The Bugatti Queen

by Miranda Seymour

  The presence of the occupiers in Paris was impossible to miss. Over a thousand Germans were helping to supervise the occupied zone from their headquarters at the Hotel Majestic on Avenue Kléber. The police had moved into the Claridge on the Champs-Elysées, the Gestapo were carrying out nocturnal interrogations at 74 Avenue Foch and 11 rue de Saussaies, while the deeply unpleasant Sicherheitsdienst (SD) were established at the Crillon. Every day the soldiers’ march along the Champs-Elysées became more of an affront. The commendation: ‘Ils sont corrects’ had changed to a bitter ‘ils nous prennent tout’ in 1941 when it became apparent that Hitler’s plans for France reached no further than its exploitation. Everything of value was reserved for German use, while the French were left to manage as well as they could. ‘Le système D’, which became part of the language, translates as ‘getting by’. Le système D, by 1941, was the only way to survive.

  Photographs of the lengthy queues for increasingly meagre rations show scrawny women, bare-legged, their skirts cut short for cycling, their unkempt hair valiantly hidden under turbans, their faces haggard with anxiety. Civilians who did not fraternize with the Germans or have access to goods through the booming black market were starving. A walk in one of the city’s gardens was often undertaken with the hope of braining an unwary pigeon; posters warned that it was unhealthy to eat stewed cat. The fortunate, with kind relations in the country, depended on the food parcels of which 300,000 reached Paris in 1941. The enterprising bred rabbits in their cellars to enliven a stomach-knotting diet of beans, swedes, tiny lumps of fatless cheese and, for a treat, grey, gelatinous sausages. In years when an egg was a magnificent luxury, food was increasingly associated with the idea of power. The Germans alone had regular access to good food in Paris; while their hosts starved, they ate like victors.

  Freezing weather provided some of the harshest memories for those who lived in Paris during the Occupation. The winter of 1940 was bitter; the winter of 1941 was worse. Hélène Delangle, like her sister Solange, suffered from poor circulation: she could have been among the many who, threadbare coats padded with newspaper to keep out the cold, roamed the windy streets in a ceaseless hunt for treasures to lay in the grate: chestnuts, twigs, a sheet of cardboard, or, if they were lucky, a piece of broken furniture. She and Arnaldo might have joined the scavengers of suburban ditches, uprooting clumps of grass to use as tobacco for cigarettes. It is likely that they made slow, humiliating journeys to Sainte-Mesme each month to beg for anything that could be offered, a loaf of bread, a precious lump of butter wrapped in paper.

  It was not the only way in which the Occupation could be survived. Life could seem almost normal in occupied Paris, if you were willing to put your conscience to sleep or to be – it was a much-used word – realistic about the situation. Officially, the Parisian evening ended soon after dusk. Street-lamps heavily veiled in navy cloth gave the city the haunted air of a Picasso painting from the blue period. The Métro signs gleamed dimly; in the back streets, where every window was tightly shuttered in obedience to the regulations, the darkness of the blackout hours was profound and eerie. Yet Colette wrote of her friend Georges Auric, a member of the group of composers known as Les Six, that he had been out drinking and dancing at two in the morning with a German officer friend and the Vicomtesse de Noailles when his leg was crushed: ‘nightclub,’ she noted cryptically, ‘two in the morning, champagne, accident’.7 Maxim’s and Le Tour d’Argent were crowded every night of the week during the war and not all of the tables were occupied by men in grey uniforms, although officially non-Germans were always placed in a discreet side-passage. French audiences as well as Germans turned out to watch an ageless Mistinguett sing and dance at the Casino de Paris; a blind eye was turned to the fact that Django Reinhardt had gypsy blood and performed long after curfew hour at the Hot Club.

