When the French government left Paris on 10 June, Bullitt telegraphed Secretary of State Cordell Hull: ‘This Embassy is the only official organization still functioning in the City of Paris except the Headquarters of the military forces, Governor and the Prefecture of Police.’ Italy, seeing that Germany would win, declared war on France and launched an invasion from the south that the outnumbered French repulsed. A few hours later, at the University of Virginia, Roosevelt declared, ‘On this tenth day of June 1940, the hand that held the dagger struck it into the back of its neighbor.’ He had borrowed the phrase from Bullitt. Gallup published its latest poll the same day: 62 per cent of the American people believed that, if Germany defeated both France and Britain, it would attack America next. The following day, Bullitt cabled Roosevelt: ‘I have talked with the Provisional Governor of Paris, who is the single government official remaining, and it may be that at a given moment I, as the only representative of the Diplomatic Corps remaining in Paris, will be obliged in the interest of public safety to take control of the City pending arrival of the German Army … Reynaud and Mandel just before their departure requested me to do this, if necessary.’

On 12 June, the day that Prime Minister Reynaud and Interior Minister Georges Mandel made him in effect Paris’s provisional mayor, Bullitt attended a prayer service at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Kneeling in the front pew, he was seen to weep for the city and country he loved.

Secretary of State Hull urged Bullitt to follow the French government to Tours and persuade the French to fight on from their bases in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Bullitt argued that, in the absence of FDR’s commitment of American arms, the French would ignore him. He cabled Hull after the service in Notre Dame, ‘As I said to you when you telephoned me the night of Sunday the 9th my deepest personal reason for staying in Paris is that whatever I have as a character, good or bad, is based on the fact that since the age of four I have never run away from anything however painful or dangerous when I thought it was my duty to take a stand. If I should leave Paris now I would no longer be myself.’ Bullitt was saving Paris. Hull was asking him to save France.

A few hours later, Bullitt wrote a follow-up telegram to Hull: ‘I propose to send my Military Attaché and my Naval Attaché to the German General Commanding the forces in the Paris area to explain the situation and return with suggestions of the German command as to methods of facilitating the orderly transition of government.’ German forces agreed to enter the city peacefully the next morning, but someone fired on German truce officers near the Porte Saint-Denis in the north of Paris. General Georg von Küchler, the German 10th Army commander who had demolished Rotterdam only a few weeks earlier, responded by ordering an all-out air and artillery assault on Paris. It was scheduled for eight o’clock in the morning, leaving Bullitt only hours to save the city from destruction. His communications, like everyone else’s, had been sporadic since the French Army cut Paris’s telegraph lines as it withdrew on 11 June. A chance telephone call from the American Embassy in Berne, Switzerland, opened a line for Bullitt to relay a message to Berlin. He urgently requested the Germans to recognize that ‘Paris has been declared an open city’. He proposed a parley early the next morning, 14 June, to save lives on both sides and prevent the destruction of Paris. Bullitt wanted to spare Paris the fate of Warsaw the year before, when the Luftwaffe demolished much of the Polish capital and killed 17,000 people.

General von Küchler agreed to try again before bombing the city. However, the French commander of the Paris region, 48-year-old General Henri-Fernand Dentz, refused a German demand to negotiate the transfer of power. His orders, he told the Germans via a radio link through the Prefecture of Police, were to provide security. He was not authorized to hold discussions with the enemy. At 2.25 in the morning, the Germans radioed Dentz: ‘Delegates till 5 a.m. German time on the fourteenth at Sarcelles. Comply – otherwise attack ordered on Paris.’ (German time was Greenwich Mean Time plus two hours, an hour later than in Paris.) Dentz acquiesced, sending two officers, Major Devouges and Lieutenant Holtzer, to treat with the Germans at Écouen, 12 miles north of Paris. At 5.30 a.m., Paris time, the two sides settled terms for the handover. The French achieved one amendment to the document: withdrawal of a forty-eight-hour non-stop curfew on the grounds that it contradicted the German requirement for public services like water and electricity to function normally. German Major Brink compromised by limiting the curfew from 9 p.m. to dawn. With the document signed, von Küchler cancelled the bombardment of Paris. Bullitt’s intervention had spared the City of Light.

