The Monuments Men (20 page)

Standing now before the empty wall of
La Joconde
, Rorimer remembered Jaujard’s opinion of Reichsmarschall Göring: rapacious, insatiable, a man of appetites. A man who brooked no opposition and possessed no moral or ethical boundaries in pursuit of personal power and wealth. The man who could look on the cultural treasures of a nation like France and see nothing but plunder, ripe for the taking.

“James!” The word, echoing off the empty walls of the Grande Galerie, startled Rorimer from his thoughts. He turned from the alcove that had once held the
Mona Lisa
to see, coming toward him, none other than Jacques Jaujard, the guardian of the Louvre. Rorimer had known Jaujard before the war. He was always surprised to see how good the French patriarch looked after all those treacherous years.

“So glad you received my call,” Jaujard said, clamping the Monuments Man on the shoulder.

“Good to see you again, Jacques,” Rorimer said, taking the older man’s hand. “And I have good news this time. The paperwork is straightened out. The tapestry is yours. At least for a few weeks.”

“Bureaucrats.” Jaujard laughed, turning and motioning down the hallway toward his office.
The man hasn’t lost a step
, Rorimer thought. Jaujard not only had an office in the Louvre, but his apartment was inside the museum too. Rorimer wondered if he had left the building even once during the entire four years of the German occupation.

Or the month since liberation. In the first fevered days of emancipation, a mob had descended on the German prisoners being held in a camp outside the Louvre. Convinced they were about to be lynched, the Germans had broken the windows of the Louvre and leapt inside. A search found them scattered amid the artwork not evacuated, including several hiding in the pink granite funereal vase of the ancient Egyptian emperor Ramses III. The mob also found a curator helping a wounded German to the infirmary; all the proof it needed to condemn the whole staff as traitors and collaborators. How else to explain their survival, and that of the artwork they protected? No other institution had been so successful.

Jaujard and his loyal retainers—including his secretary, Jacqueline Bouchot-Saupique, who had been a primary conduit for reports to the Resistance at risk of her own life—were marched to the town hall while the mob yelled, “Collaborators! Traitors! Put them to death!”
12
There had been a very real chance they would be shot before reaching the government building. Only the timely testimony of several of Jaujard’s contacts, including members of the French Resistance, had narrowly saved their hides.

Now, finally safe, he took no vacation. Instead, he was working endless hours to organize an art exhibition to lift the spirits of the wounded city. The centerpiece was the Bayeux Tapestry. Just more than a foot and a half high by 224 feet long and dating to the 1070s, the tapestry was without equal as a surviving relic of the early medieval period. There was no precedent: The lettering was unique, the figures more dynamic than any depicted before or for a hundred years thereafter. The unknown artist, whoever he or she was, had created no other surviving works. The Bayeux Tapestry, treated as a minor church relic for six hundred years and only rediscovered by the world in the 1700s, was a keystone in the cultural history of France.

It was also an important historical document, a nearly contemporaneous account of the French nobleman William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066. Stitched with narrative passages and depicting more than fifteen hundred objects—people, animals, clothing, arms, military formations, churches, towers, cities, banners, tools, carts, reliquaries, and funeral biers—it was by far the most detailed extant description of life in the early medieval period. With its focus on politics and military campaigns, culminating with the death of the Anglo-Saxon king Harold II in the battle of Hastings in 1066, it was also one of history’s great depictions of conquest and empire. As such, it had long been coveted by the Nazis, and particularly the rapacious Reichsmarschall Göring, who had a special fondness for tapestries.

In 1940, fearful of its safety, the French moved the tapestry from Bayeux, one of the major cities in Normandy (William the Conqueror was a Norman duke), to the Louvre repository at Sourches. After their conquest of France, the Nazis made its possession a top priority, offering a steady barrage of monetary and artistic exchanges. Jaujard, as always, delayed and obfuscated. Then on June 27, 1944, with the Allies securely on the Normandy beaches and the tapestry on the verge of slipping out of their grasp, the Nazis transported it to the Louvre under German military escort. On August 15, with Paris on the edge of rebellion, the German military governor in France, General Dietrich von Choltitz, arrived at the Louvre to confirm the presence of the tapestry. After seeing it with Jaujard, he dutifully reported its location to Berlin.