  This was the brighter aspect of life; there were blacker tales. The sign on the door of the Casino de Paris instructed all Jews and dogs to keep out. Philippe de Rothschild’s beautiful wife, Lili, prudently reverting to her maiden name of the Comtesse de Chambure, lived on good terms with the occupiers until, in the month of the Normandy landings, she refused to sit next to the German ambassador’s wife, Frau Abetz, at a dinner-party. The order for her arrest went out that week. Philippine, her ten-year-old daughter, was smuggled away by a resourceful grandfather; the Countess was taken from the Gestapo headquarters to a Paris prison and then to Fresnes, before being deported to Ravensbrück. A female friend who had been a Resistance fighter was at Ravensbrück with her and survived to report that Countess Lili had been beaten, tortured and was still alive when she was thrown into the oven.8 Philippe de Rothschild himself, after serving eight months’ imprisonment in Morocco, and then at Clermont-Ferrand, had escaped to Spain before joining his brother James under de Gaulle’s command in England. He arrived home in the Normandy landings. Later, after hearing of his wife’s death, he volunteered to join the delegation investigating Belsen and the children’s camp at Hamburg-Neuengamme. His own twelve-year-old cousin proved to be one of the children brought here for use in medical experiments and then hanged.9

  Such dark stories did not come near Hélène Delangle. Or, if they did, she chose to obliterate them. We can try to imagine her sharing the discomfort of the majority of civilians in Paris; we can guess that an instinct for survival allowed her to make some useful compromises. A woman whose career had been an exotic mix of dancing and racing would not have escaped some flattering attention and invitations. She may not have turned them all down.

  Guesses are all that can be made since every scrap of evidence concerning Hélène Delangle’s life in occupied Paris has disappeared; no allusion to the war survives among her papers, perhaps for good reason. All that is known is that Arnaldo Binelli was able to continue the development of his ideas for making an improved form of bicycle mechanism and to employ a patent attorney’s help to take out three separate patents, registered in Paris, between 1941 and July 1943. This would not have been cheap and Binelli, estranged from his Swiss parents, was dependent on Hélène to pay for his enterprises. Her passion for the handsome young man had not lessened; there was nothing she would not spend to keep him with her. His schemes might even have seemed a shrewd investment when bicycles and vélo-taxis had become the only mode of transport for non-Germans in Paris. Taxis only returned to the city, and at a rate which put them outside most citizens’ reach, in 1946.

  Hélène’s identity card for 1941 provides a few more clues. The photograph, taken in semi-profile, shows that she had kept her good looks. The years of driving have left no mark on the pretty and for once, rather pensive face; her hair, still expensively bleached to the pale blonde she claimed to be her natural colour, is drawn back behind her ears. The préfet de police has, however, firmly revised her age; her claim to have been born in 1905 has been corrected to 1900. The address, 1 Avenue Jeanne d’Arc, Arcueil, shows a considerable drop in living standards from the elegant apartment above Rondpoint Mirabeau; here, Arnaldo and Hélène were living out in the suburbs, south of the city.* A collaborator might, without too much difficulty, have retained the handsome apartment above the Seine; in Arcueil, it would have been easier to maintain a low profile. They were nearer to Sainte-Mesme, a source of food in hungry times. A few small bistros had survived in the Arcueil area; keeping themselves and their customers on Le système D, they provided a threadbare illusion of life as it had been.

  A more striking detail emerges in 1943. That autumn, Hélène and Arnaldo travelled south to Nice.† There, they settled into a newly built villa of some considerable splendour. The Villa des Pins, on avenue Jean de la Fontaine, is a film star-style home, hidden behind tall gates at the end of a secluded drive. The road up to it, exhilarating to a practised hill-climb driver, is an ascending spiral of fast corkscrew bends which allows for no pause. Beyond the gates, a terrace projects from the cliffside. The city spreads out below; at dusk, the line of the Riviera coast road uncoils a necklace of lights besi
de the sea.

  Hélène’s wartime identity card, showing that she failed to get away with taking five years off her age.

  The villa, with its large light rooms and glorious views, was magnificent, but Nice itself was not a pleasant place for a patriotic Frenchwoman to make a new home in the autumn of 1943, however great her hunger for warmth might have been after the bone-chilling winters of Paris during the Occupation. The fact that Hélène was able to acquire such a luxurious abode there, at this time, raises questions she might not have been eager to answer.