Some Germans did not wait for the official capitulation. At 3.40 in the morning, a German soldier on motorcycle sped through the 11th Arrondissement, between the Place de la Nation and the Place de la République. More troops penetrated the city in trucks and armoured cars, followed by large units marching in formation, all spit and polish to impress the Parisians. The first American resident of Paris to see them was most likely Charles Anderson, who lived in Montmartre and rose before sunrise each day to take the Metro train to work. Born in Lebanon, Illinois, in 1861, Anderson ran away from home to join the Barnum Circus when he was 15. He enlisted in the American Army as it was completing the annihilation of the Indian tribes. In 1884, he worked his way by merchant ship from Boston to Europe. When his seaman’s pay ran out in France, he volunteered for the French Foreign Legion. Military service took him to the North African desert and, during the Great War, to Paris. On leaving the Legion after the Armistice of November 1918, he became an interpreter at the International Transport Company of Maurice de Brosse. De Brosse, in the frantic days before the Germans arrived, urged Anderson and his French wife, Eugénie Delmar, to leave Paris and come south with him. Nazi racial policies could be harsh on a black American, especially one married to a white woman. Anderson answered, ‘No, I’ll stay. No need to run.’

M. de Brosse asked Anderson what he would do in German-occupied Paris. When Anderson answered that he would report to work every day as usual, de Brosse pleaded, ‘The office will be closed!’ Anderson, a patient man who taught chess to young people in the evenings, said, ‘That doesn’t matter. I’m too old now to change my ways.’ De Brosse left, and Anderson stayed. He was almost eighty years old. On the morning of 14 June, Anderson watched German troops occupy an apartment building opposite his seven-room flat in Montmartre. The soldiers were courteous to him, and he was polite in return. The occupation, he decided, would not change his life. And he went to work.

Ambassador Bullitt, fearing a communist revolt in the working class suburbs, had made it a condition of his appointment as acting mayor of Paris that the police and firemen remain at their posts. He had also requested that Washington ship Thompson sub-machine guns to protect the embassy, mainly from the communist uprising that he wrongly predicted. Diplomatic manuals did not dictate protocol for an American ambassador to turn over a foreign capital to a conquering army, so Bullitt improvised. General Bogislav von Studnitz, commander of Germany’s 87th Infantry Division who would soon be Provisional Military Governor of a city he had never visited, simplified Bullitt’s task by instructing his staff to requisition the Hôtel Crillon at 7.55 that morning. The Crillon was only a dozen yards from the embassy wall. Von Studnitz, noted one French writer, was the type of Prussian officer that generations of Frenchmen thought ‘were born with monocles fixed to their eyes’. One of his first acts on entering the city was to put Paris one hour ahead to Berlin time.

Bullitt instructed Counsellor Robert Murphy, military attaché Colonel Horace H. Fuller and naval attaché Commander Roscoe Hillenkoetter to pay a courtesy call on General von Studnitz ‘as soon as he appeared to be settled’. When Murphy saw the Swastika rise on the roof of the Crillon, he decided ‘the moment had arrived for us to make our call’. Their purpose was to keep Bullitt’s promise to Premier Paul Reynaud to ensure a peaceful occupation. When the three Americans left the embassy that warm summer morning, a military convoy passed between them and the Crillon. One car stopped, and a German lieutenant asked in English, ‘You are Americans, aren’t you?’ They nodded. The lieutenant, who said he had lived in the United States, asked, ‘Can you tell us where we might find a suitable hotel here?’ Murphy laughed. ‘The whole city seems to be in your possession. It has hundreds of empty hotels. Take your pick.’

