A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead Read Free Book Online Page B

left to work for a union, and began to study law at night. In spite of his father’s opposition, Georges had joined the PCF in 1933 and when he and Charlotte married he was working for one of the party’s other papers, L’Avant-Garde .
    In the summer of 1939, Charlotte and Jouvet went walking together in the countryside. When she got home, with a huge bunch of mimosa she had picked, Charlotte sat down and recorded in her diary what she remembered of their conversation, not knowing what she might later need it for. Jouvet’s attention to detail, and the way he analysed every aspect of a production appealed to her. She also had an excellent memory.
    Because Charlotte spoke some German, along with English, Spanish and Italian, and because he could not bear to meet them himself, Jouvet asked her to handle most of the dealings between the Athenée theatre and the Germans. One day she was called to the rue de Saussaies and asked to report to the occupiers on individual members of the company, to say whether they were ‘pure’ or not. She felt outrage and contempt that she should be asked to spy. As the weeks passed, and the Germans moved steadily towards total control of the theatre in Paris, she observed with horror the growing exclusion of Jews from jobs and occupations. Charlotte herself was not Jewish, but her cast of mind was defiant, independent and humane. She had no time for the bullying and bureaucracy of the Nazis.
    The winter of 1940 was exceptionally cold, the longest and coldest since meteorological records began. In Toulouse, temperatures dropped to minus 13 degrees. A metre of snow fell on Grenoble. In Paris, where it froze for sixty-six consecutive days, cold, hungry, angry women, unable to afford exorbitant black market ration cards, queued for hours for supplies that dwindled day by day. Though the integration of France into the Nazi war economy had dramatically cut unemployment, the French were beginning to understand that the shortages were the direct result of the enormous booty of clothing, food and raw materials leaving every day for the Reich. The Parisians were now obsessed with food and warmth, lining their clothes with newspapers, putting mustard in their socks and making muffs out of rabbit and cat skins. The extreme cold enabled the dissident young to dress in outrageous clothes—boys in vast enveloping overcoats, their hair slicked back with vegetable oil, girls in fur coats over very short skirts. They called themselves zazous and became a colourful sight on the streets of Paris; they reminded people of the exotic merveilleuses during the Directoire in 1795.
    No longer the capital of France, without government or embassies—apart from a US representative—French Paris had turned into a silent, still, anxious city, patrolled by enemy troops in uniform. The free press had gone underground, unions had been abolished and all gatherings of over five people were forbidden. German Paris, by contrast, was flourishing, its restaurants and cabarets full, its dress collections admired, its art shows well attended. The couturière Madeleine de Rauch had brought out a witty collection of winter clothes based on the theme of the métro. Solférino was a tailored red coat, Austerlitz a yellow jacket.
    Paris had become a city of collaborators, both open and hidden, anti-Semites, anti-Freemasons, repentant communists and right-wing Catholics, who had hated Blum’s Front Populaire and felt more than sneaking admiration for the German cult of youthful valour, orderliness and heroism. For the most part they were men, locked into an increasingly lucrative but dangerous relationship with the occupiers and effectively prisoners of their outwardly polite but inwardly ruthless German friends; but there were women among them too. Gabriel Petri, who worked on L’Humanité , called them nazilous and spoke of them as servants to the Germans. To the surprise of the occupiers, informers were coming forward in their