The War Begins in Paris

by Theodore Wheeler

Genres: World War II; Noir; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

From the author of Kings of Broken Things and In Our Other Lives comes a provocative and stylish literary noir about two female war correspondents whose fates intertwine in Europe.

Paris, 1938. Two women meet: Mielle, a shy pacifist and shunned Mennonite who struggles to fit in with the elite cohort of foreign correspondents stationed around the city; the other, Jane, a brash, legendary American journalist, who is soon to become a fascist propagandist. When World War II makes landfall in the City of Lights, Mielle falls under Jane’s spell, growing ever more intoxicated by her glamour, self-possession, and reckless confidence. But as this recklessness devolves into militarism and an utter lack of humanity, Mielle is seized by a series of visions that show her an inescapable truth: Jane Anderson must die, and Mielle must be the one to kill her.

Structured as a series of dispatches filed from around Europe and based on the misadventures of a real journalist-turned-Nazi mouthpiece, The War Begins in Paris is a cat-and-mouse suspense that examines the relentlessness of propaganda, the allure of power, and how far one woman will go for the sake of her morality.

“Propulsive, immersive, and beautifully rendered, Theodore Wheeler…deftly illuminates themes of friendship, love, sacrifice, and heroism, and shows us how loyalty and conviction can move in unpredictable patterns under wartime duress. This is a major gut-punch of a novel, and I, for one, am thankful it exists.” —James Han Mattson, author of Reprieve

Release date: November 14, 2023

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 304

Sample

One was famous for her audacity, her beauty, her appetite for headlines. The things that made people love her were the same things that made people hate her.

The other woman, nobody ever noticed her.

They met in Paris in 1938, working as foreign correspondents. Jane Anderson spent most of that year on a speaking tour to rally support for the nationalist side of the Spanish Civil War. She had a way of putting herself at the center of a story, so it was no surprise that she was one of many journalists who took up a cause célèbre. Hemingway and Dos Passos and Gellhorn advocated for the elected republic: the socialists, the peasant soldiers who fought with birding guns and conspired to blow up bridges. Jane, on the other hand, sided with Franco and the clerical Fascists. She was a strict Catholic (ardent, anyway; Jane was strict about nothing) and she took it personal how the Republicans burned cathedrals and wanted to nationalize all the lucre owned by the Church. Jane loved the Church. All its pompous glory. The glittering robes and golden crosses and the little chime a burning censer made swinging from its chain with incense smoke trailing behind. Much the same as she loved the pomposity of Fascists and their claims to empire. That kind of ambition was addictive to some—aspiring to rule the world as the Romans did, as Charlemagne did, to make themselves a link in the chain of history. Not to say the Church and the Fascistas were the same thing, but in Spain that decade, in Jane’s heart, they were close enough.

But there was more to her than her politics. Some facts about Jane Anderson, largely undisputed:

She was born in Atlanta in 1888. This made her fifty when she met the other woman, though Jane always claimed to be younger than she was. Thirty-six, at the most. Her mother came from a good family. Luckie Street in Atlanta is named for her grandfather. She was given his first name, Foster, though she took on Jane as an alias when she attended Piedmont College, and by the end of her life she responded only if addressed as Doña Juana. Her childhood was split between Georgia and Arizona, where her father was a lawman and a confidant of the showman Buffalo Bill Cody. (Jane knew him as Uncle Buffalo.) She was five foot nine, with deep-set green eyes and tawny-red hair she wore long, curled at the bottom. She was partial to chichi hats, dangling peacock feathers, pert silk bows, long jackets with epaulets on the shoulders. At one point she laid claim to being the most beautiful woman in the world. In those days she seduced Joseph Conrad (a national hero in Britain) and made a ludicrous bid to usurp his fortune. Her only defect, it was said, was her nose. Her nose was broad, the nostrils too prominent, and it made her look common to those who knew what a nose should look like. A phrenologist claimed, because of the shape of her nose, that she was prone to sociopathy; that she was a born liar; that it would be a crime if she ever reproduced. She never did.