Inside the Crillon’s gilt lobby, Murphy saw a French police commissioner amid a throng of Germans. ‘You can’t imagine what happened,’ the man said. He told Murphy, Hillenkoetter and Fuller that a German colonel stopped him earlier that morning and ordered, ‘Open that hotel. It will be our headquarters. Take down the French flag from the roof, and replace it with this German flag.’ The empty hotel’s doors and shutters could not be opened, and the colonel warned, ‘If that hotel is not open in fifteen minutes and the French flag is not down, we will shoot it down and shoot you, too!’ A locksmith opened the doors in time, but the commissioner was still in a sweat.

‘Murphy!’ one of the German officers in the Prince of Wales suite upstairs called out. Murphy knew Colonel Weber from his years as US Vice-Consul in Munich. Weber, now von Studnitz’s aide-de-camp, welcomed the Americans, wrote Murphy,

as if we were all old friends, ushering us immediately into the drawing room where the general was talking with a dozen staff officers. We had expected to spend only a few minutes with the general, but he had previously ordered champagne from the Crillon’s excellent cellars and was in a mood to answer all the questions of our military and naval attachés. The only information we had about the progress of the war was what we had heard from western and Berlin radio broadcasts, which necessarily were confusing. General von Studnitz, who had served as German military attaché in Poland, said he appreciated it was the duty of attachés to gather intelligence for their governments and he was quite willing to inform us fully and frankly.

Von Studnitz gave the attachés a ‘clear and concise summary of the military campaign to date’ and predicted that ‘mopping up operations in France would not require more than another ten days, after which preparations would begin for crossing the channel to England’. Von Studnitz believed the British, without a single army division intact and most of their heavy artillery abandoned at Dunkirk, would not resist. Hillenkoetter asked how the Germans would cross the Channel, but von Studnitz ‘brushed aside this question with the comment that all plans were made’. The war, he added, would be over by the end of July, in six weeks. Walking the short distance back to the embassy, Murphy and the two attachés agreed that ‘none of us was at all sure he might not be right’.

Commander Hillenkoetter, recalling the same encounter, but without the champagne, wrote that ‘although it was only 10.30 a.m., we were offered a glass of what the General said was the very best brandy in the Crillon’. Hillenkoetter reported that von Studnitz was ‘most happy to make his call on the Ambassador at 1:30 p.m. as the Ambassador wished – assured us that all American property would be protected, and that we could count on the best of cooperation as far as the German military were concerned’. Von Studnitz invited Hillenkoetter and Fuller to attend the review of the Green Heart Division, the 185th Infantry, which he had once commanded, in the Place de la Concorde at 3.30 that afternoon. The two Americans could think of no polite way to refuse.

For Colonel Horace Fuller, the experience of handing Paris over to the Germans was galling. The 1909 West Point graduate had been briefing American and British journalists daily that the French Army would not hold. ‘Colonel Fuller was the only man in Paris who knew what was coming,’ Quentin Reynolds, the Collier’s Weekly correspondent, wrote. ‘He advised us to make plans to get out. He told us “off the record” that the French Army wouldn’t even bother to defend Paris.’ Fuller’s astute observations contrasted with the French government spokesman’s reply to a question from Virginia Cowles, the attractive American correspondent of Britain’s Sunday Times, asking whether Paris would be declared an ‘open city’: ‘Never,’ he said. ‘We’re confident that Hitler’s mechanized hordes will never get to Paris. But should they come so far, you may tell your countrymen we shall defend every stone, every clod of earth, every lamp-post, every building, for we would rather have our city razed than fall into the hands of the Germans.’ Colonel Fuller had fought the Germans in the Great War, when he commanded the US 108th Field Artillery Regiment in the Meuse-Argonne and Ypres-Lys offensives. Clare Boothe, covering the invasion for Life magazine, asked Fuller ‘what’s going to happen’:

His hands trembled. His eyes were quite bloodshot from loss of sleep. He tried to smile, but he couldn’t. He said, ‘Oh, there’s hope of course – the morale of the French – we can deliver 1,000 planes a month soon.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘don’t talk morale and economics, talk WAR. What do you think?’ He said so wearily, ‘I don’t want to think any more, I want to use my heart. You see, I want them to win so much, so very much,’ he said. ‘I fought with them at Chateau-Thierry in the last war – and oh, they’ve been Goddamn dumb, but dear Christ I love them.’

