I kiss you and kiss you and adore you.
He wrote her again the following day, June 12, two days before the fall of Paris, mostly worrying about the paintings he had left behind in his studio.
I wait every moment for a word from you. What are you doing? Are you planning to stay put, or are you taking Francine to the Gorges du Tarn? I suffer a lot from having left all the paintings behind—they’ve surely perished! However I’ll make more, if God wills it.
It’s atrocious, it’s difficult to be separated from you, especially in times like these—Here crowds of refugees are arriving all the time, I live from one radio to the other—there are no newspapers, no more news. Mother is calming down a bit. Write soon you’re the only window open on a world still filled with sun.
I hug the whole the whole of you.
She wrote him the day she received his first letter, on the thirteenth, the day after we’d arrived at Villandry. “How can you be in doubt, I love you more than life and am only thinking of our future life together,” she reassured him amid a rush of news about the displaced children in her charge and her struggle to get enough gas coupons to drive anywhere. “I can’t live without you. You’re indeed vital to me. I’m totally unhappy and lost without you.”
During that particular week of the debacle, the French postal system seems still to have been functioning normally. Alex received her letter of the thirteenth within two days and wrote her on the sixteenth, two days after Paris fell, warning her that she mustn’t wait too long before leaving Villandry.
I’ve just received your first letter. You can’t imagine my joy. Tears welled up in my eyes. I beg you, please forgive me my first letters. I was in such a terrible state without you, with Mother acting up all the time etc. And all of a sudden I felt your passionate love again. I adore you so endlessly, I think only about you day and night…. I am so happy that you are working and helping out. I love you endlessly for everything you do. It’s hard for me to live without you…. [A]ll hotels here are requisitioned. My heart stops at the thought that I might see you soon…. There was an air raid last night and radio Stuttgart announced that we were about to be bombed…. I beg you not to stay in Tours until the last minute, for if a new front is established you won’t be able to leave any more…. My only true love. My life, my everything, write and come. I can come to fetch you…. Command and I shall obey, je t’aime.
Throughout that week, the Villandry community had kept up with events on the château’s one wireless, some twenty of us gathering every afternoon in the living room to hear the calamitous news. On June 16, Premier Paul Reynaud resigned after his cabinet voted down Churchill’s extraordinary offer temporarily to fuse the British and French nations into one union. Marshal Pétain was named head of state in his stead. And on the seventeenth—it was the day before the Germans arrived in Tours and we were bidden to gather in the living room earlier than usual, at noon—we heard the eighty-four-year-old Pétain announce the end of the war in his quivering, curiously high-pitched voice: “I make to France the gift of my person to allay its misery…. It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today to cease all combat.”
Our room at Villandry was at the end of one of the two main wings of the U-shaped château, and it looked out, on the left, on its celebrated boxwood gardens. Straight ahead, we looked onto the little country road that linked the village of Villandry to Tours. The day after Pétain’s speech, June 18—it was a very sunny morning; I remember that entire tragic month as being drenched in sunlight—we woke before seven to the sound of powerful young voices singing. My mother leaped out of bed, exclaiming “Les Boches sont arrivés!” (“The Germans have arrived!”) She grabbed my hand as she ran to the window, and we looked down upon a German regiment’s first parade on their newly conquered terrain: goose-stepping smartly, four abreast, a few hundred yards from our window, the Nazis, fresh faced, very young, very glaring, their heads held high toward us, their helmets and bayonets blazing in the sun. If my memory serves me right, their marching song that day was “Lili Marlene”:
Vor der Kaserne, vor dem grossen Tor
stand eine Laterne, und steht sie noch davor….
As children, I suspect, we are all born collaborationists; we do everything in our power to enchant and charm the enemy, to save our skins, to survive. With an enjoyment I knew to be infamous, I thrilled to the radiance of the young Germans’ stern faces. I wanted to kill them, yet I felt the thrill of a child admiring anything that is sleek, streamlined, powerful. My crass little soul delighted in the pomp of uniforms, in all appurtenances of rank and might. I thought back with pity and rage to the haggard, desperate French soldiers we had seen on the road out of Paris. I stared hard at the young Germans, trying to summon up hatred, feeling disloyal to my father (who might at any moment, wherever he was, be killed by one of them) for admiring their beauty, their futurity. I know my mother felt no such ambivalence. She stood at the window in a defiant posture, her hands on her hips, as if confronting someone in a brawl, and quietly whispered, loathing in her voice, “Quelle merde.”
