Photograph by Christian Duvivier
Red Cross Headquarters, Paris, France, 1919
The Americans living around the Place de la Concorde assured me that Paris was not changed; not for them perhaps, but when I went among my old French friends, most of whom had stuck it through the War, changes stared me in the face. I had hurried to my old quarter on the Left Bank. Great gaps in the circle around the Panthéon and in the Boulevard Saint-Michel skirting the Luxembourg told the story of what the quarter had endured. The laiterie where once I had bought eggs and milk and cheese was gone, the space carefully boarded. I hunted among the neighbors for the cheerful Madame whom I had so enjoyed. She had died with the building, they told me.
There were little neglects in the once carefully kept apartments of my friends that affected me all out of proportion to their importance. The door into Madame Marillier’s chambre à coucher would not close.
“Nothing has been mended in Paris, you know, now for three years,” my friend explained.
It was literally true: nothing painted, nothing mended, little replaced. Craftsmen and tradesmen were in the trenches or in their graves. So many of those whom once you had known, the people who had served you or had been your comrades, were in their graves. Madame Marillier, pointing to a long roster of names on her desk in the salon, said: “Look, these are our dead. Read them. You will remember some of the names.” And I did, men whom I had known twenty-five years before, and whose brilliant talk I had listened to at her Wednesday night dinners.
They could not bring back their dead; but after all the horror life was to go on, and they were bravely doing their best to give it something of its character before the War.
One thing they were counting on was the return to their homes and to the museums of their treasured belles choses. When I went out to dinner with French acquaintances who had possessed beautiful things, often pictures catalogued as national treasures, empty frames stared from the walls. The canvases had been cut out and sent to a safe place, generally somewhere in the South; but they would soon have them back, and that would help.
Not only in Paris but wherever invasion was threatened there had been an immediate effort to hustle the best loved treasures out of reach. At Amiens, they told me, they had “sent away” the famous L’Ange pleurant. It was back when I was there in March, and people were coming from all the towns near by to see it, to gloat and weep over it.
I was concerned with the fate of the “pretty girl of Lille” that exquisite wax bust attributed by some to Leonardo da Vinci; and when I made Lille my headquarters for a few days I at once made inquiries. The gallery was closed, but there had just been received many boxes of pictures which the Germans were carrying off when stopped on their retreat. The authorities were not adverse to having an accredited journalist see with his own eyes what had happened, and I was permitted to visit the gallery. The boxes were there standing against the wall, still unopened, and on each was clearly printed the name of the picture and of the German museum to which it had been assigned—beautiful evidence of the amazing efficiency with which the Germans had conducted their looting.
“Why, there,” I said as I went about, “there is the ‘pretty girl of Lille’!”