Back in his office at the chancellery, Murphy saw German soldiers climbing over the embassy gate: ‘They were running a telephone wire across our courtyard to the Crillon Hotel.’ To Murphy’s shock, the embassy’s ‘picturesque colored doorman’, George Washington Mitchell of North Carolina, was helping them. Mitchell had come to Paris before the Great War as a rider in a cowboy and Indian show. Murphy, who knew Mitchell was married to a German woman and spoke German, demanded to know why he had disobeyed orders not to allow German troops onto embassy premises. Mitchell said the soldiers were from Hamburg, where he knew people, and were ‘nice fellas’. Bullitt reacted with fury, not at George Mitchell, but at the Germans. He sent word to von Studnitz to remove the telephone cable at once. Henceforth, any German soldier breaking into the embassy grounds would be shot. The Germans removed the wire, but they posted a sign in front of the embassy that said, ‘Amerikanische Botschaft’, ‘American Embassy’. It was one of hundreds of signs the Germans affixed all over Paris for their troops and the German civilians, both administrators and tourists, who would arrive in their wake.

Von Studnitz, recalled Hillenkoetter, came to the embassy on time at 1.30 p.m. and spoke with Bullitt for about ten minutes ‘of correctness’. An hour later, Hillenkoetter and Fuller accompanied Bullitt for a similar, formal session at the Crillon. At 3.30, as promised, the two uniformed American attachés met General von Studnitz in the Place de la Concorde. With Nazi newsreel cameramen poised to record the military march-past, von Studnitz invited them to join him on the reviewing stand. ‘Both Fuller and I could easily see how that would look in newsreels, photos, etc. – two American officers taking a review with a German general. So we hastily, but firmly, declined, saying that we didn’t feel worthy to share the General’s honor; that it was his division and his glory; and that it would be a shame to deprive him of even a share of the glory.’ Fuller and Hillenkoetter diplomatically disappeared into the crowd. Robert Murphy, however, stood uncomfortably beside the German generals as the Green Heart Division goose-stepped across the great square to thumping martial music. When the parade ended and Murphy was walking back to the embassy, he complained to New York Herald Tribune correspondent Walter Kerr, ‘The general wanted the ambassador, and the ambassador told me to take his place.’ From an upper window of the embassy, a young diplomat hired locally in Paris, Keeler Faus, surreptitiously took photographs of the German troops in the Place de la Concorde.

Associated Press correspondent Philip W. Whitcomb, a graduate of Washburn University in Kansas and of Oxford, watched the same parade from the pavement and detected a bizarre normality:

On that day the garbage-men cleaned the streets alongside of German troops as they marched up the Friedland and Wagram Avenues or across the Place de la Concorde. The underground railway men ran their trains, though some carried only Germans on their way through Paris. The telephones worked. The police, under instructions to obey German orders, were all on duty, though on June 14th they were little more than members of the silent throng lining the streets through which the Germans moved.

The triumphalism of the military parades offended even a few Germans. A 33-year-old officer, Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, shared his disgust with General Franz Halder and his staff in Paris. Hitler deserved death for this nihilism, von Stauffenberg said. Although Major General Henning von Tresckow was brave enough to second him, General Halder counselled von Stauffenberg that the German public was unlikely to support a coup at a time of military victory.

Martial parades established themselves as facts of daily life that Parisians soon treated with the indifference they accorded to red lights.