Jane reported for the Daily Mail from both Allied and German trenches during the First War as the personal protégée of publisher Lord Northcliffe. She began carrying a Red Cross uniform to pose as a nurse to sneak in where journalists weren’t supposed to go, then kept up the habit her entire life. After the war, she was an alcoholic, a failed actress. Her star fell. It became known that her life was a complete mess, as she wrote about her exploits in the news, in three novels. She stalked H. G. Wells. She hatched a scheme to assassinate Lenin. She accepted marriage proposals from at least two dozen men but was married only twice: once to a famous composer and once to a Spanish count who finagled a royal wedding at the Gothic cathedral in Seville as a bridal gift. Despite the honest commissions she made as a correspondent and that she was typically surrounded by rich men, she was almost always broke. She spent her whole life chasing money, as people do when they grow up teased with affluence that isn’t really theirs.

Jane Anderson was one of the most baffling, provocative women of her generation, and she knew it. Most people struggled to resist her field of gravity.

The other woman (the one who had a talent for going unnoticed) was only twenty-four when the Second War started. She had been in Paris less than a year when she met Jane. This was her first time more than fifty miles away from the Mennonite assembly in Iowa where she was born. It was a remarkable thing to make a jump like that, though by all appearances she was an unremarkable woman.

As a girl, she was raised to value simplicity, sobriety, pacifism, and patriarchy. She and her siblings were educated at a public country school with children from neighboring farms, and she made regular trips to the town library to read its clothbound editions of German poetry and the collected works of Friedrich Schiller, which instilled in her an appreciation for personal freedom. At home she spoke a dialect of Pennsylvania Dutch. She was also fluent in Iowa-inflected English and could speak German with a low accent. She was a dour child. That was a strange trait for children in her assembly, where kids were typically mischievous and genial and overcome by boisterous laughter at any provocation. When she left home at age sixteen, the librarian in Kalona arranged for her to attend Coe College in Cedar Rapids. Once she left, according to the law of her commune, she could never return. She belonged to the rest of the world thereafter, if it would have her.

This young woman was tall and had dark hair, a square jaw, long, swinging arms. She moved like a stork stuck in mud because her legs had suffered severe nerve damage when she fell from an oak tree as a child. The muscles of her calves could not untense. In college, she spent most of her free time reading magazines in the school library, which was her way of learning about the world that existed outside Mennonite farms. She discovered a few women journalists who reported on war and politics. In back issues, she read firsthand accounts by Rebecca West and Jane Anderson. (Yes, Jane.) Saw Jane’s stories about life and death in the trenches of Flanders. These were women who made their own way in the world (whose intelligence and appetites apparently weren’t held against them). She wondered if Rebecca or Jane had ever been promised in marriage to a fifty-year-old bachelor farmer named Yoder. She was certain they had not.

Once she arrived in Paris, in the spring of 1938, she took a furnished room in a hotel in Montmartre. This woman could read and understand French but was hopeless when it came to speaking. Iowa was too heavy on her tongue. She wore tan shirts and slacks and a long canvas jacket that resembled a butcher’s smock. She wandered the city alone at night. She was tall and glum and limped. Nobody bothered her. Nobody talked to her at all until she discovered the community of war journalists and bohemian poets and trust-fund novelists who then lived in Paris. They were everywhere, once she learned how to spot them.

Really, the story is about this woman. Her real name was Marthe Hess, but they all called her Mielle. Jane gave her that name.

She and Jane would meet in Paris. Jane would be a corrupting influence, as was her custom. They would spend every evening together for a torrid month to waylay the cabarets of Montmartre and observe a flash of violence during the November Pogrom firsthand, then Jane would vanish from Mielle’s life just as quickly as she appeared.