  The Italian occupation of Nice, which began in November 1942, had been relatively benign; until September 1943 the city offered a friendly haven to Jewish refugees, despite the strenuous efforts of SS Hauptsturmführer Dannecker, the assiduous chief of the Gestapo’s Jewish office in France. Thanks to Dannecker’s visit to the town in July 1942, however, two streets with Jewish names had been renamed and a handful of Jewish businesses were closed down; in August 1942 some immigrant Jews were identified in Nice and sent to Drancy, the half-finished housing estate outside Paris which served as a holding station for Auschwitz victims. Ugly though these events were, they were rare and extremely unpopular with citizens; more typical of Nice under Italian control was the fact that a French attempt to attack a synagogue in the town was quelled by the carabinieri.

  In September 1943 all of this changed as Germany took possession of Nice and began preparations for defending it against an anticipated attack by the Allies on the Riviera coast. In October cyclists were barred from the Promenade des Anglais; by January 1944 the Promenade had become a military zone, guarded by concrete barricades and defended by machine guns and anti-aircraft emplacements. The tranquil crescent of the Baie des Anges was drilled with trenches and fortified with barbed wire before mines were laid. The extravagant and absurd Jetée Promenade, Nice’s favourite and most absurdly kitsch tourist attraction, was stripped of metal for ammunition until nothing remained to show its former splendour but a skeleton cupola and a row of sea-bound stumps. Nice’s citizens were ordered to surrender their household metals or face a fine; candlesticks, fenders and copper pans were carried in baskets to the Atlantic Hotel on boulevard Victor Hugo, to be weighed and added to the stockpile. The people, here as in Paris, were starving.

  Was this a pleasant place to be? To choose to be? Not unless you were prepared to compromise, to ignore what was unpleasant, to pay with your company, your smile, and perhaps a little more, for a life of ease and freedom.

  In September 1943 SS Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner established his headquarters at the splendidly ornate Hotel Excelsior. You can still stay at the Excelsior, in a room looking on to a courtyard of iron balustrades and cascading plants; you would have no idea, either from the surroundings or from the anodyne brochure which extols their placid atmosphere, of what this place had once become.

  The Jews who had seen Nice as a haven fled from it as the German troops marched south in the early autumn of 1943, but not fast enough. Initially, a distinction had been made between les juifs, who were French-born and entitled to some protection, and les Israélites, immigrant Jews who had been forced out of Germany, Poland, Russia and Czechoslovakia. Now, all wore the yellow star over their heart from the age of six upwards, and all were under threat. Forty-five were arrested trying to cross the River Var; a hundred more were culled from a railway-station platform. From the moment Alois Brunner established himself at the Excelsior, the Jewish population were hunted out of Nice like rats, taken from their beds, from the pavements, from the station, from the beach, even, hurried away in shorts and sunsuits to be shunted north to Drancy, and out to the German camps. Three thousand were arrested in the space of a few weeks; many of the names had been supplied by local informers. The reward for such assistance was excellent, up to 5,000 francs a head.10

  Was this the crime of which Hélène would stand accused after the war? The money she had been paid in compensation for her crash at São Paulo was running out, seven years on, and she had borne the considerable expense of her lover’s enterprises, none of which reached completion. The city archives do not show the name of the previous occupant of the Villa des Pins. Favours may have been done. Was a Jewish family eased out to provide the home of her choice? It is possible that the occupiers were willing to adopt a laissez-faire policy towards a charming woman who could have formed a paradigm for German womanhood, an image of blonde strength and singlemindedness, a French Brünnhilde.

  Far below the Villa des Pins lies Nice’s Baie des Anges. Standing on her terrace, shaded by the one superb pine which has given the villa its name, Hélène could have watched over the destruction of the Jetée pier and the conversion of the beautiful bay into a minefield. The Hotel Excelsior was hidden from view. Out of sight, out of mind; perhaps she and her young lover passed the last phase of the war here in effortless isolation, unscathed by temptation, as untouched by the presence of the occupiers and their steely mission of extermination as by the coming of the Allies.

  Perhaps, between 1943 and 1945, Hélène and Arnaldo did nothing but play with the dogs, make love, drive up and down the corkscrew road and close the gate against anybody who came asking awkward questions.

  Perhaps.

  DISGRACE

  14

  THE ACCUSATION

  ‘Vôtre place n’est pas ici, vous.’