General de Gaulle’s appeal, which was broadcast at 8:00 P.M. that very day, June 18, was heard by only a very small minority of French citizens. Reports of it only reached us in the following days, along with the story of his daredevil escape from France, the bravado of which has not received proper attention. General Edward Spears, who had gallantly led the British Expeditionary Force throughout the fall of France, was ordered to leave Bordeaux on the evening of the seventeenth, a few hours after Pétain’s announcement of the armistice. Through a plan arranged that afternoon by the two generals, who were close friends, de Gaulle assigned himself the task of seeing off Spears at the Bordeaux airport. In full sight of the French officials who would later become eminent members of the Vichy government, de Gaulle stood by Spears’s tiny four-seater plane, briefcase in hand, saying good-bye to his British colleague. At the very last minute, after the engines had started up, Spears reached out a hand to his comrade and yanked de Gaulle into his plane. To the consternation of the bystanders, off the two generals went, reaching London an hour later. On the evening of the following day, de Gaulle, after a considerable amount of maneuvering with the British cabinet and with the dauntless support of Spears and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, went on the BBC to tell his compatriots that “we have lost a battle, but we have not lost a war.”
I recall our hostess, Madame de la Bouillerie, rushing into our room the day after the “Appel du 18 Juin” to give us the news: De Gaulle was calling on all French to join him in London and continue the struggle against Germany! Upon hearing this, my mother grew very quiet. She waited until we were alone and everyone was out of earshot, then took my hand and whispered excitedly, “I suspect that your father will at any moment join him, join de Gaulle!” She was absolutely right.
A few days after we heard about de Gaulle, on June 22, Pétain agreed to the ignominious terms of the 1940 armistice and signed it into law. France was divided into two zones, the Occupied Zone (which included our temporary refuge, Tours) and the so-called Vichy Zone, headed by Pétain’s Collaborationist government. Royan was scheduled to be occupied by the Germans, and by defying a series of border guards at the frontier between the two zones Alex managed to get to the little town of Ascain, a few miles above St. Jean-de-Luz; there, he had sought temporary refuge, his mother still in tow, with his friend Jean-Pierre Fourneau. Since mid-June, Alex and my mother had not received any letters from each other, and due to new censorship rules they were to remain incommunicado until well into July. Although he still was not yet technically a French citizen, upon the armistice Alex keenly felt the depth of the French tragedy and seemed to have sought solace in the Protestant faith of his youth.
June 23rd
My life, my everything,
I am writing to you on this dreadful day. I don’t know where you are, what’s happening to you. I don’t know if you’ll ever receive this letter, but I believe that God will have mercy
to such great and true a love. I suffered so much, I worried so much about you and Francine…. My soul aches for our country, and I feel so helpless. Everything is happening on such a world scale, that personal sufferings, worries, desires seem trifling….
Whatever happens now, I am grateful to you for my happiness, and in all the sufferings that probably await me I will think about you and it will help me to endure everything. Always remember how much I love you and how much we need each other. My love, wherever I may be, I will only wait for a moment when I see you. Since we parted, I have an image of you before my eyes, and at every turn of the road, of the street, it seems to me that I will find you. I believe I will find you.
I pray to God for France, for you, for us. Believe in me the way I believe in you. Don’t leave me, the way I don’t leave you.
Yours For ever and completely,
A.
My mother, too, was anguished by the dearth of news about Alex’s whereabouts. On July 6, she wrote him four separate letters, addressing them to four possible destinations.
“My love,” she wrote him in the version she sent to Sainte Maxime, “I am sending out four copies of this letter. What if not a single one will reach you?! I’m going crazy from missing you and desiring you. On Monday I am going to Vichy to organize the trip to the South with Francine…. I adore you and love you more than ever. I hope you will manage to get in touch with me in Villandry as soon as you can.”