Mielle would feel so lit up inside to have a wild friend like Jane Anderson. How unexpected it was that someone like herself, with her limp and her simple country manners, could be an intimate of someone like Jane. Someone like this young woman, who was raised on a religious commune to be the exact opposite of women like Jane.

How strange, then, how fitting, that Mielle would be plagued by visions and would one day cross the border into Germany with the intention of killing her friend Jane.

But that’s not where the story starts.

(William L. Shirer)

As reported on September 24, 1938

There was some confusion among us all at Godesberg this morning… but tonight, as seen from Berlin, the position is this: Hitler has demanded that Czechoslovakia not later than Saturday, October 1, agree to the handing over of Sudetenland to Germany. Mr. Chamberlain has agreed to convey this demand to the Czechoslovak Government. The very fact that he, with all the authority of a man who is political leader of the British Empire, has taken upon himself this task is accepted here, and I believe elsewhere, as meaning that Mr. Chamberlain backs Hitler up.

That’s why the German people I talked with in the streets of Cologne this morning, and in Berlin this evening, believe there’ll be peace. As a matter of fact, what do you think the new slogan in Berlin is tonight? It’s in the evening papers. It’s this: “With Hitler and Chamberlain for peace.”

What she would remember most was waiting in the cafés early in the morning. Before sunrise with the light sluggish behind the terra-cotta facades, that sensuous curve of sandstone from the lips and hips of art deco that were lined up in rows of gray like the wool jumpers the schoolgirls wore that season, with just an occasional gabardine pink or lavender. Mielle never stayed in a hotel that was garish enough to be painted in bright colors, the same as she never, as a girl, wore a coat that was anything but black. Only white blouses and bonnets, black coats. Even those days in Paris, two years before the invasion, she dressed plain. Photographs from this time show her in a black canvas jacket cut past her waist, with tan trousers in wool, and a pair of unlaced men’s brogans on her feet. A handsome young woman with a worried face, dressed in men’s work clothes. She would be pretty now, what we consider pretty, in an androgynous way. But from the desperate look in her eyes in photographs, you can tell she was used to being ignored.

She lived downhill from Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre and caught the first morning train at Abbesses Station. She always left early, even on a Saturday, like this one, with the shops closed behind their gates as she limped to the station. Her dark hair was combed straight back with a perfumed oil she bought at the Ornano flea market. It smelled of rosemary and thyme and, vaguely, camphor. Her jacket, also bought at the flea market, reminded her of the smock her father wore when he butchered animals. It had a pronounced collar that flopped with the stiff way she walked. She could move smooth only with great concentration; without it, she devolved to a halting gait. Her hotel was halfway up the hill on rue Gabrielle. Most of the time, when she returned home, she zagged up narrow side streets to avoid the steepest inclines. It was impossible to avoid the hill altogether.

There was a certain pride Mielle felt, being up first. Sliding into a subterranean coach that was empty except for a flower woman with white hair pinned to her temples or a broom salesman with big ears, his pack of sticks and bristles blocking the aisle. All of them with jacket collars over the backs of their necks. That contentedness showed in her face when she climbed from her stop in the Latin Quarter, hair falling in her eyes, with the Dôme still lit green from sodium lights embedded in the ground. The first peach blush of dawn was on the horizon.

She felt, deep inside her, that something special was going to happen that day. It was her twenty-fourth birthday.

Her whole life, she had visions that made her worry it was the devil inside her and not God. When she was a girl, her visions scared her so much, they were so grisly, so vivid, that she couldn’t describe what she saw to anyone. She saw over and over, when she was sixteen, that a stranger would come live on her family’s farm, and, because of what this stranger would do to her, she would be forced to leave the collective forever. Bad things had happened to her in Iowa—things she didn’t ever talk about, that had spoiled what her life was supposed to become. She learned the hard way to believe her visions, because they always came true. The same would happen this time, during the war.

But what she felt that morning in the Latin Quarter wasn’t her second sight, which always left her with a stabbing pain behind her eyes. This was just a feeling, just a hope, that her life could be extraordinary because of who she was inside. This sort of thing is easy to understand. She was young.

