Paris: The Novel (132 page)

Marie didn’t tell him, but she had guessed at once.

In Roland’s aristocratic world, a man might have the best of everything, but when it came to being injured at war, then you took whatever the army doctors offered and you didn’t complain. Charlie hadn’t actually been wounded in battle, but he’d fallen and been struck by a tank during maneuvers, and broken his leg in several places.

“The military doctors know what they’re doing,” Roland told her. “If he walks with a limp, he walks with a limp. No dishonor in that.”

Marie said nothing. She went straight to the telephone. Within an hour, she’d discovered the best surgeon for that kind of injury in Paris, spoken to his office and made all the arrangements. She’d even spoken to Charlie’s colonel in person. Using the combination of her rank and wealth, and the skills she had developed running Joséphine, she both intimidated and charmed the colonel. By that evening, somewhat sedated and strapped to splints, Charlie was being whisked in a private ambulance to Paris. Having discovered that the surgeon operated not only at one of the great Parisian hospitals, but also at the American Hospital at Neuilly, she had also gotten the surgeon to admit him there.

“Charlie will be more comfortable at Neuilly,” she said firmly.

“Women shouldn’t interfere in these things,” Roland grumbled, though Marie suspected he was secretly amused.

The spring of 1940 was beautiful and surprisingly warm. Each day, on her way to see Charlie at the hospital, Marie would tell the chauffeur to take a route through the quiet boulevards and avenues of Neuilly—boulevard d’Inkermann was her favorite—so that she could see the soft lines of horse chestnuts putting on their leaves and breaking, early, into their white blossoms.

The operation had been a great success. With luck, and careful treatment, Charlie would be able to walk quite normally. “But you must be patient,” the doctor told him. “This will take time.” By mid-April, it was agreed that, rather than go to a convalescent home, he should return to the apartment on the rue Bonaparte where Marie made arrangements for a private nurse to be in attendance.

A string of friends came to see him, and he seemed to be constantly on the telephone. His father would read the paper with him each day and discuss the news. Marie would play cards with him. He seemed to be cheerful enough. Only one thing irked him.

It started as a joke. One of his friends pretended to believe that his injury was a skiing accident. Within a day, the idea had gone around all his friends in Paris. It was meant as a harmless bit of teasing, yet it had to be confessed that behind it lay the perception that Charlie was the rich, athletic aristocrat who could do anything he liked.

And Charlie would probably have taken it in good part if it hadn’t been for the circumstances.

For in April, Hitler had been on the move again. Scandinavia this time: Denmark and Norway both fell, their monarchs unwillingly forced to acknowledge a German overlord. In England, the more pugnacious Churchill replaced Chamberlain as prime minister.

“I should be back on duty, ready to fight,” he moaned. “And everyone is going to say I wasn’t there because of a stupid skiing accident.”

“No one seems to believe that France will even have to go to war,” Marie said to comfort him. And it was perfectly true. Even now, as the warm days of May began, Parisians were starting to sit outside the bistros and cafés to enjoy the sunshine as if Hitler and his armies belonged in another universe.

“But you think we’re going to war, don’t you?” Charlie replied. And she couldn’t deny it.

To Roland she confessed: “I’m just relieved he isn’t on the front line.”

Roland, of course, would never admit to such a thing.

“The boy can’t fight on crutches,” he muttered, “and that’s all there is to say.”

It came on the eighth day of May. Blitzkrieg. Straight through Belgium, the Netherlands, tiny Luxembourg and the Ardennes. The German armored divisions poured through between the end of the Maginot Line and the French and British forces guarding the northern coastal plain.

It happened so fast that, in later years, people would say that the French collapsed and gave up in face of the onslaught. It was not so at all. The French fought heroically. But, just as had happened in the Great War before, the high command had not adapted to the latest modern warfare.
That essential combination of tanks operating with air cover, on a large scale, was lacking. Even the tank division bravely commanded by Colonel de Gaulle was forced to retire in the face of overwhelming air attack from German Stukas.

In the space of days, France lost a hundred thousand men—not casualties, but killed.

By early June, the British forces, together with a hundred thousand French troops, were trapped against the coast at Dunkirk, while Paris lay open before the German divisions.

In Paris, Charlie was beside himself.

“I’m sitting here doing nothing to defend my country,” he cried.

But his father was more realistic.

“There is nothing useful you could have done,” he told him grimly. “The war is already over. The British are about to be annihilated at Dunkirk, and that’s it.”

He was right—and, miraculously, wrong. Hitler, having just won the war, didn’t realize it. Fearful that his lines were overextended—they were, but the Allies had no armor to throw at them—and trusting mistakenly in the Luftwaffe to finish the British army on the huge beaches of Dunkirk, he hesitated. And thanks to this God-given but astounding military error, Paris learned days later that nearly a third of a million British and French troops had been ferried across the English Channel to safety.