“My love,” he wrote her that same week, suggesting that he intended this missive to serve as his last will and testament,
I write you a word again, and I don’t know if you will ever receive it…. My life, we are trying to reach our house in the South, and there we shall wait for events. Where are you? What is happening to you? My life stopped since we parted. If anything happens to me, everything I own—paintings, books, furniture, means of support, I give to you in the name of the happiness you gave me.
I pray to God for you, for us. Yours for ever. Alexander Liberman.
The lovers’ communication finally resumed in mid-July: On the fourteenth of the month, Tatiana responded to a telegram she had just received from Alex, who had safely reached his house in Sainte Maxime. But by this time, a guarded tone had to be maintained in any correspondence between the two zones. All of Tatiana’s subsequent correspondence from the Occupied Zone bears the stamp “Ouvert par l’autorité militaire.”
“My Dear Life,” she wrote him.
Finally I received your telegram with the address. I was feeling so completely lost without you. My Love: I miss you SO MUCH!
Here we have our personal dramas. 40 children left for Villandry yesterday in an ambulance and still haven’t arrived…. We haven’t found any lodging for the kids, so Isabelle is taking them in. Can you imagine this hovel? Yesterday we went four(!!) times to Tours for beds, etc.
I am waiting anxiously for your letter and I wonder how you are coping there without my pragmatic counsel. Francine is enjoying the life here and the garden is a great background for her type of beauty!
What to do to see you? I kiss you tenderly, as much as I love you.
PS My love to Mamasha.
In the second week of July, my mother and I had our first face-to-face encounter with the Nazi regime. We had driven in our tiny Peugeot to Tours to get flour for Villandry’s refugee children. A few blocks from the prefecture, where the Germans had established their Kommandantur, our tiny car was crashed into by a huge Mercedes filled with German officers, three times the size and weight of our vehicle. The windshield shattered and glass struck our foreheads, hitting particularly hard on the passenger side, and my memories of the next few minutes are drenched in blood. Although my mother’s terrible driving might have been at fault, she bounded out of the car, seething with rage, and in her very limited German accused the officers of irresponsible driving. The officers may have been taken aback by her vehemence—these were the days when docility was counseled upon any encounter with the occupying forces—but she was gorgeous and distinguished looking enough to keep them temporarily at bay, and they limited themselves to asking her for our identity papers. She whipped them out, along with her visiting card. Seeing the title “vicomtesse” engraved on the card, the officers, apparently sensitive to issues of social hierarchy, offered to take us to the hospital. “Not at all,” my mother demanded, “I want to see the Kommandant.” Startled but bowing, they acceded. Our Peugeot was still drivable, and we followed the Germans’ Mercedes amid a blaze of klaxons to the Kommandantur.
My mother was a shrewd and cunning woman; and I suspect that for the past few weeks she had been wondering about how to eventually obtain an Ausweis, a permit, to get us to the Vichy Zone and on to Alex’s house in the south of France. What luck! she had immediately thought upon the occurrence of the accident. She might meet the Kommandant of Tours! As our car reached our destination, she lovingly commended me for my calm as she wiped off some blood from my face and combed my hair for our important visit. We were ushered into the main office, where a French préfet had reigned until a few weeks earlier. The Kommandant was a tall, courtly, scholarly-looking man in his late thirties with horn-rimmed glasses and a handsome mustache. Upon ushering us in, the officers handed him our identity papers. “Is your husband by any chance descended from the cardinal de Richelieu?” the Kommandant asked in accent-free French, after perusing them. “Anyone in their right mind,” my mother answered snappily, “would rather be descended from la Dame aux Camélias.”
The Kommandant gave a broad, enchanted smile and called his orderlies to come and dress my wounds. As I was being tended to, he held a lively discussion with my mother concerning the relative merits of Dumas père and Dumas fils. We learned that Kommandant Hebert was a professor of French literature at the University of Heidelberg. A box of chocolates was offered us, a car was called for to take us home to Villandry. “Schön kleine Kontessen,” he whispered as he kissed my hand in parting. I’ll never forget the graze of his mustache on my wrist, the very great kindness—an almost pleading kindness—of his eyes, my deepening confusion as to whether it was permissible to think of him as a nice man, to like a highly placed member of the armed forces that were my father’s enemy.
