The Twenties bounty turned, for Sylvia as for much of the western world, into Thirties desperation. The dollar’s devaluation slashed the incomes of expatriate Americans – impoverished writers, painters and composers most of all. Ernest Hemingway and her other favourites left Paris for the United States. In December 1933, restrictions on drinking and writing that had driven many American writers to France were lifted with the repeal of Prohibition and the American publication of Joyce’s Ulysses. Judge John Woolsey of the US District Court in New York wrote the landmark decision that Ulysses, despite its sexual content, was a ‘sincere and honest book’. He famously added, ‘His locale was Celtic and his season spring.’ This was good news for Joyce, whose book sold 35,000 copies in three months, but it came at a cost to Sylvia. Joyce had convinced her, after her years of subsidizing him and keeping his book in print, to relinquish publishing rights to Random House in New York and the Bodley Head in London. Her health, plagued since childhood by eczema and migraines, suffered. The writer Katherine Anne Porter recalled ‘attacks of migraine that stopped her in her tracks’. Lack of business in Depression-era Paris put her deeper into debt. Her family helped when it could – small amounts arriving in their letters from Princeton and California. But the presents were not enough to protect Shakespeare and Company from bankruptcy.

When Sylvia told André Gide in 1935 that the shop might close, he declared, ‘But something must be done!’ Thanks to Gide and fellow writers Jean Schlumberger and Paul Valéry, something was. They created the Friends of Shakespeare and Company, whose members paid dues for two years to support the shop. Almost all of France’s best writers contributed. André Maurois, Jean Paulhan, Jules Romains and Georges Duhamel headed a long list of donors who paid a minimum of $45 a year to attend readings by French and American novelists and poets. The poet Archibald MacLeish sent $75. The largest donation came from Sylvia’s childhood friend, Carlotta Welles Briggs, with whom she had spent summers at the Welles’s country house near Bourré in the Touraine.

The civil war in Spain brought American writers back to Paris, where they took leave from the battlefront. Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and the English poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender became Sylvia’s loyal customers. Sylvia persuaded Hemingway to do a reading to raise funds. He agreed on condition that Spender join him on the platform. This was less generosity than stage-fright. He was so nervous that he drank copiously before and during his reading of the short story ‘Fathers and Sons’. Faltering at first, he was declaiming like a Shakespearean dramatist by the end. The Paris Herald Tribune wrote, ‘He was beginning to show grace under pressure.’ Hemingway left Europe again when the Republicans lost the war in Spain and the half million Spanish refugees who escaped to France were be interned in camps.

In 1936, with the shop on a more secure footing, Sylvia made her first visit to the United States since coming to Paris in 1917. Her older sister, Holly, followed by younger sister Cyprian and their father, had moved to Altadena, California, where Sylvia saw them for a few weeks. By the time she stopped in Princeton to see childhood friends, severe menstrual bleeding took her to a Connecticut hospital for diagnosis and a hysterectomy. While Sylvia was away from Paris, a young German-Jewish photographer, Gisèle Freund, whom she and Adrienne had encountered two years earlier, supplanted her in Adrienne’s affections and apartment. Returning to convalesce in Paris, Sylvia, without demur, moved into the mezzanine rooms above Shakespeare and Company. The three women remained close, usually having lunch together in Adrienne’s kitchen.

A year later, after receiving nominations from parliamentarian Edouard Herriot and Henri Hoppenot, a poet in the French diplomatic corps, the French government made Sylvia a Knight of the Legion of Honour. It was the first official recognition she had received of her contribution to Franco-American letters. While she made light of her ‘little ribbon gibbon given me by the French’, she wore it proudly when occasion demanded.

At the outbreak of war in September 1939, Sylvia’s family urged her to return home. But her home was Paris. Friends, though, were leaving. The few American writers there in 1940, like Henry Miller and Robert McAlmon, as well as the photographer Man Ray, were fleeing to the south, where most went on to safer countries. Gisèle Freund waited until the Germans were bombing the industrial suburbs of Paris before she too escaped, first to the south, finally to Argentina. As a German-Jewish refugee, she would have been arrested immediately. By June 1940, Joyce was on his way to Switzerland. Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier and their contracting circle of brave friends awaited the humiliation of their city.