But France itself could not be saved. France was lost. By the tenth of June, people were evacuating. Roland told Marie and Charlie that they must all go down to the château. “The Germans will occupy Paris,” he said. “If they take over the apartment, so be it. But at all costs we must try to save the château.”

They set off at dawn, but the lines of people along the roads were so great that they did not reach the château until nightfall. The following day, they heard that Paris had been declared an open city, rather than have the Germans perhaps destroy it. Five days later, the elderly General Pétain, the hero of the Great War who had secretly brought the mutiny to an end, took over as premier of France.

“That’s good,” Roland declared. “Pétain has judgment. He’s a man one can trust.” And when, the very next day, Pétain declared an armistice with the Germans, Roland only shrugged and remarked that he didn’t see what else the old man could do.

It had always been a source of some amusement to Roland and Charlie
that Marie insisted on listening to the BBC on her wireless. The signal was not strong, but she could still pick it up at the château.

“You spent too many years in England,” Roland would tell her with an affectionate kiss. “You believe that only the English news can be trusted.”

But it was thanks to Marie’s prejudice that the family listened to a broadcast, arranged at short notice, that very few people in France ever heard.

It was late afternoon on the very day after Pétain had announced the armistice that Marie called to Roland to come to the wireless at once. Charlie was already in the room, sitting with his leg stretched out on a stool.

“There’s going to be a statement from a French officer, who has just flown to London,” she told him urgently.

“About what?”

“I have no idea.”

The voice that came across the airwaves was deep, sonorous and firm. It announced, in total defiance of Pétain, that France had not fallen, that France would never surrender, but that Frenchmen outside France, in England and in France’s colonies, with the help of others including the Americans across the ocean, would restore France. And it urged all men under arms who were able to do so to join him as quickly as possible.

The message was startling. The language in which it was delivered was as magisterial as it was simple. The voice declared that, in the meantime, though he had only just been promoted to the rank of general, he was declaring himself the legitimate government of France, in exile, and that he would broadcast again from London the following day.

The name of the general was de Gaulle. “That’s the man who wanted more tanks,” Marie said. “The one that the English officer told me about after Munich.”

“He’s mad, but magnificent,” Roland remarked.

Charlie said nothing.

But the next day, he told Roland and Marie what he proposed to do. And Marie’s heart sank.

History gives no precise date for when the French Resistance began. In his three broadcasts of June 1940—on the eighteenth and nineteenth, and
a longer broadcast, heard by many more people, on the twenty-second—de Gaulle called all military forces to the aid of their country, but made no mention of any internal resistance movement. Little of significance seems to have happened before 1941.

But there was one man in France who believed he could say precisely when, and where, the Resistance began. And that was Thomas Gascon.

Because he started it.

Thomas Gascon’s defiance of Hitler and his regime began on the morning of Saturday, the twenty-second day of June, 1940. Hitler himself was hardly thirty miles to the north of Paris that day, at Compiègne, signing the new armistice in the very same railway carriage that had been used to sign the old armistice of 1918, so humiliating to Germany, that ended the Great War.

“He will come to Paris,” Thomas remarked to Luc as they sat at a table outside the little bar near the Moulin Rouge.

“We don’t know that.”

“Of course we do. He’s just won the war. Paris is at his feet. Obviously he’ll come.”

“Perhaps. But when?”

“Tomorrow.” Thomas looked at Luc as if his brother was foolish. “He’s a busy man. He’s here. He’ll come tomorrow.”

“And what of it?”

“He’ll want to go up the Eiffel Tower.”

“Probably.” Luc took out a Gauloise and lit it. “Most people do.”

“Well, he’s not going up. He may have kicked our asses, but he’s not going to look down on Paris as if he owns it from the top of Monsieur Eiffel’s tower. I won’t allow it.”

“You won’t?” Luc chuckled. “And how are you going to stop him?”

“I’ve been thinking. It can be done. But I’ll need your help. Maybe a few other men too.”

“You want me to attack Hitler?”

“No. But if we can cut the elevator cables, then he can’t go up. Unless he wants to walk up, which would be humiliating, so he won’t do it.”

“You’re nuts.”

“I’m telling you, it can be done.”

“Well, I won’t help you.”

“I helped you once,” said Thomas, quietly.

There was a moment of silence. In almost thirty years, Thomas had never made any reference to that terrible night when they had carried the girl’s body into the hill of Montmartre. Luc gazed at his brother, surprised, a little hurt, but cautious.

“You saved my life, brother,” he answered softly. “It’s true. But why should I repay it by getting you killed?” He reached out and took his brother’s arm. “You’re not young anymore, Thomas. You’re over seventy-five, for God’s sake. If you don’t fall and break your neck, you’ll probably get arrested. And then the Germans will shoot you.”