  LOUIS CHIRON, QUOTED BY HELLÉ NICE TO ANTONY NOGHES, 13 DECEMBER 1949

  On 26 August 1944 Paris was stripped of its Nazi flags and proclaimed a free city. Six months later the last of Hitler’s troops were forced out of their final stronghold in eastern France. They left behind them a poor and ravaged country. The Allies had bombed ports and factories; Resistance saboteurs had smashed electricity supplies and communication lines. A map of the French railway system for 1945 gives the measure of their success; it resembles a handful of scattered dressmaker’s pins.

  In 1945 Marshal Pétain returned to France to face his trial. The jurors, aware that he had given the order in 1942 to fire on Allied troops, recommended that the former war hero should be imprisoned for life. Pétain died at the age of ninety-five in an island fortress off the coast of Brittany. His former deputy, Pierre Laval, condemned to death for activities which included an energetic commitment to the deportation of Jewish women and children, was shot at Fresnes after making a botched suicide attempt two hours earlier. Fellow prisoners, while recognizing Laval’s guilt, were nevertheless discomforted by the brutality of his execution.

  Philippe Viannay, writing an article for the Resistance publication Défense de la France in March 1944, had called for the destruction of all those who had aided the enemy. ‘Kill without passion, without hatred,’ he wrote. ‘Never stoop to torture; we are soldiers, not sadists.’1 There were, despite this appeal, atrocities. One shocking photograph in the book which quotes Viannay’s words shows a group of naked and shaved women, daubed with swastikas and encircled by a staring crowd. In the summer of 1944, a chateau-owner guilty only of being a suspected monarchist was given a series of punishments which included being stabbed in the back and throat and doused in petrol which was then set alight. (His torturers were subsequently tried and imprisoned.)2

  Bitterness at such crimes as the burning alive, on the orders of German officers, of the women and children of the village of Oradour, in a locked church, during the vicious summer of 1944 – the men were taken to nearby barns and shot – strengthened a thirst for revenge which was fuelled by poverty. To have eaten and dressed well during the Occupation seemed now to have been a form of treachery: how had such a way of life been maintained if not by collaboration? In Paris, Louis Aragon’s testimony saved Maurice Chevalier from being tried in October; his fellow entertainers Tino Rossi and Sacha Guitry were sent to Fresnes, where so many celebrities were imprisoned immediately after the liberation that one star-struck guard made a habit of taking an autograph book on his patrol. Coco Chanel had not been the only couturier to sell her wartime creations to the occupiers; her pe
rceived crime, in times of hunger and privation, was to have lived comfortably at the Ritz with her German lover. The actress Arletty, who played the beautiful, elusive Garance in Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), briefly joined the allstar cast in Fresnes as a punishment for similarly unpatriotic behaviour.* Robert Brasillach, the disgraced former editor of Je Suis Partout, was arrested, tried and executed; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, meanwhile, returned to Paris with 134 pieces of luggage after visiting Hitler and passing their wartime years in the Bahamas.

  Photographs of the trembling, skeletal survivors who sang the Marseillaise to the crowds welcoming them back from the German camps were widely published in the newly uncensored French press. Inadmissible guilt – few had fully understood the true horror of the camps – was mixed with outrage as the stories of starvation, torture and mass incineration began to emerge. Strict rationing, a rash of strikes in 1946 and the painfully slow return of industrial confidence – only five thousand cars were manufactured in France in 1947, a number barely sufficient to provide post-war Paris with a working taxi fleet – added to the sense of bitterness. The identification and persecution of collaborators offered an outlet for such feelings. A cousin of Philippe de Rothschild’s witnessed the occasion on which a Free French officer recognized a former collaborator while they were both attending an elegant party. Identified, the man was requested to leave while the icily silent guests lined themselves into two long rows between which he was forced to walk to the door.3

  Some revenges were more subtle. It was now known that Ettore Bugatti had received handsome compensation from the Germans for the loss of his Molsheim factory. His first claim for its restitution was rejected, despite the fact that he had finally consented to become a French citizen in 1946, following his marriage to Geneviève Delcuze. (Barbara Bugatti died, after a long illness, in 1944.)