On Monday, 3 June, Adrienne wrote, ‘Loud noise of planes roaring over our heads. Raid: 200 planes, numerous victims.’ Six days later, she and Sylvia heard German artillery pounding Paris’s outskirts. Adrienne’s diary entry for the day said, ‘We think seriously of putting mattresses in the cellar to sleep on.’ Only the day before, a friend warned them that ‘Paris will be involved in the battle.’ Two days later, the same friend’s husband ‘let me understand that Paris will not be involved in the battle’. Rumours, compounded by government radio bulletins that lied about the war, were confusing rather than reassuring. Someone warned Adrienne that, if she stayed in Paris, people would assume she welcomed German occupation. By the morning of 12 June, Adrienne was ready to quit: ‘Personal longing to leave and go to Rocfoin’, the village southwest of Paris where her mother and father had a smallholding. After asking Sylvia to bicycle to Montparnasse station to see whether there were any trains, Adrienne had lunch in her kitchen with her sister, Marie. Marie, whose pet name was Rinette from Marinette, persuaded her to stay, saying that ‘we should live such moments here’. Sylvia, meanwhile, urged Ruth Camp, a young Canadian student who worked for her, to escape. Canada, unlike the United States, was at war with Germany, making Ruth subject to detention as an enemy alien. Sylvia despaired that ‘she could not be persuaded to leave in spite of my efforts to push her homeward, [and] was still helping me when the Germans swarmed into France’. As the Germans neared Paris, Ruth, in Sylvia’s words, ‘did try to get away. She was machine-gunned in the ditches, and was later interned in spite of her efforts.’ On the 13th, Sylvia had an urge to flee. She went to the American Embassy, where she discovered it was too late.

The anti-Nazi, anti-Soviet, Hungarian-Jewish writer Arthur Koestler had been hiding in Adrienne’s apartment. The French authorities had already interned him with other foreigners, many of whom were also anti-Nazis and Jews. The Nazis would take charge of those still stuck in the camps when the occupation began. After Koestler’s temporary release, Adrienne took him in. He was reading Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir on her sofa, when a four leaf clover in the book ‘fell right between his eyes!’ Adrienne kissed the spot and assured him it was an omen that he would be safe. A year later, Koestler wrote discreetly in London, ‘I still had some friends. Who these friends were, how they passed me on in turn, hiding me for one night each, and how they succeeded in obtaining for me a travelling permit to Limoges, where a fortnight later I ceased legally to exist, will be an amusing and moving story to tell at a time when the night has gone from Europe and acts of kindness and solidarity no longer count as crimes.’ When the Nazi night had passed, he was free to give Adrienne credit without putting her in jeopardy: ‘For a few days I remained in hiding, first at the flat of Adrienne Monnier, then at the P.E.N. Club.’ The president of International PEN was Sylvia and Adrienne’s old friend Jules Romains. The French novelist’s anti-Nazi views were known, and he fled Paris for the south in hope of reaching New York with his wife, Lise, the French-American novelist Julien Green and American surgeon Dr Alexander Bruno. Romains said, more in hope than truth, ‘It is impossible that France should go fascist.’

On 14 June, Sylvia’s and Adrienne’s bookshops, like all other businesses in Paris, were closed. Sylvia’s premises enjoyed some protection. Two American diplomats, Third Secretary Tyler Thompson and her friend Keeler Faus, had personally affixed red American seals to her apartment and shop to tell the Germans they belonged to a US citizen. But Sylvia and Adrienne’s anti-Nazi past made them vulnerable to the occupier. Adrienne, as well as hiding Arthur Koestler, had assisted the brilliant German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin’s escape from Paris to the south of France. (Benjamin was hoping to obtain an American visa from the consulate in Marseilles and travel to the United States via Spain and Portugal. He made an exhausting trek over the Pyrenees, but Spanish police forced him back to Nazi-occupied France. Rather than be sent to a concentration camp, he committed suicide.) Adrienne had also written a long condemnation of Nazi anti-Semitism in her Gazette des Amis des Livres in 1938: ‘From the day the Jews were emancipated (as you know, it is one of the glories of the French Revolution that they were), they have proved that they could be national elements of the first order.’ Sylvia had sold artists’ prints in her shop to raise money for Spain’s legitimate republican government to fight the Nazi-supported Francisco Franco. She also had many Jewish friends, including an unpaid voluntary assistant at Shakespeare and Company, Françoise Bernheim.

