Thus, as autumn approached, the severity of the new Vichy laws against the Jews forced Suzanne Belperron, like many businesswomen, to understand that if her company was to survive it would now have to be owned by her. Yet such was her determination to remain in Paris that she declined an invitation from Paul Flato, the flamboyant New York jeweller, to move to America. Many others realized that they should now try to escape, although it was fast becoming impossible. Picasso’s friend and art-dealer Paul Rosenberg, having already moved out of Paris to the country and having tried to conceal or send abroad as many canvases as possible, left for the United States via Lisbon on 20 September 1940 with his wife and daughter. Seventy-five years later his granddaughter, Anne Sinclair, once more back in Paris, would tell his story. The family still have not recovered all their pictures.
But some of those who had initially fled Paris now returned to a city which many of them felt had had its soul excised. Rosemary Say, a well-brought-up young English girl who had been working as an au pair in Avignon in 1939, left it too late to escape from the country so that when she finally decided to flee, against the surging crowd and with suitcases and her much treasured hatbox, she could get only as far as Paris. On the train she shared a carriage with a young soldier returning home to his dying mother. After a long and hot journey he suddenly jammed his rucksack against the train door, lifted her, unprotesting, on to the carriage bench ‘and without a word being said, we made love. It was brief, perfunctory and almost totally silent. We both felt comforted.’ After that, Rosie went on to work at the American Hospital, swabbing down corridors and waiting at table, a post which lasted only three weeks as the Americans decided that employing a British national was a liability. The woman who found Rosemary a new place to stay was Hoytie Wiborg, an American heiress and well-known lesbian in pre-war Parisian artistic circles, who proved a good friend.
A silence prevailed in the capital, breached occasionally when a black Citro?n Traction Avant – the favourite Nazi car in Paris – screeched terrifyingly out of nowhere. Jean Guéhenno, a writer and teacher who decided he would write, in private, for himself but publish nothing during the Occupation, found the silence of Paris with no birdsong unnerving. All the birds had died when the city’s large oil and gas tanks were set on fire as the Germans approached. As the black smoke spread out over the streets and parks, it poisoned everything. ‘What is certain is that nothing is moving or singing in the trees behind the house … and that adds to our sadness.’
It was the same desperate sadness which young Cécile Rol-Tanguy experienced. In early June, just over a year after her marriage to the Spanish Civil War veteran Henri Rol-Tanguy, their first child, a daughter named Fran?oise, had suddenly fallen dangerously ill from extreme dehydration. Cécile, twenty-one and alone as Henri was fighting at the front, rushed the baby to the nearest hospital where she died on 12 June, just a few months old. ‘I can still remember the terrible pall of burning smoke over Paris and wondering if that was what had made my baby ill. I left her in the hospital overnight and when I went back the next day there was another baby in her bed,’ recalled Cécile, closing her eyes as if the shock were yesterday. Still today she cannot talk about the death of her first baby without reliving the agony. To make matters worse, Henri was then arrested as part of a round-up of communists following a French decree, issued by Reynaud’s government, imposing the death penalty for those accused of ‘demoralizing the army’ as the Germans closed in on Paris. Her father, Fran?ois Le Bihan, an early Communist Party member, had already been arrested. As the country was plunged into chaos, Cécile agreed to resume work typing political pamphlets for the Metal Workers’ Union, now forced underground. ‘Fran?oise was buried on 15 June, the day after the Germans entered the city … It was only later I realized how work had helped to assuage my terrible grief,’ she said.