On August 21, two SS officers arrived from the Reichschancellery to transport the tapestry to the Fatherland. General von Choltitz took them to his balcony and pointed to the roof of the Louvre. It was bristling with Resistance fighters; a machine gun was firing a burst of shots toward the Seine.

“The tapestry is over there,” von Choltitz told the SS men, “in the basement of the Louvre.”

“But Herr General, the enemy is occupying the Louvre!”

“Of course it is occupied, and rather well. The Louvre is now the headquarters of the Prefecture, sheltering the leaders of the Resistance.”

“But under such conditions, Herr General, how can we get ahold of the tapestry?”

“Gentlemen,” General von Choltitz replied, “you are the leaders of the best soldiers in the world. I will give you five or six of my own men; we will cover your back with sustained barrage fire to protect you while you cross the rue de Rivoli. All you need do is force open a door to fight your way to the tapestry.”
13

When the liberators arrived in Paris a few days later, on August 25, 1944, the Bayeux Tapestry was still safely ensconced in the Louvre sub-basement in its lead traveling box.

“What about the approval from Bayeux?” Jaujard asked Rorimer over his shoulder. The tapestry was the pride of Normandy, and though it was still in the Louvre basement, gaining approval for public display had been a bureaucratic nightmare. Rorimer had cut through red tape in the American military and French government, but there was still the matter of officials in Bayeux, who usually did not allow the tapestry to be displayed outside the city.

“A young government official is off to ask permission. On a bicycle, if you can believe it. It’s a 165-mile trip.”

“At least there are some dedicated public servants left,” Jaujard said, but not bitterly. Dealing with the overworked government was a fact of life in newly liberated France. “Speaking of which,” he said, entering the reception areas of his office, “I’d like you to meet Mademoiselle Rose Valland.”

“A pleasure,” Rorimer said as the woman stood to greet them. She was generously proportioned, not heavy but solidly built, and at five foot five taller than many of her female contemporaries. She was not particularly attractive, Rorimer couldn’t help but notice, a fact not helped by her drab, unfashionable outfit. Her hair was in a bun, like a kindly aunt, but her mouth was drawn. Matronly. That was the word that came to mind. And yet there was unexpected determination in her sharp brown eyes as she stared down the American Monuments Man, something that couldn’t be missed, even behind her delicate wire-rimmed glasses.

“James Rorimer, from the Metropolitan,” Rorimer said, extending his hand. “And the United States Army.”

“I know who you are, Monsieur Rorimer,” Valland said. “I am glad I have the chance to thank you for the special attention you paid the Jeu de Paume. It is unusual for an American to be so sensitive to the concerns of the French.”

He realized suddenly that he had met her before, at the small Louvre outpost known as the Jeu de Paume, located at a far corner of the Jardin des Tuileries. The building had been constructed by Napoléon III for an indoor tennis court—or
jeu de paume
, as the sport was then known—but had been converted into an exhibition space for foreign contemporary art. The U.S. Army had planned to use the building as a post office; Rorimer had successfully argued, in tense meetings over a series of days, that it was part of the Louvre and therefore protected.

“Mademoiselle Valland has been managing the museum,” Jaujard explained. “She stayed on as a servant of the French government, at my urging, during the Nazi occupation.”