TWO

The Bookseller

AS THE FIRST GERMAN SOLDIERS took control of Paris that morning, Sylvia Beach was waiting in Adrienne Monnier’s fourth-storey apartment in the rue de l’Odéon. Adrienne’s window commanded a clear view to the north, where the tiny street crossed the tree-shaded boulevard Saint-Germain. A column of German Army trucks and motorcycles appeared, along with troops riding and marching past. Sylvia called it an ‘endless procession of motorized forces: tanks and armored cars and helmeted men seated with arms folded … all a cold grey, and they moved to a steady deafening roar.’ For the first time, Sylvia heard the Germans’ famous leather jackboots. ‘Those boots always made them seem much more enraged than they were,’ she wrote. As she and Adrienne watched, ‘Tears were streaming down our cheeks. It was an awful experience. Horrible.’

‘Miss Beach’, as James Joyce called the American from the time they met in 1920, was 53 years old. Adrienne, her longtime collaborator, friend and former lover, was four years younger. For twenty years, the American and the Frenchwoman had presided over a unique and fertile realm of French and English literature. Adrienne called their little kingdom ‘Odéonia’, for the two bookshops – her French La Maison des Amis des Livres and Sylvia’s English Shakespeare and Company – whose plate-glass windows reflected each other across the rue de l’Odéon. James Joyce, who had made Shakespeare and Company his office, called it ‘Stratford-on-Odéon’.

The modest rue de l’Odéon flowed downhill from the crest of a rise, dominated by the rear of the great Théâtre de l’Odéon, to a roundabout, the Carrefour de l’Odéon, and the boulevard Saint-Germain. A canyon of five-and six-storey apartment buildings rose from ground-floor laundries, antique shops, carpet merchants and printers. Adrienne’s shop was at Number 7, and she lived on the fourth floor of Number 18. Shakespeare and Company was at Number 12, and Sylvia’s flat was in the mezzanine above the shop. The rue de l’Odéon’s twin bookshops, where contemporary writers were supported and published, made it the world capital of Franco-American letters. For a week before the Germans seized Paris, French people, as well as refugees from the Low Countries, had trudged up the rue de l’Odéon on their way out of the city. Sylvia and Adrienne watched them bearing the weight of all the possessions they could carry on their backs. While other booksellers and publishers were fleeing, the two women preferred to remain, if only to guard a small light amid what their friend Arthur Koestler called Europe’s Nazi ‘night’. Sylvia dismissed what many saw as her courage: ‘I never left Paris – hadn’t the energy to flee, luckily, as nothing happened to us or the other monuments.’

Adrienne had come to Odéonia in 1915, opening her bookshop during the war when rents were low and the city’s male booksellers were mostly in the army. From a peasant family in eastern, Alpine France, Adrienne had retained her earthy love of food and all other things sensual. Her father, Clovis, was a postal clerk who sorted mail on trains. An injury he received in a rail accident gave him an insurance settlement that his daughter used to start her business. La Maison des Amis des Livres became more than a bookshop. It was the base for publishing Adrienne’s literary journals and a venue for authors’ readings and discussions. She had befriended and defended some of France’s greatest writers – among them, poets Paul Valéry and Guillaume Apollinaire and novelists André Gide and Jules Romains.

Sylvia Woodbridge Beach arrived a couple of years later. Born in Baltimore in 1887, she had spent two teenage years in Paris from 1902 to 1904, when her father served as Presbyterian clergyman at the American Church on the Quai d’Orsay. From Paris, the family moved to Princeton, New Jersey. The Reverend Sylvester Beach’s most prominent parishioner was Virginia-born Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton University before being elected governor of New Jersey. The Reverend Sylvester Beach officiated at the weddings of both Wilson daughters and, after Wilson’s election to the White House in 1912, was known as the ‘president’s pastor’. Sylvia, who already spoke French fluently, learned Spanish in Madrid and Italian in Florence before returning to Paris during the Great War in 1917. A course in French literature at the Sorbonne led Sylvia to Adrienne Monnier’s shop in the rue de l’Odéon in search of a French literary journal. In March 1917, the slender, 5-foot-2-inch wisp of an American met the voluptuous French bookseller. Sylvia was thirty and Adrienne almost twenty-six. They discussed American and French books. Adrienne, who spoke little English, said she loved the works of Benjamin Franklin – albeit in French translation. When she told Sylvia, ‘J’aime beaucoup l’Amérique,’ Sylvia answered, ‘J’aime beaucoup la France.’ Soon, they loved each other as well.

