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Coupole, and the boarded-up Rotonde. “Across the gay glass fronts of another day, chairs and tables were heaped up in earthquake disorder. Down the way, at the Gare Montparnasse, Nazis in field-green were surrendering in terror or glum despair. It was strange, stranger than all fiction, to encounter at that moment, in the July twilight, scenes of a dead past.”
    Hemingway bypassed Montparnasse and came straight to Odéon. He hoped to salvage something of the Paris he had known before he left for the United States, Cuba, and fame. As Beach tells it,
         A string of jeeps came up the street and stopped in front of my house. I heard a deep voice calling “Sylvia!” And everybody in the street took up the cry of “Sylvia!” “It’s Hemingway! It’s Hemingway!” cried Adrienne. I flew downstairs; we met with a crash, he picked me up and swung me around and kissed me while people in the street and in the windows cheered. He was in battle dress, grimy and bloody. A machine gun clanked on the floor. He asked Adrienne for a piece of soap, and she gave him her last cake.
    Stirring stuff—but, alas, mostly invented. When I first moved to rue de l’Odéon, our octogenarian ground-floor neighbor, Madeleine Dechaux, still recalled that day, but not the way Beach describes it. A young woman in 1944, she watched the new arrivals from her first-floor window. Hemingway didn’t shout for Sylvia. Instead—sensibly—he called up to Madeleine, asking if there were any Germans on the roof. She told him they had all fled, and by the time she walked through her apartment and out onto the stairs, the travel-stained group of mostly teenaged cameramen and journalists were crowding the lobby.
    In Madame Dechaux’s memory, Hemingway didn’t race up the stairs. Instead, Adrienne descended to greet him while someone went to fetch Sylvia from where she was then living. She and Monnier hadn’t shared the Odéon apartment since 1937, when Adrienne began an affair with the young photographer Gisele Freund. Monnier urged Hemingway to wait there for Beach. Instead, he drew her aside, by the big green-painted radiator that still today feeds heat up the stairwell.
    “Just tell me one thing,” Madeleine Dechaux heard him murmur. “Sylvia didn’t collaborate, did she?”
    It was a revealing moment. Beneath all his bluster, the unsure adolescent in Hemingway continued to fret about what “the very few” might think.

Chapter 9
The Boulevardier
    In all classes of society, one finds plenty of people who, full of mad presumption or in a deplorable abuse of the French language, call themselves “flaneurs” without understanding the first elements of that art which we do not hesitate to place next to music, the dance, and even mathematics.
    LOUIS HUART, “Physiologie du Flaneur,” 1841
    I n the 1860s, Emperor Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was terrified of revolution. France had survived a century of internal strife, but if one could judge from the experience of other countries, more was imminent. As it happened, revolution never did come. Two world wars would protect France from civil unrest until the student-led disturbances of 1968, still referred to with some embarrassment as les événements— the events. But Napoleon’s generals couldn’t know that. Narrow streets and crowded tenements lent themselves to house-to-house warfare. They pestered him for broad avenues joining all the institutions of government—routes down which infantry, cavalry, and even artillery could be moved at the first murmur of trouble.
    Napoleon ordered Paris rebuilt. The job went to Georges Eugene Haussmann—“Baron” Haussmann, as he liked to be styled, though he was no nobleman—who did nothing by halves. He drove his boulevards through the festering alleys and created fantasies like the Etoile—the star—where twelve of them crash together in a carousel. From its heart erupts the Arc de Triomphe, a stone colossus shouldering out of the