The majority of the conservation and repair work undertaken on Invalides’ art works was performed by outside contractors, who were brought into the complex as needed. Security protocols intended to prevent the theft of what were in many cases priceless objets d’art required that these contractors be signed in and out, and that they be given access only to those specific areas where their particular expertise was required. The staff members of the small Fine Arts Office were too occupied with their professional functions to supervise the daily comings and goings of the contractors, so that duty was given to an individual variously referred to as the “supervisor of fine arts building sites” or the “fine arts concierge.” While the position did not come with a salary it did offer a very valuable perk: the incumbent and his or her family were allowed to live rent-free in a small apartment in the southeast corner of the Invalides complex. When Monsieur Possoz learned that the position was about to become vacant, he urged Georges to apply—if given the job, the young veteran’s physically taxing twelve-mile round-trip commute would be reduced to less than one hundred yards, and he would see far more of his family during the workday. Moreover, Monsieur Possoz pointed out, Denise Morin could actually undertake most of the duties, meaning that Georges could retain his ONMR position and salary.
The Morins saw Possoz’s suggestion as the ideal solution to their difficulties, and Georges applied for the job as soon as the vacancy was officially announced. He and Denise were interviewed by the director of the Fine Arts Office, who knew and liked them both, and who understood that if given the position the young veteran would remain with ONMR and that most of the daily “concierge” tasks would be carried out by his wife. The job was duly awarded to the Morins, and in the summer of 1925 Georges, Denise, Yvette, and Denise’s recently widowed sixty-two-year-old father, Charles Bourinet, moved into their new home.
The 680-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-level apartment was part of a long row of connected structures—other apartments, a garage, and small workshops and storage rooms—built over a section of the original seventeenth-century moat and facing the rear of a three-story complex of offices across a narrow, mews-like alley.16 The Morins’ home and the adjoining structures shared a common rear wall that backed up to the sidewalk bordering the west side of the tree-lined boulevard des Invalides. There were no openings piercing the rear wall at street level, but two large dormer windows on the second floor of the Morins’ apartment let in light and offered a fine view of the boulevard. On the entry level were a small living room with a window looking out on the narrow alley and, at the rear, a pantry and a compact but functional kitchen. Upstairs were the single bathroom and the bedrooms—Georges and Denise’s facing the street and Yvette’s the alley—each room with two dormer windows and a double bed. Charles Bourinet slept on the fold-out couch in the living room.
At that time all of Invalides was enclosed by tall, wrought iron fences that connected the remaining sections of the original stone walls. There were large entrances on each of the four sides of the sprawling complex, with each entry flanked by stone guard houses. The east entrance was some fifty feet north of the Morins’ apartment, on the other side of a small garden. The structure to the right of the gate was the actual guardhouse; the ground floor of the building on the left side was home to the Office of the Architect and its small second floor was allocated to the Morins as a storage space. A smaller, barred gate pierced the fence about 150 feet to the south, at the corner of the boulevard des Invalides and avenue de Tourville.17
While their new home was certainly far from palatial, the Morins were well pleased with it. Georges’s ONMR office was only a few minutes’ walk from his front door, and he was able to come home for lunch every day. Denise found she enjoyed being the de facto “concierge” of Invalides, and the huge ring of keys she carried gave her access to every part of the complex other than the Musée de l’Armée and the government offices. On weekends she and Georges—and Yvette, as she grew older—would explore the labyrinthine hallways and the myriad spaces that branched off them, discovering a world that few visitors or even employees ever saw. Among their favorite places to visit were two of Invalides’ literal “high points.”
The first was the attic of the ornate Saint-Louis des Invalides cathedral. Reached via a series of small doors and narrow, vertigo-inducing wooden stairways, the attic rests atop the cathedral’s vaulted ceiling and is some ninety feet above floor level. The interior of the attic is dark, dank, and dusty, and the massive arched timbers supporting the cathedral roof look for all the world like an inverted ship’s hull. Among the attic’s most interesting features, they discovered, is a small circular hole in the stout wooden floor. When the piece of wood covering the hole is removed, a visitor can look directly down at the cathedral’s altar. A little research on Denise’s part revealed that Louis XIV had ordered the hole installed so that white doves could be passed down through it during services, both to underscore the spiritual nature of the proceedings and to hold the attention of the aging and infirm veterans who were its primary congregants.
The second of the Morins’ favorite hidden spots is reached via the first. At the south end of the attic two sets of wooden stairs steep enough to qualify as ladders lead to two small metal doors, both of which open out onto an exterior landing on the cathedral’s roof. Immediately in front of the doors is the circular metal cupola that is the exterior covering of the small dome just behind and above the altar. Narrow walkways lead around the cupola to either side, and terminate on a relative flat area that separates the smaller cupola from the much larger and vastly more ornate golden dome directly above Napoléon’s tomb. The view of Invalides, and indeed of much of Paris, is spectacular, but not enjoyed without risk. The winds that are funneled between the dome and the smaller cupola are often strong enough to blow a person over, and the walls that surround the open area—while tall enough to prevent visitors from being seen from below—are too short to prevent a fall of almost one hundred feet.18
As it happened, the Morins’ intimate familiarity with Invalides’ hidden places—and their possession of the keys to most of the complex’s doors—would ultimately prove vital to the safety of Allied airmen when war came again to La Belle France.
