Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

The question remained unspoken.

His company induced sensations of being in a movie, where taxis arrive at a beckon, the choicest table is readily available, theatre tickets are unnecessary. Ever solicitous, he tolerated my anecdotes of Mirabeau, Desmoulins, Brissot, indeed encouraged them. ‘Can you tell me, Erich…?’ ‘Is it true that…?’ rarely and apologetically, as if risking affront to my omniscience. Patient, respectful as he might be to Bergson, Proust, Maritain, he would demur with accomplished diffidence. ‘But would you not also agree…?’ his humour so self-deprecatory that his sudden, barely controlled laugh was always a shock.

Hearing of Father’s repugnance for Hegel, he said nothing but, finding a book, showed me ‘The Function of the Authentic State is to behave as if the Individual does not Exist.’

He knew the antique shops, lovingly studying a curved Siamese blade that Malraux could have identified or stolen, a secretaire at which Zola or Flaubert could have sat, a mirror topped with glass centaurs that, perhaps, had reflected Manon Roland, Josephine Beauharnais, Madame Tallien. One painting appealed to me, a sunset, fête galante , autumnal, with an empty swing, satined courtiers departing through glades, a satyr leering through decayed leaves. A vanished European imagination delicately preserved. I dared not, however, show feelings, for Wilfrid, with generosity never ostentatious but a matter of course, would have bought it for me, together with an equivalent purchase for Marc-Henri, who would take it only to keep level with myself.

In a small cinema near rue des Archives, I was introduced to pre-war movies of Clair, Duvivier, Ophuls, Carné, Lubitch, the tender and lyrical rescued from sentimentality by witty ironies, sceptical undertones, an occasional hint of foreboding. We might end in the Vieux-Colombier night club.Wilfrid attentive to jazz and girls, once, very dispassionately, dancing with a heavily made-up, blonde ex-star, long workless from flaunting her wartime liaison with a Gestapo chief. I could not penetrate the motives prompting this gesture but suspected that he liked, as it were, to make typical the untypical.

‘There is,’ he once announced, ‘a special picture we might inspect.’ Braque? Poussin? But no. In a ‘particular reservation’ we were soon watching a Judy Garland musical through which, save for that rare but disconcerting hoot of laughter, he sat rigid, in devotion to blazing tunes, Garland’s bouncy fling, the bizarre troupes and montages. Afterwards, the manager, as if pleading, beckoned him away for a few minutes behind a door sternly closed.

He had his foibles: one, a distaste for bowler hats, derived, he maintained, from connoisseurship of the œuvre of Laurel and Hardy.

In gracious parks we sauntered between chestnuts, hedges, sculpture, fountains, many still unrepaired from wartime depredations. Down an alley a cart waited, stocked with tools, pans, cutlery, caged pigeons, while blue-shirted men, probably, Wilfrid considered, on leave from the National Assembly, disputed with expletives older than Richelieu. As if in afterthought, he led me to the fragments of the medieval Episcopal palace in Cour de Rohan where a new restaurant was everywhere advertised though not yet built.We paced the cobbles of narrow rue Saint-André-des-Arts, its peace unimpaired by Cadillacs and buses. Under the spire of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, we heard the bells that tolled the Bartholomew Massacre and, at Thermidor, had summoned the virtuous to rescue Robespierre and Saint-Just.

Later, he crossed an avenue to indicate polished windows and an intricately wrought balcony.

‘Behind them dwells in some state M. René Bousquet.’

‘An artist?’

‘In his way, I suppose.’ He was more resigned than enthusiastic. ‘Courageous, versatile. Lawyer, first class. Economist. Currently, he heads the Banque d’Indo-Chine, no starting post for the lame. Le Monde is praising him as the best-dressed gentleman in Paris.’

He continued to gaze upwards, like an actor – Jouvet, Gabin, Brasseur, Barrault – savouring a key line before delivering it.

‘In July 1942, during the Vichy Collaboration, defined by M. Laval as the Politics of Understanding, Bousquet was Pétain’s police secrétaire générale . Eichmann sent him notice that all Jews must be deported, but for the while he would be content with only the adults. Bousquet was obliging enough to add, on his own initiative, ten thousand children. He was forecast as a future Premier of France, one of the custodians of Western civilization, by Laval, Heydrich and Himmler.’

‘But surely…’

‘Yes. Last year he was belatedly denounced and indeed tried. He admitted all charges, rather eloquently, with the further, gratuitous, information that he had extended his searches into the Unoccupied Zone.’

‘And?’

‘The judges committed the impertinence of sentencing him to five years’ imprisonment, but he was immediately released on his further plea of services to the Resistance, though in sad truth he had already repaired, I think, to Stuttgart.You must, if you care for a sight of this notable product of La Belle France, wait until after dark.’

In English-style blazer, white, with plum-coloured edges, and blue, carelessly knotted ‘flare’, he attracted many glances, curious, respectful, though, as if unaware of them, he was already moving from the pastel-hued apartment block and gracious limes. ‘I think, Erich, that as an antidote to coarser subjects, and before our friend accepts his Nobel Peace Prize, we should allow ourselves an instant of respect to another humanitarian, in whom you must have specialized information.’

Gambetta? Jaurès? Pasteur? Curie? Rolland?

We were soon facing a nondescript triangular house, neglected or unoccupied, with barred windows, padlocked gate, on the corner of Cour de Commerce and rue d’Ancienne Comédie.

‘The home, Erich, of one of your natural subjects. A minor specimen. Guillotin. Dr Joseph Ignace Guillotin. He congratulated himself, sincerely and, I judge, correctly, on his recipe to cure intolerable and needless pain.’

Returning, he said little. I, too, was thoughtful, my optimism chastened. Yet, after all, so much was stable and reassuring. The poplars rustled unchanged, a fountain purled as it might have done for Lully and Racine, a girl in a green hat, perennial gamine , thinking herself unobserved, put out her tongue at the sky, a tramp with drunken dignity rebuked a commissionaire braided and tasselled as an Italian admiral, the copper beech glistened immemorially against gold-tipped gates. Feudal and classical emblems emblazoning porticoes were imperturbable. My misgivings had already shifted to desire, not for political enlightenment but for girls, Calypsos from ‘Ogygia’ with men at their finger-tips.

Wilfrid, I knew, was deliberately warning me, not against girls but the deceptions of peace.Witty café repartee, volatile students, a Tati film, the songs of Greco and Piaf could induce tourist coma, catch me off-guard, for, though Paris was not Meinnenberg, I had been mistaken in thinking it only Hugo’s City of Light. A Resistance plaque, bullet holes in opulent Hôtel Crillon, anti-Semitic and Stalinist scrawls in a pissoir were running reminders of what had destroyed Mother, Father, the Herr General. I should be more watchful. A dark blue June sky recalled the eyes of the Gutter King.

Certain words had lost holiday innocence: Camp, Comrade, Cattle Truck, Shed, Fence were short-cuts to horror, as, long ago, had been Rope, Cross, Tumbrel. Certain words also were immovable: Jazz, Rose, Corot.

The Red Cross was never to discover my parents’ fates, save that Mother had died in Berlin in 1943, ‘in unfavourable circumstances’. Wilfrid’s legal acquaintances eventually divulged that some financial inheritance was secured for me in a London bank, not large but sufficient to allow me independence, a labyrinth preserving me against that never quite credible sha .