La scène croquée par Grosz et décrite par Ben Hecht se déroule au restaurant Le Moal, où se retrouvaient les Français en exil, à l'angle de la 3ème avenue et de 50th Street.
The bar is a little crowded, the tables not entirely. Nothing is here to be noted except a plainness and a dinginess a trifle below the Third Avenue standard. This is because matters of the spirit are not for the eye. M. Le Moal’s little collection of tables and chairs and cutlery is not a café. It is Paris still breathing near the corner of our own 50th Street.
When you look a little more closely at the men standing at the bar you notice they are mostly sailors. They are off the Normandie and other French ships locked away in our river. They have no money and they wait for a good Samaritan to come in and buy them a drink or a meal. In return they will talk of the glories of the French Navy and its undiminished threat to the Nazis.
In the meantime they stand about talking hardly at all. Solemnly and with a curious patience they study the faded murals over M. Le Moal’s bar. These reveal scenes on the Brittany coast. Not too well drawn, but nonetheless rugged fishermen are gathering oysters off the Brittany sea bottom.
At the tables inside are not diners but a cast—a cast brought over intact from Paris. Fernand Léger, the painter, sits over his chicken casserole. A plump and literary industrialist once famed for his output of linen is sipping his vin ordinaire. You may be sure that for this hour he has forgotten the loss of his factory and the increasing need of a job.
At another table sits one Henri Szamota, bicycle-racing champion of Paris in 1936 and now a salesman for a NewJersey soda-water manufacturer. And you may be sure that Henri is not thinking of soda-water sales.
There is present another painter, Mané-Katz. He is a Polish Jew, long a resident of Paris and recently escaped from a concentration camp. In this camp he met Picasso.
“What can we do now?” this Mané-Katz inquired desperately.
“We can get out of here, with luck,” said Picasso, ‘ “and give a show.”
Mané-Katz got out, painted his head off, and gave a show at the Sterner Gallery.
La couverture du menu
Over all this a phonograph plays. French military marches come scratching out. Maurice Chevalier sings. Tino Rossi croons and Trénet, called the Singing Fool, comes from the records. All is the same, nothing altered, nothing added or subtracted. Paris still breathes despite a slight geographical dislocation.
And sitting in this ghostly survival of a vanished day, I wonder if Tony Canzoneri and Irving Berlin and Damon Runyon and Oscar Levant and Jimmy Johnston and Billy Rose and all the other Lindy habitués will be sitting sometime in an odd far-away street trying to recapture the soul of a way of eating, talking, and night-haunting stolen out of the world by the Luftwaffe.
Ben Hecht - 1001 Afternoons in New York, Viking Press, 0ctober 1941
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