Mielle was the first to arrive at Café Capoulade. The terrace hadn’t yet been watered off and was still dusted with ashes from the all-night smokers who had leaned forward in wicker chairs to argue until closing time. Inside, it smelled of spilled wine, but the bread was being delivered and that smelled better. The cook wiped sleep from his eyes and lit the gas burners. The waiters polished the dishes and preened one another’s costumes. And in the corner, smiling to herself, Mielle was getting settled. She pulled a small notebook and a pencil from inside her jacket, then ordered a soft-boiled egg and a café au lait, three sugars, and a basket with half a baguette and strawberry jam. Mielle didn’t have to order the bread and jam, as that came complimentary, but she worried the waiter would forget. She was very hungry.

She drank two cups of coffee, slowly, and watched how the sun rose lazily, then all at once. The density of the light appeared to lessen by the minute outside the window until she could see all the way down boulevard Saint-Michel to the Luxembourg Gardens. The color of the city bloomed from gray to its marble and sandstone, those pinks, as the light came up.

Before long, other reporters milled along the walkway, hung-over, with surreptitious glances to keep an eye out for the door of Capoulade. Foreign correspondents were like somnambulists. Their mornings were different than Mielle’s. The walkways swept and watered by nine o’clock. The gates of shops raised to expose the florists and flowers, the butchers and plucked geese. The terraces arranged neatly. The cafés warm and buttery with breakfast.

All sorts of writers, famous and otherwise, revolutionary or otherwise, stopped by Café Capoulade when they weren’t trying to be seen at Les Deux Magots or chatting with Sylvia Beach on the ratty sofas inside Shakespeare and Company. If it was fame and glamour and celebrity thinkers you wanted, sipping espresso at Les Deux Magots made more sense. If you wanted to meet Gertrude Stein (charging into late middle age with her hair butched) or James Joyce (frail and white-haired with a black patch over his left eye), Shakespeare and Company was the spot. If it was coffee and ham and eggs and talk about transit permits, Capoulade was the place to be.

That day (maybe at breakfast, maybe at the Anglo-American press briefing), Mielle was supposed to meet William Shirer. They had both graduated from Coe College, in different decades, and that year Shirer would become a star correspondent for CBS Radio because of his broadcasts from Germany. Mielle supposed meeting Shirer was what her earlier feeling was about, that he might change her life. He was coming with his boss, Edward Murrow, who was bureau chief for CBS in Europe. Both men would be famous in a general way soon, not solely among other reporters, like Sigrid Schultz or Howard Smith or Virginia Cowles was famous. Mielle had dressed up as much as she could to impress them. A silk blouse, tan, with a borrowed silk scarf, white. She ironed a crease into her slacks, also tan. These were her best clothes. She bathed that morning, in icy water, because the boiler was still cold before sunrise. Her skin was pearly, chilled and scrubbed. She felt translucent. Mielle was so self-conscious, dolled up, that she pulled on her long canvas jacket to cover her body. She told herself that she could unbutton or remove the jacket later, when she was to meet Shirer and Murrow, but she would forget. That jacket was like a second skin.

Mielle was supposed to give Shirer a packet of postcards from Iowa. Her old dean at Coe had sent them, as a way to thank Shirer for the letter of reference he’d written that got Mielle a job reporting from Paris. Someone at Coe probably noticed that Shirer had earned a little notoriety and hoped he had some money to spare. They sent Mielle these postcards in a manila envelope via transatlantic post. Scenes around campus with little notes from professors scratched on the backs.

On top of that, Mielle hoped that Murrow might need to hire more correspondents to report on the situation in Europe. Mielle was so green, so quiet, she didn’t really stand a chance of getting a job like that. But still, atoms bounced around inside her gut that told her such a thing was possible. If the sound of her voice was just right, if those men thought she was clever enough, if they liked her, then why couldn’t Mielle become one of them?