As the Germans occupied each arrondissement in Paris, someone told Adrienne that they were ordering everyone to remain indoors for forty-eight hours. Wehrmacht loudspeaker vans repeated this message, until it became known the curfew had been amended to begin at 9 p.m. Adrienne waited with Sylvia all morning in her apartment. At noon, they noticed civilians on the streets. In some places, Parisians were accepting gifts of food from German army trucks sent to feed the populace. In others, women flirted with soldiers. One of the better bordellos posted a notice: ‘Business as usual from 3 p.m.’ A few cafés opened to serve their first uniformed German customers, who were polite and paid for all they ate and drank. Adrienne was disgusted by a common sentiment she overheard: ‘What if the Germans are here? At least there will be order.’ She prepared lunch for Sylvia in the kitchen where for twenty years the earthy and maternal bookseller had cooked oily peasant dinners for the luminaries of French and American literature. It would be her last lunch before the Germans began requisitioning most of France’s food.

After lunch, the husband of Adrienne’s sister Rinette, painter Paul-Emile Becat, came to the flat to see her and Sylvia. He told them he had seen ‘the procession of the first German battalions this morning at the Place de l’Etoile’. A great phalanx of helmeted Wehrmacht troops marched to a Nazi band, while the Swastika flew over the Arc de Triomphe. At this scene, Parisians had stared sullen and silent, many of them weeping. Adrienne ended her diary of the day, ‘In the evening, great depression.’ She was not alone.

German forces seized both houses of France’s parliament, the Chamber of Deputies over the Seine from the Place de la Concorde and the Senate in the Luxembourg Gardens. They also commandeered the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d’Orsay, the Naval Ministry beside the Hôtel Crillon and most other government buildings. Signs were posted in German saying they were under the ‘protection’ of the German army. Troops set up light cannon and machine guns at the main approaches to the Arc de Triomphe. They replaced French flags with Swastikas on government buildings, monuments, the arcades of the rue de Rivoli and the main hotels. Robert Murphy wrote, ‘I was amazed in those first occupation days to discover how thoroughly the Germans had prepared for every phase of military government. It became apparent that they had drafted comprehensive blueprints long in advance to suit whatever conditions they might encounter in conquered countries.’

The only fatal incident occurred at nine in the morning, when a lone French soldier shot at German troops in the southern suburb of Antony. ‘The German soldiers responded to the firing, killing the French soldier and a woman,’ noted the Paris Prefect of Police, Roger Langeron, in his diary. No Americans were harmed.

The Germans honoured most of the embassy certificates of American property ownership, including one that Bullitt personally issued to a French friend, Marie-Laure de Noailles. Married to an aristocrat, Marie-Laure was the daughter of a Jewish banker. Bullitt’s gesture undoubtedly saved her collection of Goyas and other masterpieces from German seizure. Nonetheless, the Nazis requisitioned two American homes near Paris in Versailles. One belonged to James Hazen Hyde, whose house was ransacked by German troops. The other was the villa of the twice-widowed Mrs James Gordon Bennett, in her youth Miss Maud Potter of Philadelphia. Her first husband had been Baron George de Reuter of the news agency his father founded. Five years after his death, she wed the eccentric, 73-year-old owner of the Paris Herald. When the Germans occupied her Versailles villa, she stayed in her Paris townhouse in the avenue d’Iéna near the American Ambassador’s residence. Other American losses were houses north of Paris belonging to Harlan Page Rowe and Ogden Bishop, both looted during the battles. The Luftwaffe bombed American oil and communications facilities on the northern French coast. Another American loss during the Battle of France was a consignment of 150,000 cigarettes for Ambassador Bullitt. The Germans did not tamper with any other embassy supplies, but a Wehrmacht colonel told French officials in the Paris customs house, ‘So these are Bullitt’s cigarettes! Well, he won’t get them. I used to live in Philadelphia and I never did like Bullitt. Take them away.’