LIFE QUICKLY FELL INTO A COMFORTABLE RHYTHM FOR THE MORINS FOLLOWING their move onto the grounds of Invalides. Georges continued his important work for ONMR—which in 1935 adopted the decidedly more unwieldy name l’Office national des mutilés, combattants, victimes de guerre et pupilles de la nation (National Office for the Maimed, Veterans, Victims of War and Wards of the Nation)19—steadily rising in the organization’s hierarchy and often traveling to regional offices across France. Denise quickly made herself an indispensable member of the Architect’s staff, and was to be seen every day bustling about the complex, groups of workmen in tow and her enormous ring of keys jangling on her belt. When not assisting his daughter in her duties, Charles Bourinet kept an eye on his growing granddaughter. He walked Yvette to school when she was young, and when she no longer needed such an escort Charles often spent time with friends among Invalides’ long-term residents.
As the years passed, Yvette grew into an intelligent, self-confident, and engaging young woman. Slender and standing just over five foot four, she was graced with lush, light-brown hair, and striking, emerald-green eyes. While her looks and outgoing personality ensured her social popularity, she was also known as a thoughtful and principled individual with a strong moral compass. These attributes were the product of both her parents’ influence and Yvette’s deep religious convictions. The Morins were devoutly Roman Catholic, and the church was an integral part of family life.
Although Invalides was within the parish of the nearby Basilica of Sainte-Clotilde, Yvette and her parents and grandfather chose to attend Saint-François-Xavier church, 450 yards straight down the boulevard des Invalides on the place André Tardieu. Their preference stemmed largely from their friendship with, and admiration for, Saint-François-Xavi
er’s charismatic Monsignor Georges Chevrot. A well-known and widely respected priest and a prolific author on religious topics, he had also created a church youth movement to which Yvette had belonged for most of her adolescence. In addition to emphasizing equality and social justice, Chevrot imbued his young charges with a love of their nation’s history and the role of the church in that history. Nor was Chevrot’s patriotism merely intellectual, for when the clouds of war once again gathered over France he would prove himself more than ready to turn words into action—as would those who revered him.
LIKE MILLIONS OF OTHER EUROPEANS, THE MORINS HAD WATCHED WITH growing anxiety as increasingly aggressive moves by Adolf Hitler—notably the 1936 occupation of the Rhineland and the March 1938 “Anschluss” with Austria—had ratcheted up martial tensions on the continent.20 British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Hitler at the September 1938 Munich Conference did nothing to ease those tensions; indeed, allowing the Nazi leader’s October annexation of the Czech Sudetenland simply stoked his desire to further expand the “Greater Reich.” Hitler did so in mid-March 1939 by sending the Wehrmacht into the rest of Czechoslovakia and declaring a “protectorate” over the regions of Bohemia and Moravia.
While Georges Morin was not surprised by the latter move, which he saw as a typically duplicitous act by the never-to-be-trusted Boche, he was incensed by the fact that France had failed to honor its long-standing treaty of alliance with Czechoslovakia.21 Indeed, so infuriated was Georges by what he saw as his nation’s failure to confront the very real threat presented by a resurgent Germany that—despite Denise’s logical and vocal objections—the forty-one-year-old disabled veteran actually explored the possibility of volunteering for the belated military mobilization ordered by Prime Minister Édouard Daladier. A cursory examination by an army physician assigned to Invalides put a quick end to Georges’s understandable but quixotic notion.22
Although her father had been denied the chance to serve, seventeen-year-old Yvette had more success in her own search for a way to contribute to her nation’s preparedness. In the spring of 1939 she started taking Red Cross classes in nursing as part of a program referred to as the “passive defense” initiative. Several afternoons a week and on occasional weekends she joined other young women from the area in a classroom at a local hospital, where instruction centered on basic and advanced first aid. Shadowing the facility’s physicians and nurses during their rounds provided Yvette and the others with both a realistic view of what they might be required to deal with should war erupt, and with the occasional opportunity for hands-on experience with real patients.
With the outbreak of war on September 3, 1939, Yvette assumed that her nursing skills would immediately be put to the test. That proved not to be the case, however, since there were no significant air attacks on Paris during the initial eight months of the new conflict—the period that came to be known as the Phoney War. Yvette instead spent time participating in the Saint-François-Xavier church youth group’s efforts to provide the families of mobilized servicemen with supplementary meals and other aid, and when needed, the young woman also tended to her increasingly frail grandfather.
