Chapter 19 November 1995 Clara De Chambrun—Founding Trustee
Clara de Chambrun—founding trustee
You haven’t heard of me. Though my memoir Shadows Lengthen was brought out by Scribner, the same publisher as Hemingway, I remain a footnote in other people’s stories.
Supportive wife of General Aldebert de Chambrun.
Circumspect sister of Nicholas Longworth II, the Speaker of the House.
Sage cousin of wild child Alice Roosevelt, whose father, Teddy, admitted, “I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.” In-law of inglorious Pierre Laval, France’s wartime traitor in chief, executed in a hail of machine-gun fire.
People remain fascinated by World War II, when the City of Light went dark.
Rations, danger, spies. Résistants risking their lives for others, collaborateurs in connivance with Nazis.
Who remained in France? Who fled? Who got out while the getting was good?
Who was trapped? From Is Paris Burning? to The Last Metro, people can’t get enough.
During the Occupation, we Parisians carried on.
My husband oversaw the American Hospital, raising pigs in the basement so patients would have more to eat than the meager rations.
I oversaw the library, where we all hand-delivered books to Jewish readers.
I fended off the beady-eyed Gestapo spies, who posed as patrons and tried to catch me out in lies.
I slept on a pallet there, in case the Nazis tried to pilfer our collection. The library became my life.
Curiously, my husband receives full credit for keeping the hospital going, while in my case, it was written that I was able to protect the ALP thanks to family ties with Pierre Laval, prime minister in the Vichy government.
Yes, I reached out to him—once—for a matter of life and death.
Florence Frikart, the sister of my dear personal assistant, Hilda, was to be executed for copying and distributing Résistance tracts.
Thanks to his intervention, her sentence was reduced to hard labor; when the war ended, she was released.
I, too, was “let go.”
Dismissed, sacked, fired—despite my enduring affection for and affiliation with the library.
I was one of the original trustees, along with my friends Edith Wharton and Anne Morgan.
After the war, when Laval went on trial for betraying France, the men pondered the “de Chambrun question” and insisted that I was “an embarrassment.” Because of my family ties, the men wanted to exclude, punish, and humiliate me.
Future generations would call this being “voted off the island” or “canceled,” but back then, there were no words.
And without words, it is impossible to speak.
Yes, the trustees who’d fled France at the first rumblings of danger ousted me. They weren’t in Paris during the war, and yet they’re the first to tell you how it was. All they cared about was “appearances.” You give your heart, and the men take it, wad it up, and throw it in the dumpster.
Even today, from what I hear, men keep fouling things up.
One man in particular, according to Margaret.
When she speaks of Hayes, she paces before my tomb, her ice-blue eyes narrowed.
This new director is the worst of the lot—hiring pretty young girls with no experience, angering longtime volunteers, and repelling donors.
I suspect he’ll soon be gone, but who will take his place?