“I had a funny choke in my throat and I had to clean my glasses because there now, below us, gray and always beautiful, was spread the city I love best in all the world.”—Ernest Hemingway, “How We Came to Paris,” Colliers, October 7, 1944, reprinted in Reporting World War II, Part Two: American Journalism 1944-46 (Library of America edition, 1995)If you want a sense of the jubilation on the streets of Paris on this date in 1944, when French troops walked into their city at last, having put (with the help of the Allies) the Nazis on the run, then Irwin Shaw’s essay, “Morts pour la Patrie,” is the one to read. And you can’t read Ernest Hemingway’s return to war correspondence without feeling that his work had become less about the world he was encountering and more about him.
Be that as it may, the love affair that “Papa” Hemingway bore for Paris, from his young manhood all the way to his death, makes this must reading. Knowing that relationship—one he celebrated in A Movable Feast—will leave you, too, with a lump in the throat by the end of the piece.
Hemingway had had it in for “the Krauts,” as he called them, for commandeering one of his favorite bars and turning it quarters for Nazi generals. He couldn’t wait to liberate the bar at the Ritz hotel.
Legend has it that the lubricated author jumped out of his jeep, saying he’d come to liberate the Ritz. Manager Claude Azello, who’d known him for a long time, got him to leave his gun by the door and celebrate with champagne.
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