The months following the outbreak of war were also busy ones for Georges and Denise. In their dual role as the concierges of Invalides the couple were key players in the French government’s plans to protect many of Paris’s most famed art treasures in the event the capital came under attack. Larger items such as statues, fountains, and memorials were to be surrounded by protective enclosures, while more portable items would be crated and stored in central locations so they could be quickly evacuated to safer locales. This was an especially complex undertaking at Invalides, with its many collections and thousands of individual objects—indeed, the number of items just in the Musée de l’Armée judged significant enough to warrant evacuation ran to several scores of large crates. The Morins, including Yvette when she was free, spent weeks assisting in the identification, documentation, and crating of objects from within Saint-Louis des Invalides and the Tomb of Napoléon. The emperor’s huge and obviously immovable sarcophagus itself disappeared beneath extensive wooden scaffolding, which was then covered with a pyramid of protective sandbags.23
The somewhat deliberate pace of the effort to prepare Invalides’ treasures for safekeeping elsewhere turned frenetic following the May 1940 German invasion of France and the Low Countries. As the seemingly unstoppable Boche rolled ever closer to Paris in early June, the process of carefully documenting and packing each item gave way to a far faster and less painstaking procedure. Those items that had already been crated were moved into the complex’s various courtyards, ready for loading aboard the trucks that would haul them to the presumed safety of western and southern France. Other pieces for which no crates could be quickly found were simply covered with tarps and stacked near the loading areas. But Invalides’ priceless art works were not the only items being prepared for quick removal. The various government offices within the complex began boxing up their most important files and burning those that were deemed less essential. Even the pensioners living on the grounds were told they should prepare to be evacuated to a safer location.
All these preparations came to fruition following the Luftwaffe’s June 3 bombardment of various targets in the Paris region. While no bombs landed anywhere near Invalides, the director of the hospital ordered the immediate evacuation of the pensioners, and the crates of artworks and items from the Musée de l’Armée were swiftly loaded on the waiting trucks and dispatched. The convoy of buses carrying the human evacuees toward the Pyrenees and the trucks bearing the inanimate items were not alone on the roads, however. The June 10 departure from Paris of Paul Reynaud and his government turned what had been a steady trickle of people leaving the city into a torrent; over the following two days fully two-thirds of the capital’s inhabitants abandoned their homes. The routes leading south and west were soon clogged with vehicles and masses of people, and the Germans—seeking to both sow terror among the civilians and prevent retreating French and British forces from reaching the Atlantic and Channel ports—routinely strafed and bombed the packed roadways.24
Though the Morins helped dispatch the artwork and pensioners, they themselves chose not to join the mass exodus from their beloved Paris. Georges and Denise saw it as their duty to remain and do what they could to protect Invalides from whatever depredations the Boche might attempt to inflict upon it, and Yvette would not abandon her parents or sickly grandfather. The family thus stayed within the complex, spending the days following the departure of the pensioners and artworks doing what they could to prepare for the Germans’ now-inevitable arrival. While Georges was occupied with boxing his agency’s records for storage—so the enemy couldn’t use them to identify veterans that might oppose the coming occupation—Denise used her enormous ring of keys to begin locking the doors that led to smaller and less obvious hallways and storage areas, the better to keep hidden from prying German eyes those items of value that had not already been shipped elsewhere.25 By the afternoon of June 13 the lead German elements were rumored to be entering Paris’s northern suburbs, and that evening the Morins closed the shutters on the windows of their apartment and settled in to await whatever the dawn would bring.
What the morning of June 14 brought was a vigorous banging on the Morins’ front door. When Georges opened the portal he was greeted by the sight of several young and heavily armed German soldiers staring menacingly at him. His initial alarm was calmed, however, when a tall and imposing officer stepped forward and in correct but somewhat accented French introduced himself as Major Hermann Oehmichen, commander of the Wehrmacht’s Panzerjäger Abteilung 187.26 His unit, he explained, was responsible for securing several important facilities along the Left Bank, including Invalides, and he had been told that monsieur and his wife had all the keys to the complex. Would they be so kind as to accompany him as he and his men ensured that everything was in order?
There was only
one possible response to the German officer’s request, of course, so Georges and Denise spent most of that first morning of the occupation of Paris leading Oehmichen and a group of his subordinates through Invalides. The French couple obviously could not avoid responding to direct questions from the Boche, but they did not volunteer information and managed to restrict the Germans’ explorations to the main hallways and public spaces. And though the new “visitors” were aware that Invalides was home to the headquarters of General Henri-Fernand Dentz, commander of the Paris military region, they seemed remarkably uninformed about the several other government agencies housed within the complex. Georges assumed that the speed of the German advance had surprised the attackers as much as it had the defenders, and that the Boche had simply not had time to do the necessary intelligence research. Indeed, the only thing Oehmichen and his troops seemed intensely interested in was the chance to see Napoléon’s Tomb—and they were clearly disappointed when they discovered that the emperor’s famous sarcophagus was still completely hidden within its pyramid of protective sandbags.
Escape from Paris Page 6
