Even Youki Desnos, the artist’s muse and model at the core of the bohemian artists’ circle in Montparnasse, wife of the surrealist poet and journalist Robert Desnos, recorded in her memoirs that at first the sight of Germans and their swastikas made her legs so wobbly she had to sit down on the terrace of Maxim’s. Immediately, a German naval officer took a chair next to her, ordered champagne and proposed she should drive off with him to Rouen. According to her explanation, it was all too easy to fall into conversation. ‘There I was, having shared champagne with the enemy. Oh zut alors! But it was the gospel truth that he had a way with him, that admiral did.’ Youki loved Paris so much that she did not want to escape with Robert. ‘Having been so afraid, the people of Paris, regaining confidence, began to tease the invaders, harmlessly nicknaming them Haricots Verts or les Frisés. After the agony of defeat a kind of euphoria reigned.’
Throughout the capital that summer there were similarly easy and relaxed café encounters between well-mannered Germans, not always in uniform, and elegant Parisiennes eager to hear about life elsewhere, angry at being abandoned by their own menfolk and enjoying a mild flirtation. It was just such a chance meeting that led to Johann and Lisette* becoming lovers that summer, though Lisette insisted later that had Johann been in uniform she would not have engaged in conversation. Johann, aged thirty-one, was serving in the Wehrmacht Auxiliary Forces as an interpreter (he had excellent French), and so was often in civilian clothes, which made it easier for them to be seen strolling around the sights of Paris together, walking up the Eiffel Tower (the Resistance had put the lift out of action) and eating in romantic restaurants à deux. Although he was married with two children, something he probably did not immediately reveal to the twenty-seven-year-old Lisette, the couple soon began an affair. By the time Lisette brought Johann home to meet her parents her mother Fran?oise, a concierge in one of Paris’s nineteenth-century apartment blocks near the H?tel de Ville, was delighted by the man she immediately started to call her son-in-law.
For many of the profoundly demoralized French, the arrival of the German army in June 1940 was almost a relief. What they had feared had now happened and it was not too bad. The German soldiers, well dressed, amiable and often French-speaking, were ordered to behave with restraint and good manners – as many Parisiennes could not fail to notice. ‘More than any Frenchman ever did, German soldiers invariably stepped aside politely in the street or in the Métro for us in our nursing uniforms,’ recalled the Viennese-born Gitta Sereny, then a teenage nurse without a home and already embarked on the life story in the course of which she would deny her Jewishness. It was a complex part of her survival mechanism which allowed her to comment later that ‘the German officers with whom I had to negotiate for food, clothes or documents were always courteous and often extremely helpful’.