High life

22 November 2008

Love story

Arletty did not fare as well. After the war, that is. When the arresting gendarme asked her how she was, she answered, ‘Pas très resistante.’ She was put in La Conciergerie, where Queen Marie-Antoinette spent her last miserable years, and was interrogated for hours on end 11 nights running. She was then sent to an internment camp and after that to a residence for bad women. She was forbidden to act. But by Christmas 1946 she managed to rejoin her lover in Munich, where she was photographed riding and impeccably dressed with her handsome German pilot. All’s well that ends well, but in this case it didn’t.

I always thought the French acted disgracefully going after women who had slept with German officers. Love and passion — and certainly hunger — do not recognise uniforms. Arletty, the star of such beautiful films such as Les Enfants du paradis, Hôtel du Nord, Fric-frac and La Fleur de l’âge, was truly in love, and who the hell were those who dared to judge her after the war? In 1949, the lovers met for the last time in Paris. The intuitive Arletty smelt that her handsome German was playing hooky. She was right. He married, had children and died in front of them while swimming in a river far away from Europe and civilisation. Arletty took it very badly. She outlived her lover by 32 years, dying aged 94 in the year 1992. She was blind.

No one has yet made a film of this wartime romance, and the reasons for this are obvious. The French re-invented history following the Allied victory over a Germany that had to put up with the additional handicap of being allied to the Italians. The fact that Guderian and Rommel made patsies out of the Ligne Maginot and the BEF still stings. My friend Andrew Roberts might write non-stop about how great the Brits were, but there are those of us who know who would have won if America, the Soviets, Poland, South Africa, Rhodesia, Holland, Greece, even tiny Belgium and the Free French had not united against Hitler. The German army, especially the Prussian officer corps, has never been matched, perhaps only by the Japanese Imperial Army. To say this today is not very smart, but then it wasn’t very smart for Arletty to flaunt her lover all around Paris either. I think the French government should posthumously apologise to Arletty, just as the present German government should apologise to us for having become such wimps.

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Ronald Guy

November 21st, 2008 12:25pm Report this comment

Would somebody fix that screw that's gone loose in this man's head.

James Jackson

November 21st, 2008 3:18pm Report this comment

Yawn - please release Taki

Susan Grave

November 21st, 2008 4:08pm Report this comment

Gee whiz! I really loved this story. Thanks very much.

ex-Rhodesian now living on the east coast of South Africa.

GK

November 26th, 2008 4:54pm Report this comment

You found the right people to
tell this story. They are very
compassionate.

Luther B. Miller, Jr.

January 2nd, 2009 11:42pm Report this comment

You wrote "The German army, especially the Prussian officer corps, has never been matched, perhaps only by the Japanese Imperial Army." Perhaps you never heard of the United States Marine Corps. The Germans knew the Marines from WW I - and called them Teufel Hunden. The Japs heard of them at Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and a few other places. The Marines won, the Japs were almost exterminated.

Rogerscorpion

June 13th, 2010 11:38am Report this comment

I'd wager you're an American, Luther. I'm a native Texan & recognize the tone.
The author did miscommunicate, leaving out the Marines, but his point was really about the Brits not being 'all that' @ the time.
I'm intrigued, Luther. You refer to the German soldiers as Germans (not Jerries), but you call the Japanese 'Japs'. The Germans, Naziism aside, were @ least white people, after all---right?

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