by Susan Ronald
* Louise Bryant was a journalist and author of Six Red Months in Russia as well as the widow of John Reed, author of Ten Days That Shook the World about the Russian Revolution. When Bullitt discovered his wife’s lesbian affair with English sculptor Gwen Le Gallienne, he divorced her and was awarded custody of their daughter, Anne.
* De Noailles was nicknamed “la vicomtesse rouge” not because of any leftist leanings, but rather for a bloodthirsty affair when she sucked the lifeblood out of the young composer Igor Markevitch.
* Institut d’Études des Questions Juives.
† Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg.
* The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the precursor of the CIA, and its first head of operations was General William (“Wild Bill”) J. Donovan.
* The DNA was short for the Deutsche Nachrichtenableitung, or the German news bureau. Heinrich Himmler was the director of the Reichsicherheitshauptamt (RHSA). The former led the battle of words. The latter’s duty was to “fight all enemies of the Reich” inside and outside its borders.
* An extortionate sum given that, in 1973, I was earning a “good salary” in France of only 1,800 francs a month as an executive secretary.
* The “pink palace” was demolished in 1969. Anna moved back to New York permanently in 1939.
* Cocottes in this sense means “little darlings.”
* Paulhan forgave her, since he believed everyone should all take people as they find them, and not try to change them.
* Beach would remain at Vittel for six months, hiding her precious books in an upstairs apartment after she refused to sell her last copy of Finnegans Wake to a Nazi soldier. While Hemingway personally “liberated” her bookshop in 1944, it never reopened for business during her lifetime. Beach lived until 1962. Today the bookshop flourishes and is owned by Sylvia Beach Whitman.
* Appointed September 5, 1941, after Attorney General Robert H. Jackson became a Supreme Court Justice.
* Translated literally as German Wares Share Trust Company.
* The RHSA was divided into different bureaus, or AMTs. AMT VI was foreign espionage, and the “wi” stood for wirtshaft, or economy.
* Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur.
* Mongolian nationalists, fearful of being swallowed up by either the Soviet Union or China, looked favorably on Hitler’s NSDAP, adopting it as a movement to preserve their “national identity,” just as Hitler had done in Germany.
* This might have been her stepdaughter Helen, though it is doubtful the event occurred.
* There were only a hundred copies printed at her expense. In 1949 her Éditions de Quatre Jeudis printed a second edition, and in 1964 Gallimard printed a third.
* Medicus’s father so loved living in the United States that he gave his son Franz the middle names “Horace Greeley.” Medicus, too, had affectionate memories of the United States, like Vogel. He was viewed by Abetz with suspicion. Medicus liked to portray himself after the war as a gentleman scholar who was forced to do as ordered. See Charles Glass, Americans in Paris (London: HarperPress, 2009), 134–135.
* Chambrun’s father-in-law Pierre Laval, like Pétain, was put on trial and found guilty of treason. Laval was executed but Pétain was spared due to his age, ending his life in prison.
* Seemingly not a close relation of Hermann Goering.
† Italic emphasis is the author’s.
* Mendes-France later also became prime minister of France.
* They had married in April 1956.
* Today both would be worth far in excess of the inflation calculator value of circa $500,000, due to their rarity and changes in the art market that have made artworks investment vehicles.