In mid-July, a few days after our first meeting with the Kommandant, my mother received a letter and an Ausweis, asking her to drive to the Ministry of War at Vichy. The letter notified her that it had information about my father and stipulated that she must leave me behind at Villandry as a hostage of sorts. She left me in the care of a fellow exile, Gitta Sereny, a precocious seventeen-year-old Hungarian girl whom she had befriended in Paris in the weeks before the debacle, when they had worked together at a refugee center. It is in Vichy that a minor official of the Ministry of War gave Mother the news, briskly and coldly, about my father: That very month the Vichy government would impose a death sentence on de Gaulle on grounds of treason, and like all of de Gaulle’s recruits my father was being listed by Vichy as a defector. Mother also learned that Lieutenant du Plessix had left Bordeaux shortly after June 18 and flown to Casablanca, where he had organized a squadron of Free French aviators. He had been shot down over the Mediterranean in early July, on his way to joining de Gaulle in London, and until further knowledge he would be listed as missing in action. (Throughout the following year, not daring to break the news to me, my mother led me to believe that my father was “on a secret mission.”)
My mother seems to have informed Alex of our family tragedy the very day she was notified of it, through some form of coded telegram: In view of the censorship, it obviously would not have been safe to inform him openly of Lieutenant du Plessix’s heroic actions with de Gaulle. The shockingly buoyant, casual letter she writes Alex the day after she received the news concerning my father expresses no grief, no sense of loss, little more than her overriding obsession to assemble enough gas coupons to drive to the Vichy Zone and join Alex.
“My Life, my Life, my Life,” she writes to Alex in her letters of J
uly 15 and 16, during her twenty-four-hour stay in the Vichy Zone.
It was hard to get out of the Germans’ hands, but the path is clear now and the next time will be easy. I got to the Parc-Hotel [where all the Vichy France ministries had their offices] and sent you the telegram right away. I’m trying to procure some gas to go to the South, but I still need 50 more liters. I do have 40 liters at Villandry, that could get us to Vichy, but I need more gas for the rest of the road. On Friday I’m going back to Villandry, where Francine is staying. I’m dreaming about getting to you at the beginning of next week. I wish I could remain in the South till the end of this whole nightmare. Write to Villandry at once. I would like to leave after getting your letter. I kiss you as much as I love you.
But in those very days of mid-July, several issues got in the way of our going south to stay with Alex. Mother could find no more gasoline. (“The ministries that passed through Tours have requisitioned everything.”) A few of the refugee children fell very ill, and Mother did not want to leave Villandry until she had found someone responsible for them. She herself came down with severe bronchitis and a high fever. Moreover, her sense of prudishness and propriety came to the fore—what would people think, she might have asked herself, when they heard that she had brought her child to live with her lover?
But even more important, my father’s wishes concerning my future, which were stated in a series of letters he had written to her and to the Dessoffys in the weeks before his death, started to gnaw at her conscience. Notwithstanding his own record of infidelities, he seemed to have been more profoundly jealous and resentful of Alex than he had been of any of her earlier lovers. And now that I was exclusively in my mother’s charge, what alternatives had he had if he had wished to see me safely refuged in the Vichy Zone yet kept out of Alex’s sight? His options had been very narrow. Everyone who had helped him take care of me throughout my childhood—my governess, Aunt Sandra, and the Monestiers, the last of whom had already started working with resistance movements—had decided to remain in the Occupied Zone. Apart from those trusted relatives, all of my parents’ close friends had been partying hard throughout the previous decade, and come the debacle they seemed reluctant to rearrange their lives for a nine-year-old. This entire correspondence—which thank heavens I did not get to read until a few years ago—reminds me of some lost-parcel episode. Help, everyone is calling out! Lost child here, misaddressed, needs to be re-expedited! How to re-expedite this burdensome child?
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