That morning there were ten of them at the big table. Not yet Shirer and Murrow, but a few names. Dorothy Thompson, who was loud, who acted like she was old money, and who was the first American journalist Hitler expelled from Germany, in 1934, something she was very proud of. And Jean-Gérard Dreyfus, with his spectacles and his bald head, tweed suits, and British sweaters. He didn’t write all that eloquent but was very good at the important parts of the job. He used the nom de guerre J-G and was claimed by both French and American writers because his childhood had been split between Paris and Washington. Virginia Cowles of the London Daily Telegraph was there too. A. J. Liebling of The New Yorker. A few green correspondents fresh from Eastern colleges in navy blazers and striped ties, the same style they wore in prep school.

These people were fairly cruel to Mielle. Uncaring, at least. They were self-involved and gauche. Successful, but pretentious. Mielle felt like the most unlikely member of this fraternity, like an amphibious creature among witty pros with their Ivy Leagues and family estates and their fathers’ notorious suicides. How glamorous they were capable of being. And she was not. She was quiet and blended in with the wallpaper. She wrapped her chest flat with the lapels of her jacket and avoided looking anyone in the eye. A rumor had gone around that she was a virgin. Not many of them seemed to even remember her name, but she became an acquaintance, a familiar face at the table. “The tall one,” they might call her. “The young one.” “Her.”

This was generally acceptable to the young woman. Even when the others did remember her real name—Marthe Hess—they tended to say it wrong. (She pronounced it “Mah-tah,” the way they’d said it in her assembly, not how some French said it, “Mahr-teh,” with the aspiration exaggerated, or the atonal American way, “Marth,” or, worse, something closer to “Marf,” like she had been subjected to by her composition professor in college.) She dreaded hearing her real name spoken by anyone those first months in Paris—mostly because it was forbidden for her family back home to mention her name. She had left that person behind in Iowa, she believed. If it came down to being Marthe Hess or being invisible, she preferred to be invisible.

It was Alden Linden Elder who first invited her to join them at Capoulade. He’d spotted Mielle while they both covered the annual Harper’s Bazaar spring fashion broadcast. Very often since then, he arrived not long after her in the morning, so they had a few moments alone.

They were nearly the same age; he was twenty-six. Neither of them was experienced enough to belong there. That early October in Capoulade, Alden sat next to her at the table, said, “Bonjour,” not at all ironically, then reached across her plate to snatch a piece of bread from her basket. Capoulade was both home and office for Alden. Most of his stories were broadcast over shortwave radio just around the corner at a state-run studio in the Sorbonne. If Alden kept an apartment, he went there only to change clothes and collect his mail.

It was well known among them that Alden had his heart broken when he was at Yale. The Vassar girl he’d planned to marry hadn’t even returned the engagement ring when she ran off with a French boxer, one who was knocked out by Joe Louis at Madison Square Garden in 1935, dispatched back to Dijon after three rounds with Alden’s sweetheart in tow. It was in the hope of impressing this woman with his own Continental bona fides that Alden arranged for a post in France with International News Service. His father was old friends with William Randolph Hearst.

In Mielle’s eyes, Alden Linden Elder was a hopeless case. He was tall, with a pronounced stoop to compensate for his endowment. He wasn’t yet bald but would soon be bald. He had a soft tenor and wooden way of speaking. But Alden was fascinated with her, and she often liked the attention, whether she would admit it or not. He’d never met someone like Mielle, who didn’t seem to belong anywhere. “You know so little about anything,” he sometimes told her. “No offense.” With that long sloping brow, his small nose, his skin pale like a child’s, it was easy to forgive him.

“Tell me again,” he said to her that morning, the two of them in the packed corner. “Tell me what it’s like to live in an agrarian cult.”

“A cult?” she objected. Her voice quiet and contralto. “The Anabaptists? They are Christians, but they believe in a more focused way.”