Alice B. Toklas called Sylvia ‘flagstaff’ as much for her bony figure as her commitment to flying the banner of American literature on French soil. The American composer Virgil Thompson, who like Aaron Copland and George Antheil came to Paris to study music with Nadia Boulanger, called Sylvia ‘angular … Alice in Wonderland at forty’. Adrienne reminded him of ‘a French milkmaid from the eighteenth century’. William Carlos Williams remembered Adrienne in the kitchen, ‘That woman loved food, the senses were her meat.’ Her dining room was pink, she said, because pink was ‘good for the appetite’. Janet Flanner, who moved to Paris in 1922 with her lover Solita Solano and began her New Yorker column three years later, was a friend of both Sylvia and Adrienne. She compared ‘these two extraordinary women – Mlle. Monnier, buxom as an abbess, placidly picturesque in the costume she had permanently adopted, consisting of a long, full gray skirt, a bright velveteen waistcoat, and a white blouse, and slim, jacketed Sylvia, with her schoolgirl white collar and big colored bowknot, in the style of Colette’s Claudine à l’Ecole’.

Adrienne invited Sylvia to readings in her bookshop, where she heard, among many others, Paul Valéry in French Army uniform read his anti-war poem, ‘Europe’. When the Great War ended in November 1918, Sylvia went to Serbia to help her sister Holly with relief work for the Red Cross. Six months later, she was back in Paris. Adrienne encouraged her to open a French bookshop, like La Maison des Amis des Livres, in New York or London. Both cities proved impractical because of high rents and small readerships for French literature. Sylvia’s fallback was to establish an English language bookshop and lending library in Paris. Adrienne found her space on the ground floor of a building at 8 rue Dupuytren, around the corner from her own shop. With $3,000 sent by her mother, Eleanor Beach, Sylvia opened Shakespeare and Company on 17 November 1919. Above the door hung a pub-like sign of William Shakespeare’s head by the French-Polish painter Charles Winzer. When it was stolen, Winzer painted another. The second too disappeared, and Adrienne made one herself to replace it. Sylvia slept at the back of the tiny shop. Without running water but surrounded by the books she loved, she was content.

The first American writer to patronize Shakespeare and Company was the formidable Gertrude Stein, who appeared in the shop on 16 March 1920 with her companion, Alice B. Toklas. Already a figure on the Paris scene, Stein had yet to achieve success in America. Her weekly salon, initiated in 1906, attracted Pablo Picasso and other artists, whose paintings she assiduously collected. In the 1920s, American writers in Paris, including Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, sought her invitations. Stein became one of the Shakespeare and Company library’s original ‘bunnies’, as Sylvia called them, from the French word for subscriber, abonné. On 12 November 1920, 22-year-old Stephen Vincent Benét became the first young, aspiring American writer to join the library. Sylvia’s English competitors were Brentano’s bookshop for sales and the American Library of Paris for lending, both Right Bank institutions not favoured by the Left Bank bohemians. Brentano’s did not stock books by new writers or sell the experimental literary journals that Sylvia promoted. The blue-stockinged American Library matrons played moral censor, something Sylvia refused to do. When they removed H. L. Mencken’s journal, American Mercury, from their shelves, poet Ezra Pound, another of Sylvia’s American bunnies, wrote, ‘DAMN the right bank pigs, anyway.’ Shakespeare and Company became the haven of a new generation of writers and publishers. Most of its bunnies were students from the nearby University of Paris who, too poor to buy imported English books, paid the small subscription to borrow them.