In the evening, Bullitt received a visit at the embassy from Police Prefect Roger Langeron. For the past weeks, the two men had come to know and respect each other. Langeron told the ambassador that the Germans had arrested and were interrogating his chief of general intelligence, Jacques Simon. This violated the assurances given that morning by General von Studnitz, who told Langeron, ‘If order is maintained, if you can guarantee the security of my troops, you won’t hear a word from me.’ Langeron asked for Bullitt’s help. The ambassador called Robert Murphy, who went immediately to the Crillon with a message from Bullitt: if Simon were not released, no one would be responsible for security in Paris. Without Langeron’s 25,000 policemen, who had remained at Bullitt’s request when the French government was planning to remove them, the occupation which had gone smoothly until evening would become a shambles. At 11 p.m., Simon appeared unharmed in Langeron’s office on the Ile de la Cité.

THREE

The Countess from Ohio

THE NAZIS REQUISITIONED the best Parisian hotels – not only the Crillon, but the Ritz, Majestic, Raphael and George-V. The American Embassy beat them to the Hôtel Bristol, Ambassador Bullitt having already leased it from proprietor Hippolyte Jammet. The elegant hotel in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré was suitable as an American refuge, because its basement shelter was the only one in Paris with protection against poison gas. The hotel flew the American flag, which the Germans did not remove. One American expatriate, Isadora Duncan’s brother Raymond, made the Bristol bar his second home. The Hellenophile Duncan was easy to recognize, invariably dressed in a toga and hand-made sandals. His Left Bank art gallery, the Akademia in rue de Seine, was close enough to the Bristol for him to walk there over the river. Representatives of the American Red Cross, the Rockefeller Foundation and the American ambulance units moved into the Bristol. Anne Morgan also took up residence there, hiding foreign and French Jews under quasi-diplomatic protection until she found ways for them to leave France. Dorothy Reeder, directress of the American Library in the rue de Téhéran, went to the Bristol on the occupation’s first day to work for the embassy verifying that the residents were American citizens.

Two days earlier, Miss Reeder had received an unexpected visit from the American Library’s first vice-president, Countess Clara Longworth de Chambrun. The two women conferred in the darkness of a library whose windows were obscured in brown paper as a precaution against bombing. The rest of the library’s board were preparing to leave France altogether, but Countess de Chambrun was going that afternoon to the country – imperiously informing Miss Reeder that she would return as usual in September. Miss Reeder, the countess recalled, ‘promised to remain on the spot and continue to wave the flag of neutrality. Meantime, she appeared to be getting what she termed “quite a kick” out of the position in which she was left as sole guardian of the premises, and with authority to negotiate the most delicate questions with the occupants, certain that the American Embassy would back her decisions.’ Miss Reeder herself wrote, ‘Was it really Paris whose streets I walked through the 11th, 12th and 13th of June 1940? I do not think so. It was a dead city. Everything was closed, locked and deserted. Even the fall of a pin could be heard.’

Clara Longworth de Chambrun was reluctant to abandon Paris. Her husband’s employers, the National City Bank of New York, had a ‘theory that, should the enemy enter Paris, certain French directors might be held as hostages and endanger the interests of the establishment’. So, Count Aldebert de Chambrun, the Marquis de Mun and six French employees were ordered to move the bank south of any imaginable German penetration to Le Puy. Clara told Aldebert that he could leave Paris without her. She refused to desert their house at 58 rue de Vaugirard, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens and the Senate’s ornate Palais du Luxembourg, in the 6th Arrondissement. A few dozen yards away was the Théâtre de l’Odéon, where Clara staged plays. Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company was just around the corner. Clara was obstinate: ‘My temperamental dislike of retreating from danger when others less capable of facing it remained behind caused me to protest vigorously against this mandate [from the bank to leave].’

Her husband reminded her that she would be alone in Paris. Aldebert himself had to be in Le Puy with the bank. Their only son, René, was in Washington on a mission from the French government at the request of Ambassador Bullitt to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt, a distant cousin by marriage, to send emergency military aid to Britain. Her husband’s brothers had also left. Pierre, who as the eldest had inherited their father’s title of Marquis de Chambrun in 1891, had gone to his country seat, the Château l’Empery-Carrières, in Lozère. As representative of Lozère in the Senate, he was the only American citizen in the upper house. With him was his wife, Clara’s cousin, Margaret Rives Nichols. Aldebert’s younger brother, Count Charles, known as Charlie and formerly French Ambassador in Rome, took refuge with relatives in Brittany. ‘My husband argued that, if I remained in Paris and saw the hideous swastika replace the tricolor, I would be cut off from everyone and everything I loved except the house itself and a little grave [of her daughter] nearby. I gave in before the inevitable and busied myself with the practical arrangements for that hated flight.’