“Now, that. Why do you say ‘they’ instead of ‘we’? Are you not one of them?”

She didn’t want to tell Alden again how it was with the Mennonites in the assembly. But he wouldn’t let it drop unless she explained.

“Once I left, I can’t ever go back.”

“Never? Now—”

“Take this down so you’ll remember.” She plucked his notepad from his front pocket and slapped it on the table. “It’s the last time I’ll explain.”

But she didn’t tell him any more about her people, or why she’d stepped off the commune only to attend school or ride in a buggy to raid the Kalona library until a professor whisked her away when she was sixteen. She didn’t want to think about the looks on her parents’ and little sister’s faces as she drove away—that moment when she was forced to give up her family and all their scrupulous traditions by stepping into a shiny Hudson Model T. She wanted only to be present in Café Capoulade on the Left Bank of Paris. What did she need Iowa for in that moment?

In that moment, in fact, Mielle looked across the café and noticed someone standing at the bar who looked like Jane Anderson. Tall, with tawny-red hair, in a wide-brimmed hat and a black silk dress and an overlarge scarf. She had never met Jane; she didn’t even presume that she would. Before that year, Mielle hadn’t thought of Jane Anderson since those lonely days in college when she read back-issue magazines and first learned that a young woman could travel the world, that she could write about war and politics and sex and whatever she wanted. Jane had done all that as a young woman. So how strange for Mielle to spot a woman who looked like Jane Anderson sitting across the room in a crowded café. The woman sipped a brandy at the bar with two men, both of them doting on her. She didn’t acknowledge the correspondents at the table, even though the café was to the gills with writers that morning. Not yet Shirer and Murrow, but others who had spent the past week holding fast to the fender of a truck that belonged to the Czech army, flying along country roads in the borderland to see if war would break out, only to have their stories ignored or cut down to filler because Chamberlain had been compelled to give half of Czechoslovakia to Hitler for nothing. The reporters were exhausted and buzzing, disoriented, like honeybees are punch-drunk in October once the temperature drops.

“There’s nothing to stop war from coming now,” Dorothy Thompson said, orating, her graying hair combed back wet over the shape of her head. She was very erect and expecting in her posture, her eyebrows arched in contemplation. She was square, a large, capable woman, and her voice was surprisingly feminine, high, and a bit stiff because of her breeding. She smelled nice, like a finicky flower that grew only on Tahiti or some remote island you had heard of but couldn’t find on a map. Thompson stared out onto the boulevard, in that moment, where life went on as normal. The boxy black taxis racing around one another, the walkway crowded with weekenders and students and house-keepers who rushed to pick up a few things from a market during their half-Saturday on the clock, these last few hours of the French workweek.

“The war has already started,” Thompson observed. “But look at the people here. They can’t believe it, they won’t. Running around with bunches of flowers in their arms.”

“An old gentleman told me last night, over there,” Alden said, pointing to the bar, “that there is no possibility France could ever lose a war. And do you know why? Because la culture. The Germans know nothing of how to cook and eat and enjoy life, he claimed, so Germany is a very poor nation.”

“Is that so?”

“And France is a very rich nation, by his definition.”

“They do have that going for them. I won’t argue.”

“He had all sorts of things to say about the French race,” Alden said.

“That’s how they always put it. But French isn’t a race.”

“French is a fine race,” J-G said definitively, laying on his accent. He leaned back, slid his glasses to the top of his nose. “Anyone who says different is a dog.”

He glanced around the table to see if anyone disagreed. It was impossible to tell if he was joking or not.

Mielle began to deflate with disappointment, listening to them banter. She brushed crumbs off her lap, noticed a spot of jam on her borrowed scarf. She should have been exhilarated to sit in the middle of these people who had just seen how close the world was to slipping over an artificial edge into war. But Mielle couldn’t get out of her own head. She’d had a feeling that today would be special. No one here even remembered her birthday.

She glanced across th. . .