“No doubt a bitter duty,” Rorimer said. He thought of the descriptions of the occupation he had heard so often since his arrival in Paris: no meat; no coffee; no heating oil; hardly a cigarette to be found. Desperate people tearing chestnuts from the trees in the public squares to keep from starving, then leaves and branches to fuel their furnaces. Women forced to stitch new handbags out of four or five old ones. Wooden soles carved into high heels. A paste that made it seem you were wearing silk stockings, since the stockings themselves were unavailable. Some women even traced a dark line down the back of their legs to imitate a seam, then complained about the leers and advances of the German troops. “Why couldn’t they just go to Montmartre?” one woman had scoffed over a black-market dinner, now available to those with money and connections. Because of the nightly blackouts and frequent electrical outages, the bawdy theaters of the red-light district had taken off their roofs and let the sun shine in. The prostitutes had done a brisk business, but Rorimer suspected even they had their complaints about the Germans.

But not Rose Valland. She simply smiled and said, “We all had our jobs to do.”

She must have simply been dropping off paperwork, because a minute later she was excusing herself to return to the Jeu de Paume. Rorimer, watching her disappear down the hall, had only one clear thought: Rose Valland had never drawn a dark line down the back of her legs to imitate silk stockings. She was clearly not that kind of woman. But otherwise, he found her completely inscrutable. So he put her out of his mind.

“She’s a hero, James,” Jaujard said, preparing to turn back to the tapestry and other matters at hand.

“You all are, Jacques,” Rorimer replied. “I won’t forget.”

Letter from James Rorimer

To special friends, including his family and his patron at the Cloisters, John D. Rockefeller Jr.

September 25, 1944

Dear Ones:

One month ago today I arrived in Paris. I suppose that by now it is old news that that was the day that the Americans arrived here. Our section came here at the same time as the combat troops. Shortly after the Germans had surrendered in their last stronghold we were working our way in and out of barricaded streets and going to the agreed meeting place. The Germans were still spending their last night in the Senate buildings and fire had just been set to the Chamber of Deputies. We slept in beds in a hotel where the Germans had been less than twenty-four hours previously. The following day I paid my respects to M. Jaujard, Director of National Museums, at the Louvre and began thinking of the work I would have in Paris as the G-5 Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Officer for Seine Section which includes Seine-et-Marne and Seine-et-Oise as it did with the Germans.

As one of the first officers to arrive in Paris I came to know the authorities—perhaps it is still too early to mention names even if they do appear in the local newspapers—and I was commanded to do special work not in any way related to Fine Arts. After helping establish our headquarters I was asked to take charge of the information section, and ran the Information Desk for eight days rather than for the forty-eight hours originally anticipated. I met everyone in Paris who had to do with the Franco-American relations. There were many generals, officers of all kinds, hotel people and business representatives of every sort and description, old friends, civil authorities and national ones, locksmiths, bomb disposal squads and intelligence people…. I gave orders and saw that they were carried out. I snapped the whip at a point where military necessity demanded that I leave Fine Arts alone and sort out the French from the Germans, the true from the false, the weak from the strong and the lazy from the willing. There were hundreds of taxi drivers to be employed and interpreters galore. Often I had a queue of fifty or more and I would stand up at my centrally located desk and help grease the wheel of progress. Yes, I really helped in winning the war during those hectic, exciting, unbelievable days.…

Here I am in the greatest art center in the world. There are the museums, the libraries, the archives, the chateaux, the public buildings of all kinds and descriptions which come under my scrutiny. Help is to be given and our directives are to be carried out by decisions which must be clear and have no reverberations. So far they have not and I have urged action that would make your hair stand on end. When the war is over I shall be able to tell many exciting adventures where a second lieutenant dared stand his ground. If I am relieved of my present position it will not be said that I didn’t try to do all I could to save the treasures which the ages have produced…. I am determined to do my job—sometimes I wonder if it isn’t all just another pipe dream like The Cloisters. Those good old days of activity and accomplishment seem to be here again after long months of teaching motor maintenance and languages.…

There are so many other things to write about. The suffering through the years of the French, one and all, except for a very few who profited handsomely by the occupation—one doesn’t see these people at all—is not forgotten, but the joys of a freedom not known is exciting to all…. The Lord knows what actually happened. It wasn’t pretty, I can assure you.