On 12 June, after her visit to Dorothy Reeder at the American Library, Clara met her husband for a last lunch at home. Their chauffeur having disappeared in the chaos, an American employee of the bank, Mr Hunt, drove the count, the countess with her Japanese dog, Tsouni, on her lap and the Chambruns’ house maid out of the city that afternoon. With a million other Parisians, they found themselves in a disorderly procession that disrupted military convoys heading to the front. Their car crawled southwards along National Route Seven to Juvisy. There, where the highway joined regional roads, the traffic halted.

There were trucks, delivery wagons, military lorries and the whole running equipment of certain factories and aviation centers. Men and women were standing entwined on flatcars, careless of the fact that they could not remain erect for ever – or even at all – when running at normal speed. No question of that now; all proceeded at a footpace, and were stopped completely every three minutes. A lad on a dark brown thoroughbred pushed past our car and, on extricating himself from the mass, galloped off across country.

Further along the road, Clara noticed people setting out picnics. One man and woman in particular caught her eye: ‘I recall the silhouettes of a distinguished-looking couple in well-cut clothes seated at a tiny folding-table which formed part of their Rolls-Royce equipment. She was dressed in printed crepe de Chine with silver fox boa; he, in impeccable grey jacket with decorations. His carefully trimmed beard recalled Leopard II.’

Mr Hunt drove them for twenty-five hours on a journey that normally took seven. They had to sleep overnight in the car. On the second night, they reached Vichy, where the Hôtel du Parc gave Aldebert and Clara a room. They were lucky. Most of the other displaced Parisians who survived Luftwaffe strafing on the highways were sleeping rough in barns, on roadsides and in cheaper hotels and inns, several families often crowded into the same room. The rambling, white-porticoed Hôtel du Parc was the best that the spa town had to offer. Its management knew the Chambruns, who had summered there to ‘take the waters’ since 1926. Their July reservations were simply pushed forward to June. The couple took baths and settled in for their first good sleep in three days.

At four o’clock in the morning, while the Germans were about to occupy Paris, the urgent banging of a gong woke them. The incessant racket worsened when ‘an excited servant thundered at our door, and commanded us to dress and pack without delay as all guests must be out of the hotel by five o’clock’. The military staff of General Maxime Weygand, France’s new minister of national defence, had requisitioned the hotel. ‘We argued, but to no avail,’ Countess de Chambrun recalled. The hotel servant ‘compromised by giving us a cup of coffee before the start’. Despite their age, their wealth and Aldebert’s status as a retired army general, they packed and left the hotel before dawn.

Clara Longworth de Chambrun, a stalwart American matron of 66 years, and her American-born husband did not complain. ‘I must say for our personal honor,’ she wrote, ‘all thought of self was totally forgotten in the magnitude of national disaster. Even my little dog seemed to understand that no attention could be paid to him. Instead of balancing himself on my knees to supervise the chauffeur or admire the landscape, he crept down on the floor of the car and lay between my feet.’ They left Vichy for Le Puy, where the National City Bank had arranged lodging for its Paris staff.

This was Clara’s third war since she left Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1901. She took it in her stride. Four years before the Battle of France, she had written, ‘By birth and education, my life – which began on October 18, 1873, was predestined to adventure, tragedy, romance and mirth.’ By the time her third war began in September 1939, she was an accomplished Shakespearean scholar and had written sixteen books, eight each in English and French. These included the memoir of her life to 1935, Shadows Like Myself, and The Making of Nicholas Longworth, a biography of her brother. Nicholas Longworth III had been a Republican congressman from Cincinnati and was twice Speaker of the House of Representatives. His marriage to President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, at the White House was the American social event of 1906. Born into a rich and respected Cincinnati pioneer family, Clara Eleanor Longworth was, by her own admission, no beauty. ‘Why should any man wish to marry a woman who is not extremely beautiful?’ she asked in her first memoir. Clara nonetheless had bountiful chestnut hair that she tied back to reveal a striking face that exuded patrician self-confidence. Her fiercely independent, intellectual temperament had probably made her unsuitable to the Ohio boys who congregated at her family’s mansion on Grandin Road. In 1895, her cousin, Margaret Rives Nichols, married a French aristocrat, Pierre de Chambrun. Clara met his younger brother, Count Aldebert, at the same time.

