Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

Stalin.
    Paris continued to be a cultural and literary Mecca for the rest of the world. The
patronnes
of cheap hotels in the
Quartier Latin
still grumbled and failed to prosper. Gabriel García Márquez, who had arranged for his employer, the Colombian newspaper
El Espectador,
to send him to Paris, moved into a maid’s attic room on the top floor of the Hotel de Flandre in the rue Cujas. There he lived off cold spaghetti, smoked three packets of Gauloises during the course of a working night, andsqueezed sideways against the radiator as he tried to summon up the tropical heat of Colombia’s Caribbean coast. The result was
La Mala Hora,
hammered out on an old typewriter. A photograph of his fiancée, Mercédes, back in Barranquilla pinned to the wall was the only decoration.
    He had no radio, or the money to buy newspapers, and his source of information on Castro’s revolt against Batista was the poet Nicolas Guillen, who used to yell the latest news from his window. The only luxury was a drink behind the steamed-up windows of La Chope Parisienne amid silent chess players. On Christmas Night 1957, he saw snow for the first time in his life. He ran out and danced wildly among the large soft flakes.
    Madame Lacroix, the
patronne
of the Flandre, was indeed tolerant. Not only did she allow García Mÿrquez credit for a whole year, she permitted the then unknown Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa to stay for two years without paying. At one point García Märquez was reduced to begging in the streets when
El Espectador
went bankrupt. But one day he was encouraged by a curious incident. On the Boulevard Saint-Michel he spotted Hemingway, still his literary idol, across the street. Without thinking, he called out his name: ‘
Emming-way!
’ Ernest Hemingway did not look round, he just raised his hand. Yet the optimistic young South American sensed this gesture as a benediction.
    Coincidentally, a new wave of writers from the United States had reached the Latin Quarter at the same time. Several members of the Beat generation, including William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, established themselves in what became known as the Beat Hotel at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur. Their ambition was to meet Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose novel
Voyage au bout de la nuit
had excited and influenced them. Ginsberg and Burroughs, having arranged an introduction through his editor, went to pay a call on him in the run-down suburb of Meudon. It was to be a visit of homage rather than a literary discussion.
    Since his return from Denmark, Céline had not had many visitors, except Arletty, who had corresponded with him during his exile and had remained a faithful friend. She understood his
cafards
; besides, the two had more in common than their origins in Courbevoie. Arletty made a recording of his
Death on the Instalment Plan
and he wrote a scenario for her called
Arletty, jeune fille dauphinoise,
a sort of picaresque adventure inthe eighteenth-century manner, rather reminiscent of
Candide
. But Céline did not have long to live: he died on 1 July 1961, the same day as Hemingway.
    France’s tortuous relationship with the United States was not improved in 1954, when the unwinnable war in Indo-China ended in ignominious defeat at Dien Bien Phu. French dominion over North Africa was also doomed. A fatal combination of bigotry, weakness, wilful shortsightedness, political inconsistency and bad faith was leading to a series of humiliations which together were tantamount to the defeat of 1940. Once again, de Gaulle appeared as the only candidate able to rescue France from the consequences of national pride and then proceed to rebuild it.
    The bitter turmoil in Algiers allowed him to return to power in the virtually unopposed
coup d’état
of May 1958. Colonel Passy immediately flew to his old wartime haunt of London as the General’s envoy to the intelligence community. Passy arranged a discreet lunch with the former SIS chief of station in Paris, who was now in charge of the European department. He chose the Savoy, where, to remind himself of the gastronomic curiosities of London, he ordered kippers and a bottle of Bass beer. The purpose of his visit, however, was to ask his old colleagues to spread the message that de Gaulle had come to power only to solve the Algerian crisis. He had absolutely no intention of staying on.
    The General, however, had every intention of staying on. His return allowed him to end the Fourth Republic, which he had despised