Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (34 page)

The city returned to what passed for normal, and the strange stories of arrests, suicides, abandoned children living in empty apartments and the stench of the Vel’ d’Hiv joined all the other implausible rumours that poisoned the air and filled it with mysteries that nobody wanted to solve.

Some of the children who were left behind saw their parents again when they were tricked into going to a reception centre run by the Union Générale des Israélites de France, and then put on a train to Drancy. Others were given new names and were sent to live with new parents in other parts of France. When things became really frightening, many children behaved in a very grown-up fashion. While their parents relived the horrors of childhood, their children sent them letters telling them not to worry and using secret code: ‘The weather has been quite stormy’, or ‘The sun is beginning to shine’. They tried to think of all the things that their parents would like to hear, but it was not very easy to comfort mothers and fathers when they weren’t there any more to be comforted.

Black and white, 35 mm.

Silence; no titles.

Fade in to
:

1. PLACE DE LA MADELEINE.

The cobbles on the square.

JULIETTE’s point of view:

Drab figures carrying bags, going about their own business. One or two cars; bicycles everywhere; a
vélo-taxi
pedalled by a young woman in culottes. If possible, no pigeons.

Medium long-shot:
CHARLOTTE
emerges from the thin crowd on the Rue Royale and waves at the camera. She begins to cross the square, moving purposefully, carrying a shoulder-bag. The sunlight shines through her white skirt; her hair is blown by the breeze; she looks young and cheerful.

Camera pulls back and zooms in: CHARLOTTE seems quite close when she still has some way to go before reaching the camera.

A black Citroën enters the square behind her to the left. Sound of doors banging. Three men in gabardines and fedoras grab Charlotte and bundle her into the car.

CHARLOTTE screams.

The car drives off. Juliette runs into shot, racing after the car.

JULIETTE,
banging on the windows
: That’s my sister! That’s my sister!

Close up: Charlotte’s face stares back from the retreating window in wide-eyed terror. The car brakes and swerves to a halt. The door opens; an arm pulls Juliette into the car.

Zoom back: the black car accelerates away towards the Place de la Concorde.

Close up: cobbles in the foreground.

2. INSIDE THE CAR.

Two men in front; two behind, Charlotte wedged between them. Juliette sitting on the knee of one of the Gestapo officers.

JULIETTE,
giggling
: It’s ages since I had a ride in a car!

The officer punches her very hard in the back. Pain and shock on her face.

3. PLACE DE LA MADELEINE.

The black Citroën accelerating away; pedestrians still going about their own business. The car is increasingly hard to pick out from the background.

The solo trumpet begins–one long note, then the melody–brash, almost slapdash, but forlorn; it sounds like an empty room. The title scrolls rapidly across the screen
:
LOVERS OF SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉ S…

4. TITLE SEQUENCE: LEFT BANK AND SUBURBS.

Fade to: face of JULIETTE, staring out of the car window. Her black fringe and long, straight hair make her look like a child, but her expression is that of an adult.

While the TITLES appear, street scenes are reflected on the window and pass over Juliette’s face. The trumpet continues, with bass and cymbal.

NB: this should be the real route, as taken in September 1943 to Fresnes (they were first taken to Avenue Foch, but that route would be too short and familiar). Film practically the whole stretch from Place de la Concorde, across the Seine, down the Boulevard Saint-Germain and Boulevard Raspail to Place Denfert (the car is moving at speed); empty shops and café windows.

Fade twice to increasingly deserted scenes of suburbs–walls; isolated, scraggly trees; vacant lots…Bleary sunlight. Children playing among ruins or whatever else happens to appear.

Trumpet stops. Silence.

Black screen for four seconds.

5. AN OFFICE, 84, AVENUE FOCH.

Sound of a typewriter.

The typewriter, with an apple next to it on the table.

WOMAN in uniform, typing; hair in a bun. A SOLDIER standing by the door. JULIETTE sits in the corner. Ornate fireplace, Second Empire mirror; the incongruous paraphernalia of military administration.

Juliette looks down at the bag between her legs (the bag her sister was carrying in the opening scene). She looks up; the typist sees her looking and pushes the apple towards her across the table, and starts typing again.

Juliette steals a glance at the contents of the bag–papers rolled up–and quickly looks up away. She raises her hand, with a meaningful expression.

JULIETTE: Madame? My tummy’s hurting…

The typist nods to the soldier, and gestures at a wooden door.

TYPIST,
to Juliette
: Don’t lock the door, and don’t be long.

6. TOILET.

Art deco tiles; stained glass showing a beautiful woman in a garden full of flowers. Two polished wooden steps lead to the toilet seat.

JULIETTE
opens the bag, removes the papers, flushes the toilet, rolls up her sleeve, and begins to stuff the papers into the bowl as far as she can reach. Then she flushes the toilet again. Loud sound of flushing.

Close up of papers (a glimpse of handwritten lists of names and addresses) swirling in the water.

