BOOKSELLERS, EDITORS, WRITERS, STUDENTS, PROFESSORS, GALERY OWNERS, MOVIE MAKERS (...) MET IN THE CAFÉS
One could make phone calls there and stay indefinitely for the cost of a cup of coffee.
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During the winters of the Occupation cafés became essential because they were (on the whole) heated. Below is a rare photograph, with German officers on café terrace in summer.
I don't know of any inside, an at café Flore, on boulevard Saint-Germain, there couldn't be any. In recalling its ambiance the writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir shows why:
The winter [of 1942] was harsh....
Working inside my room with its glacial humidity was impossible. At the Flore it was not cold, and the acetylene lamps gave a little light when the electricity went off. That is when we became used to spending our free time there. We did not find only a relative comfort [...]: We felt sheltered, at home.
[...] I would try to arrive at the opening to take the best place, that where it was warmest, near the stove [...].
A certain number of habitués would install themselves like me at the marble tables to read and work. [...]
Every day, toward 10 a.m.,
two newspapermen would sit side by side
[a collaborationist journal].
They would comment on the events in a disillusioned way [...] "The way things are going, we'll never get rid of those kikes!" [...] I didn't mind hearing them; there was in their faces, their remarks, something so ridiculous that, for a moment, the collaboration, fascism, antisemitism, seemed like a joke for dumbbells. And then I remembered, appalled, that they harmed [mention of people who have vanished follows].
No one associated with those two collaborators, except a little brown man, with curly hair, who said he was secretary to Laval [the Vichy regime's Prime Minister].
[...] Were there other spies? At the start of the occupation, two or three Flore habitués had been arrested; who had denounced them? No one knew. In any case, now no one conspired lightly, and if a few members of the Resistance hung around cafés, it was to provide a facade. [...]
On the whole, the clients of the Flore were resolutely hostile to fascism and to collaboration, and did not hide it. The occupiers must have known it, for they never came inside. Once a young German officer came in and sat down in a corner with a book; no one moved, but he must have felt something for he soon closed his book, paid his bill and left.
Gradually in the course of the morning
the room filled up.
By the time of the apéritif, it was full.
Picasso smiled at Dora Marr who had a big dog on a leash; [...] Jacques Prévert speechified; there were noisy discussions at the table of the movie-makers, who, since 1939, came almost every day. [...]
Yet the two newspapermen continued to dream out loud the extermination of the Jews [...].
One always had a shock of pleasure, at night, when one emerged from the cold shadows tp enter int that warm and illuminated haunt, with its cheerful blue and red colors. The whole "family" was sometimes there, but scattered, according to our principles, throughout the room [for security?] [...]
In spite of the restrictions and the alerts,
we found at the Flore
a recollection of the years of peace.
But the war crept into our querencia.
We were told one morning that Sonia had just been arrested [...]. A few days later, at dawn, Bella was sleeping in the arms of the boy she loved when the Gestapo knocked at their door and took her away [...]. We still knew little about the camps but the silence that engulfed such merry girls was terrifying. Jausion and his friends continued to come to the Flore and sit in the same places; they spoke among themselves with somewhat hagard agitation; no sign suggested, on the red seat, the chasm that had appeared next to them. That was what to me seemed most intolérable in the absence; that it was exactly nothing. But images of Bella, if the blond Czech, de la Tchèque blonde, did not erase themselves from my memory: they signified thousands of others. Hope was starting to stir, but I knew that never again would the fallacious innocence of the past reappear.
-- The Prime of Life, II, ed.1960, pp. 606-612 (my trans.)
Simone de Beauvoir at that time.
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