In the summer of 1920, Shakespeare and Company reopened in a larger space at 12 rue de l’Odéon, facing Adrienne’s shop. Sylvia had two rooms just above Shakespeare and Company, but she did not live in them. She moved in with Adrienne at Number 8 and rented the rooms over the shop to pilgrims, as she called Americans arriving in Paris. Avant-garde American composer George Antheil lived there for several years. He used to climb up the front of the building to enter through a window rather than bother Sylvia by ringing at the shop. At the back, Sylvia kept a stove to brew tea and keep warm in winter. William Shirer, the great American journalist who was then working at the Paris Tribune, recalled how he ‘loved to browse among the shelves or be invited to tea in the back room, when in winter a fireplace blazed and there was much good talk’. Also at the back were children’s books, toys and a little red table. The outline of Odéonia was complete. It comprised the outdoor bookstalls in the arcades of the Théâtre de l’Odéon, the two bookshops, a music store, a library appraiser and, in the boulevard Saint-Germain, the writers’ favoured cafés, the Flore and the Deux Magots, and the Alsatian Brasserie Lipp.

Sylvia met James Joyce in July 1920. Joyce had just moved with his wife, Nora Barnacle, and their two children from Trieste. At the time, he was consumed with writing Ulysses. Sylvia, who had already read his short stories, later admitted, ‘Probably I was strongly attracted to Joyce as well as to his work, but unconsciously. My only love was Adrienne.’ When American courts convicted Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of the Little Review for printing ‘obscene’ sections of Joyce’s Ulysses, American and British publishers refused to consider the book. Sylvia Beach hated censorship. ‘You cannot legislate against human nature,’ she said. Although she had never published anything, she came to Joyce’s rescue by publishing Ulysses. Adrienne’s French typesetters printed it, and Sylvia proofread every page. It went on sale in her shop, and she persuaded friends like Ernest Hemingway to smuggle copies into the United States. Her friend Janet Flanner called Sylvia ‘the intrepid, unselfish, totally inexperienced and little-moneyed young-lady publisher of “Ulysses” in Paris in 1922’. When the book appeared, Sylvia lost one of her first bunnies, Gertrude Stein. Miss Stein, who hated Joyce, took her custom to the American Library on the Right Bank.

Within six years of opening her shop, Sylvia Beach was called by Eugene Jolas, the American publisher of the Paris literary magazine transition, ‘probably the best known woman in Paris’. If she had any rival for that honour, it could only have been another American, the beautiful singer-dancer Josephine Baker. Sylvia made Shakespeare and Company the centre of Parisian American literary life. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, John Dos Passos, Elliot Paul, Malcolm Cowley and other expatriate American writers used her combined bookshop-lending library as, in Janet Flanner’s words, ‘their club, mail drop, meeting house and forum’. Over tea at Shakespeare and Company, the Americans met the Irishman James Joyce and French writers like Louis Aragon and André Breton, as well as one another. It was a time of high living for the Americans, who found Paris cheaper than home and loved the freedom to write without censorship and to drink alcohol without being arrested. Aged 22, Hemingway fell in love, however platonically, with 34-year-old Sylvia the moment they met in 1921. ‘She had pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip,’ Hemingway wrote of her in his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast. ‘No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.’ He made a point of taking her to boxing matches to shake her further from her Protestant clerical upbringing. She became an enthusiast and introduced Hemingway to French writer Jean Prévost, who wrote a book called The Pleasure of Sport and matched Hemingway’s physicality. The two men sparred in the ring, but Prévost’s head was so hard that Hemingway broke a thumb on it. Sylvia adored Hemingway, encouraging the young journalist to publish in Paris’s growing number of literary periodicals.

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