Security near the Lutetia was tight. A protective zone of sandbags and wooden barriers had been established around the hotel and armed sentries manned the entrance, to the general bewilderment of the hotel’s doorman and porters. All traffic save German military vehicles was forbidden in the zone. There wasn’t much traffic, however, since the last thing the French army had done before abandoning the city to its fate was to set fire to several fuel-storage depots to prevent them from falling into our hands. But the Paris Métro was still running, that much was evident. You could feel it underneath your feet in the Lutetia hotel lobby. Not that it was easy to see your feet, there were so many German officers milling around—SS, RSHA, Abwehr, Secret Field Police (the GFP)—and all goose-stepping on one another’s toes, because there was no one I knew who could have told you for sure where the responsibilities of one security service ended and another’s began. It wasn’t exactly Babel, but there was plenty of confusion all around, and in turning men from the fear of God to a constant dependence on his own power, Hitler made a convincing Nimrod.

The Lutetia staff were no less confused than we were ourselves. When I asked the German-speaking porter to identify the cupola I could see from my window, he told me he wasn’t sure; and, calling a maid over to the window, they debated the matter for a couple of minutes before, finally, they decided that the cupola was the dome of the church at Les Invalides where Napoleon was buried. A little later on I discovered that it was in fact the Pantheon, in the opposite direction. Otherwise, the service at the Lutetia was good, although hardly on a par with the Adlon in Berlin. And I couldn’t help favorably contrasting my current French accommodation with what I’d endured in the Great War. Crisp, clean sheets and a well-stocked cocktail bar made a very pleasant change from a flooded trench and some warm ersatz coffee. The experience was almost enough to complete my conversion to being a Nazi.

I wasn’t fond of the French. The war—the Great War—was much too recent in my mind to make me like them, but I felt sorry for them now that they were second-class citizens in their own country. They were forbidden the best hotels and restaurants; Maxim’s was under German management; on the Paris Métro, first-class carriages were reserved for Germans; and the French, for whom good food was virtually a religion, found it was rationed and there were long lines for bread, wine, meat, and cigarettes. Of course, nothing was in short supply if you were German. And I enjoyed an excellent dinner at Lapérouse—a nineteenth-century restaurant that looked more like a brothel than the brothels.