France’s punishment was mainly financial: Germany demanded huge, crippling reparations. The real humiliation was that France was forced to disarm. The proud French army was reduced to a few regiments and forbidden modern armaments such as tanks and airplanes. The Parisian police force was better equipped.
My companion glanced at his watch again. It was the type that the army had issued to its officers, I saw.
“Could you tell me the time?” I asked, over the drunken singing of the German tourists. My wife was late, and that was quite unlike her.
He paid no attention to me. Staring furiously at the Germans who surrounded us, he suddenly shot to his feet and shouted, “Men of France! How long shall we endure this humiliation?”
He was so tall and lean that he looked like a human Eiffel Tower standing among the crowded sidewalk tables. He had a pistol in his hand. One of the waiters was so surprised by his outburst that he dropped his tray. It clattered to the pavement with a crash of shattered glassware.
But others were not surprised, I saw. More than a dozen men leaped up and shouted, “Vive La France!” They were all dressed in old army uniforms, as was my companion, beneath his frayed leather coat. They were all armed, a few of them even had rifles.
Absolute silence reigned. The Germans stared, dumbfounded. The waiters froze in their tracks. I certainly didn’t know what to say or do. My only thought was of my beautiful wife; where was she, why was she late, was there some sort of insurrection going on? Was she safe?
“Follow me!” said the tall Frenchman to his armed compatriots. Despite every instinct in me, I struggled to my feet and went along with them.
From cafés on both sides of the wide boulevard, armed men were striding purposefully toward their leader. He marched straight ahead, right down the middle of the street, looking neither to the right nor left. They formed up behind him, some two or three dozen men.
Breathlessly, I followed along.
“To the Elysee!” shouted the tall one, striding determinedly on his long legs, never glancing back to see if the others were following him.
Then I saw my wife pushing through the curious onlookers thronging the sidewalks. I called to her, and she ran to me, blond and slim and more lovely than anyone in all of space-time.
“What is it?” she asked, as breathless as I. “What’s happening?”
“Some sort of coup, I think.”
“They have guns! We should get inside. If there’s shooting—”
“No, we’ll be all right,” I said. “I want to see what’s going to happen.”
It was a coup, all right. But it failed miserably.
Apparently the tall one, a fanatical ex-major named de Gaulle, believed that his little band of followers could capture the government. He depended on a certain General Pétain, who had the prestige and authority that de Gaulle himself lacked.
Pétain lost his nerve at the critical moment, however, and abandoned the coup. The police and a detachment of army troops were waiting for the rebels at the Petit Palace; a few shots were exchanged. Before the smoke had drifted away, the rebels had scattered, and de Gaulle himself was taken into custody.
“He will be charged with treason, I imagine,” I said to my darling wife as we sat that evening at the very same sidewalk café. The very same table, in fact.
“I doubt that they’ll give him more than a slap on the wrist,” she said. “He seems to be a hero to everyone in Paris.”
“Not to the Germans,” I said.
She smiled at me. “The Germans take him as a joke.” She understood German perfectly and could eavesdrop on their shouted conversations quite easily.
“He is no joke.”
We both turned to the dark little man sitting at the next table; we were packed in so close that his chair almost touched mine. He was a particularly ugly man, with lank black hair and the swarthy face of a born conspirator. His eyes were small, reptilian, and his upper lip was twisted by a curving star.
“Charles de Gaulle will be the savior of France,” he said. He was absolutely serious. Grim, even.
“If he’s not guillotined for treason,” I replied lightly. Yet inwardly, I began to tremble.
“You were here. You saw how he rallied the men of France.”
“All two dozen of them,” I quipped.
He looked at me with angry eyes. “Next time it will be different. We will not rely on cowards and turncoats like Pétain. Next time we will take the government and bring all of France under his leadership. Then . . .”
He hesitated, glancing around as if the police might be listening.
“Then?” my wife coaxed.
He lowered his voice. “Then revenge on Germany and all those who betrayed us.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“You’ll see. Next time we will win. Next time we will have all of France with us. And then all of Europe. And then, the world.”
My jaw must have dropped open. It was all going to happen anyway. The French would rearm. Led by a ruthless, fanatical de Gaulle, they would plunge Europe into a second world war. All my efforts were for nothing. The world that we had left would continue to exist—or be even worse.
He turned his reptilian eyes to my lovely wife. Although many of the German women were blond, she was far more beautiful than any of them.
“You are Aryan?” he asked, his tone suddenly menacing.
She was nonplussed. “Aryan? I don’t understand.”
“Yes, you do,” he said, almost hissing the words. “Next time it will go hard on the Aryans. You’ll see.”
I sank my head in my hands and wept openly.
Introduction to
“The Angel’s Gift”
Everybody from Goethe to the high school kid next door has written a story about a deal with the devil: you know, a tale in which a man sells his soul in exchange for worldly wealth and power. Sometimes the story ends happily, as in Stephen Vincent Benét’s “The Devil and Daniel