Although the Chambrun brothers had an impeccably French pedigree, they were American twice-over. Aldebert and Charles had been born in Washington, DC, where their father, Adolphe de Chambrun, served as legal counsel to the French Embassy during the administrations of Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. The Marquis de Chambrun’s Washington memoir, Impressions of Lincoln and the Civil War, recounted his friendship with President and Mrs Lincoln, who invited him to join them at Ford’s Theatre on the night Lincoln would be assassinated. The Chambruns were direct descendants of the Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of American independence and loyal friend of George Washington. Under an April 1788 act of the Maryland legislature, all of Lafayette’s male heirs were automatically citizens of the state and, thus, of the United States. Aldebert’s favourite sport, dating to his Washington boyhood, was baseball. Clara said that Aldebert ‘never considered the United States, where he was born and passed his early school-boy days, as foreign soil’. She also thought that he looked at moral problems ‘from a more American point of view’ than she did. Their differences were many: ‘Like all his family, he upholds a woman’s right to vote; I am firmly and temperamentally against it … His ultrahumanitarian views condemn the practice of capital punishment while my baser and more practical mind considers that in our present imperfect state of civilization it is a necessary evil.’ They wed in 1901, a Cincinnati ceremony presided over by the Episcopal Archbishop of St Paul for the Longworths and the Catholic Archbishop of Ohio for the Chambruns. Aged 27, she was not a young bride for her generation. Aldebert, born in Washington on 23 July 1872, was a year older.

Clara moved with Aldebert to France and tackled French life with the determination that her late eighteenth-century forebears brought to settling the Ohio frontier. She perfected her French, took a doctorate at the Sorbonne and became a figure in the conservative world of the French aristocracy. The couple had a son, René, whose godfather was President William Howard Taft; and a daughter, Suzanne, who died of an accidental electrocution in Paris at the age of 19. In 1910, Aldebert was dispatched to Washington as French military attaché and became with Clara part of what the press called President Taft’s ‘golf cabinet’. Taft, a jovial and rotund Ohio Republican who had been governor of the Philippines and vice-president under Theodore Roosevelt, called Aldebert ‘Bertie’. The Longworth and Taft families had been friends in Cincinnati, where Taft had taught her brother Nicholas at law school. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt challenged Taft, his former protégé, for the presidency, splitting the Republican vote and handing the election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The Longworths and Chambruns, almost alone in Washington, remained close to both the Roosevelt and the Taft families.

The Chambruns returned to France in time for the Great War in 1914. Aldebert, a career soldier who had worked his way through the ranks to become a colonel, commanded the French 40th Regiment. At Bar-le-Duc during the Battle of Verdun in 1916, his entire unit was cited in dispatches for bravery. The award was presented by Aldebert’s former military academy instructor, General Henri-Philippe Pétain. Clara used her privileged position to visit her husband near the front. When she was forced to return to Paris and feared she might never see him again, she wrote, ‘But there is an end to everything, even tears.’ Her family’s sense of noblesse oblige led her to work for French refugees from the Meuse Valley battle zone and her mother to come from Ohio and nurse the wounded at the American Hospital of Paris. When the United States entered the war in April 1917, Aldebert was made French adviser to the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, General John Pershing. Clara preserved three images of the war: ‘the appearance of General Pershing on the balcony of the Hotel Crillon, the arrival of the [American] First Division, and the salute to Lafayette at Picpus Cemetery’. It was said that an American officer arrived in Paris, went straight to Lafayette’s simple grave at Picpus in the east of the city and announced, ‘Nous revoilà, Lafayette!’ This was America’s answer to Lafayette’s famed ‘Nous voilà!’ on reaching the rebellious American colonies 140 years before.

After the war, the Sorbonne awarded Clara, then aged 48, a doctorate in literature. Her interests included staging plays at the Comédie Française and helping to manage the American Library. The library had been established to provide books to doughboys, as the American soldiers were affectionately known, and remained open after they went home. Its members were mainly American residents of Paris and French students studying English. Among Clara’s American friends on the library board were its only other female members, Edith Wharton and Anne Morgan. The American Library, like Clara herself, had little contact with the Left Bank ‘lost generation’ writers who congregated at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company.

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