers with details of the July social season in Paris. It had been of unsurpassed, whirlwind brilliance, she said; the most glamorous party of all had been the yearly ball held at the Polish embassy—Madame de Portes, mistress of minister of finances Paul Reynaud, had looked a tad less ugly than usual in a superb Patou gown of violet silk; the ravishing French wife of Otto Abetz, chargé d’affaires at the German embassy, was in an almond-hued peau de soie; the grounds were lit with thousands of fairylike lights; at 3:00 A.M., the ambassador had bidden all his guests to take off their shoes, and the entire crowd had danced a polonaise all across the embassy lawns…. “The feast before the famine,” my father quietly interrupted her, looking morose and brooding, as he did whenever any issue associated with Poland—an urgent political issue that summer—was brought up.
But what I recall most vividly, perhaps because it was a rite of passage for me, was taking the legendary five-kilometer hike from La Croze to the bridge at La Malène, a walk that only “grown-ups” usually ventured on. It was the day after my mother—who tended to coddle me, like my governess—had left for the south. My father had as much as dared me to take the walk, and after three weeks in Aunt Simone’s care I felt strong enough to accept the challenge. We moved at a brisk clip through the dense forest of evergeens, guiding ourselves by the ribbon of river gleaming below us, sliding often on thick beds of fragrant pine needles. It was a cool, sunny day, and my excitement was such that I never felt much fatigue. After two hours of walking, upon glimpsing the first village houses across the river, I even felt a kind of void—I’d met the challenge and felt the need for another. As we sat down to rest under a tree before crossing the bridge, my father praised me as he seldom had before, lauding my strength, my speed, my courage. Inhaling the smell of the spruce and fir trees that surrounded us, I thrilled to his compliments—I was his good little soldier, he said with pride; think of all the walks we could do together now, in the Morvan, on the Brittany coast!
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