Detours: Janet Flanner
"If I've omitted any of your lovers, pray excuse me, Madame," the Judge said ironically at her trial. "The list is already so long."
Janet Flanner, an American writer and journalist, was the Paris correspondent for The New Yorker in the years before and after World War II. Paris Was Yesterday, 1925 - 1939, is a collection of her articles.
On a hot day in the summer of 1980, I sat in an apartment with cinderblock walls, my sprained ankle propped up on a pillow. With nothing else to do, I became completely absorbed in Paris Was Yesterday. The one window air conditioning unit wheezed and gasped. I was close to the end of my marriage. During that difficult time, Janet Flanner was my witty companion.
From Paris Was Yesterday:1
Wall Street Crash
The Wall Street crash has had its effect here. In the Rue de la Paix the jewelers are reported to be losing fortunes in sudden cancellations of orders, and at the Ritz bar the pretty ladies are having to pay for their cocktails themselves. In the Quartier de l'Europe, little firms that live exclusively on the American trade have not sold one faked Chanel copy in a fortnight.... Generally, the French people's sympathy in our disaster has been polite and astonishingly sincere, considering that for the past ten years they have seen us through of one the worst phases of our prosperity - which consisted of thousands of our tourists informing them that we were the richest country in the world, that they should pay their debts, that we had made the world safe for democracy, that we were the most generous people in the world, that they should pay their debts, and that we were the richest country in the world.
Sido
French literature is peculiarly devoid of nature - indeed, there is hardly a tree in the whole lot of it; and to the French, despite their instinct to appreciate him, Hardy reads rather like pages from a seed catalogue... Colette is the first dendrophile they have possessed, the first writer to give them news of nature; she has the strangeness of a traveler who tells of an unknown land.
Murder Among the Lovebirds
[Germain d'Anglemont] had been noted - pretty and shabby - in the then famous Jardin de Paris Café... she said she had run away from home penniless and had got into the café by pawning her umbrella for three francs with the vestiaire. The gentlemen handed her five hundred francs (one hundred dollars in those lovely days) to get some decent clothes, three francs to get her umbrella, and invited her to dine. Her second lover, according to the list the Paris judge indelicately read out at her murder trial thirty-four years later, was a Dutch millionaire named van Hoorschoot; the third was an Argentine tutor the Dutchman had hired to complete the girl's education - though she seemed to know a great deal already; the fourth love was the Prince Franz Josef of the royal house of Bavaria, who died of a broken heart because she wouldn't marry him...
The mass of Parliamentarians she also enmeshed finally dwindled down, in her forties, to the late-lamented Chief Magistrate Causeret, young, promising politician, fickle, married, father of children - and what was worse, son of the pious Rector Causeret of Clermont University.
"If I've omitted any of your lovers, pray excuse me, Madame," the Judge said ironically at her trial. "The list is already so long. You were a courtisane de haut vol - a highflier; you are also, alas, a good shot." It was her custom to practice in the shooting gallery... she kept two pistols in her boudoir alongside the statue of Sainte Thérèse - all three useful as weapons to a woman in a jealous rage. For it was for jealousy that she murdered Causeret. She had him followed through the streets of Paris by a ...female detective (a masseuse, when spying was scarce), who reported that he had gone to a department store to buy suspicious silk pajamas, instead of going, as he had announced, to talk politics with an old gentleman.
At noon, five minutes after Causeret had returned to her smart Place Beauvais flat to lunch, there was still nothing to eat on the dining-room table, but there was a corpse with only a bullet in its stomach in the boudoir. As Germaine later admitted to the jury, she had been a little hasty - the handsomest apology a murderess ever made.
War in Our Time (Declared on September 3)
The special nature of this war demanded as a primary condition a victim state. Last September, the sacrifice state was to have been Czechoslovakia. This September, the martyr was Poland. The ultimate result would have been the same no matter what the date or the name of the country. Instead of for the theoretical liberty and salvation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, the Allies have gone to war in 1939 for a Poland already in ruins, and so distant that France and England could not fire a shot in Warsaw's defense. The cannons now occasionally rumbling on the Western Front are too far off for the Poles ever to hear the avenging sound. It is these geographic elements, as well as the time now being taken by diplomats traveling like drummers back and forth between Moscow and Berlin to haggle over last-minute concessions, threats, and dickerings, which make this seem an unnatural war. As a matter of fact, it is really a commonplace war, since it is simply a fight for liberty. It is only because of its potential size that it may, alas, prove to be civilization's ruin.
https://www.virago.co.uk/titles/janet-flanner/paris-was-yesterday/9781844080267/