FRANCE: Green Eyes

FRANCE Green Eyes “From the first it was Sylvie’s eyes,” wrote French Novelist Jean-Louis Bory (1945 Prix Goncourt). “I saw them as green, but was it green? Clear and deep, surely—and with a cold limpid quality that masked her glance better than closed eyelids.” Others had gazed into Sylvie Paul’s eyes and tried to plumb their mystery—fellow fighters in the Resistance, German officers from whom she coaxed many a secret, Gestapo bullies at Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Something Soft in the Cellar. Novelist Bory, an inveterate courtroom spectator, discovered Sylvie soon after the war,when she was haled into court for stealing from her sister-in-law’s Paris apartment seven dresses, six blouses, a kilo of sugar, a rabbit-fur vest, 10.000 francs and the stuffed head of a Pyrenean lizard. The judges sentenced her to three months in prison. Novelist Bory then & there determined to make Sylvie the heroine of his next book. The novel Fragile, or the Basket of Eggs* became a bestseller.

Last year,with two illegitimate children, aged two and four, Sylvie went to live in Paris’ ramshackle Hotel du Theatre, a dingy four-story affair, its walls faced with chipped plaster, its windows hung with drying laundry. It was owned by Sylvie’s old prison cellmate, Mme. Jeanne Perron, an amiable reformed fence known to most of her friends as Aunt Jeanne. Her little niece, Denise LeRoy, 12, soon moved in to join Sylvie’s children, and in time the family circle was swelled by a handsome young Arab, Abdellah Saoulite, who had fallen prey to Sylvie’s eyes. A few months later, Sylvie was pregnant again.

At about this time Aunt Jeanne, 52, took sick. “Wild animals,”she complained, “are eating my insides.” She was soon so ill that she made out a power of attorney giving Sylvie control of all her affairs. One day little Denise came home from school to find her aunt’s door tightly locked. “Your Aunt Jeanne was picked up by the cops again,” explained Sylvie sadly. That night Denise went down to the cellar to get a washbasin. In the dim light she stepped on something soft. Sylvie said: “You must have stepped on an old pillow I threw down there.” To a girl friend, Denise confided with horror that she had “dreamed” of a woman’s foot growing out of the cellar floor.

A Patch of New Plaster. Under Sylvie’s management, the hotel prospered. Seven months pregnant though she was, the new proprietress worked hard at her job. Her clothes were sometimes smeared with plaster, and she would explain: “I’m plugging up some of those rat holes in the cellar.” An anonymous letter brought Police Inspectors Leloup and Lelong to the hotel. “Ah,” said Sylvie, “I have good news for you. Madame is returning on Saturday.” The policemen nodded: “We will be here.”

That was Tuesday. For the next few days Sylvie busied herself collecting two weeks’ rent in advance from every roomer at the hotel. She sent her suitcases to the railroad station and asked a woman to take care of her children. Then she bid her roomers goodbye. “I’m off,” she explained, “to the maternity hospital.”

On Saturday, when Aunt Jeanne did not return, Inspectors Leloup and Lelong decided to search the hotel. In the cellar, behind a pile of lumber, topped with a birdcage, they found a patch of new plaster. A few blows of a pickax revealed the naked, decaying body of Mme. Perron, a gag still wadded in her mouth.

The only sign of Sylvie was a letter to the caretaker of her children. “Terrible things are going to happen to me,” it said. “Have pity.” The letter was dated in Paris, bore a return address near Strasbourg and a postmark near Marseille.

“She has played her game,” mused Novelist Bory for the Paris Franc-Tireur. “We will never know if she was admirable or criminal. . . For me, discovering my heroine far along a path down which I would never have wished to lead her, I cannot forget the limpidness, the coolness of that gaze which I saw as green.”

*Taken from the line “I am tired … of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs,” in William Faulkner’s Light in August.