7. OFFICE.

SOLDIER goes to the door; opens it. JULIETTE descends from the toilet and goes to sit in the corner. The woman typist has disappeared.

Close up of clock (11.05). Occasional sounds of someone falling, crying out.

JULIETTE (sitting) and SOLDIER (standing), with an oak-panelled wall between them.

Close up of the empty bag between Juliette’s legs.

Close up of clock (2.30).

Black screen for three seconds.

Sound of heavy boots on metal walkways. Echoing voices.

8. FRESNES.

Echoing, metallic sounds continue.

The brick facades and perimeter fence of Fresnes prison, seen from a slow-moving vehicle.

9. CONSULTATION ROOM.

A hand in a plastic glove with blood on the fingers.

JULIETTE, from behind, putting on her skirt, then her sweater.

Female ORDERLY wearing a white coat over her uniform, removing the glove. She goes to a shelf and hands Juliette a towel, a folded blanket and a face-cloth.

10. SHOWERS.

JULIETTE under the shower, seen from behind. Her black hair falls down to her waist. The scene is cruelly lit and wholly unerotic. Inarticulate women’s voices shouting.

Close up: water, with dark streaks, running down the drain-hole.

Juliette under the shower, out of focus, behind the rain-like curtain of shower water. Loud sounds of gushing water…

11. PRISON CELL.

JULIETTE, and four slatternly prostitutes pretending not to be frightened. Camp-beds; slop-bucket. Tall windows with frosted glass and iron bars.

WHORE 1:…then he called me a filthy fucking bitch and buggered off without paying–and bugger me if he wasn’t back a week later with his friends!

WHORE 2,
nods in Juliette’s direction, as if to say, ‘Hush; she’s just a kid
.
’

WHORE 1: Bah! She’ll find out soon enough–if she hasn’t already…

WHORE 4,
inspecting Juliette
: Chubby little thing…

WHORE 3,
singsong voice
: Chubby little thing with a big fat nose.

WHORE 1: Huh! She’s not hiding much under all that hair…If they did to her what they did to me…

WHORE 4,
greedily
: So what
did
they do, then?

Raucous voices continue. Improvised jazz trumpet, intermittent throughout the following scenes, except the flashbacks.

Close up: Juliette bending over her blanket, which she holds on her lap. Big tears slither down her eyelashes. She begins to tease out loose threads from the hem of the blanket, and places them next to her on the bed.

12. CHILDHOOD HOME: PLUSH APARTMENT IN RUE DE SEINE NEAR SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS.

JULIETTE as a little girl: shorts and blouse, tights, plimsolls, pageboy haircut. Her mother and father are shouting at one another. M. GRÉCO (Corsican, 30 years older than his wife) hits Mme GRÉCO across the face. She screams, falls to the floor.

Little JULIETTE watches this in silence. She seems to be invisible to her parents.

Mme GRÉCO: Get out! Get out!

Sound of door slamming. Then more banging and echoing shouts, which turn out to be noises heard in the cell.

13. PRISON CELL.

Prostitutes lounging about, dozing or engaged in grooming.

JULIETTE drags her camp-bed to one of the windows, stands on the bed, cranes her neck and looks through a pane that has lost some of its frosting.

Lingering shot–blurry at the edges but clear in the centre–of a white GOAT tethered to a post in a scrubby field beyond the perimeter fence. The goat seems to raise its head once or twice towards the prison. (Film several minutes in daylight and again at dusk.) The goat appears to be munching quite happily. Eight seconds.

Cut to: Juliette’s blanket, in tatters. She ties the threads together and uses them in place of curl papers.

Close up: JULIETTE twisting the threads into her hair.

Tethered GOAT, munching. The light is fading.

JULIETTE lying on the bed, her hair in papers.

Black screen.

14. CHILDHOOD HOME, RUE DE SEINE.

The tall window of a drawing-room opens. Sounds of the city as heard from an inner courtyard; faint breathing. The camera pans across the windows opposite on the same floor, then looks down from the sixth floor to the courtyard far below.

JULIETTE as a little girl. She steps out onto the narrow ledge that runs all around the sixth floor. She places her feet in second position like a ballet dancer. Her eyelashes brush against the wall. She begins to move along the ledge.

The rest of the scene is through Juliette’s eyes: she looks through the neighbours’ windows, then the wall and downpipes appear as she passes on to the next window.

–A sparsely furnished room: a man and his wife staring at each other glumly across a table, eating.

–Wall.

–A soldier’s uniform hung on the back of a chair; the foot of an unmade bed with a woman’s clothes draped across it.

–Wall.

–A little boy holding a teddy bear, looking straight at the camera. He holds the bear out to the camera.

–Wall and drainpipes.

–A room full of packing crates and luggage.

–Juliette’s plimsolled feet and the courtyard below. Sound of breathing continues.

–A woman with a cat on her lap, under the photograph of a cat. She looks vacantly at the camera as though watching someone go past on the ground floor.