Maurice Sachs was a charmer. Jean Cocteau once warned their mutual friend, the poet Max Jacob, “Don’t trust Maurice. He’s a charmer. He would try to charm God Himself!” In writing his memoirs with utterly self-effacing candor, he managed to make his charm live on after him. Sachs wrote in the tradition of Rousseau, Stendhal, and André Gide, convinced that the greatest sin of all was hypocrisy. In the pages of his posthumously-published memoir, Witches’ Sabbath — being reissued this week from Spurl Editions — and its sequel The Hunt, Sachs admits to breaking most of the Commandments.
Though he rarely managed to complete the novels he started and few of his plays made it to the stage, Sachs knew everyone who was anyone in the world of French literature between the two world wars. Knew everyone, slept with many, stole from a few. Though a homosexual, he wasn’t averse to going to bed with a woman if it served a purpose. He also wasn’t averse to sleeping with the enemy. He seduced several German officers while living in occupied Paris and numerous members of the LVF (Légion des volontaires français contre le bolchévisme, a Nazi-friendly French military group) and Gestapo after moving to Hamburg in 1943. “My life has been nothing but one long complicity with the guilty,” he wrote. “I have always been on the side of the pariahs.”
Sachs’ grandmother had scandalized French society by leaving her husband to marry Jacques Bizet, the talented but erratic and spendthrift son of Georges Bizet, the composer of Carmen. Sachs idolized Jacques, but by the time they became close, Bizet was already bent on self-destruction. Maurice remembers Bizet playing around with a revolver one day. He “fired one bullet out the window to show me it was really loaded, and put the barrel in my mouth, right up against my palate. Then he put my forefinger on the trigger and said: ‘When you’ve had enough of life, that’s the way to kill yourself. It’s clean, and you don’t feel a thing.’” Not long after that, Bizet used the gun in exactly that way to take his life. Maurice was just sixteen.
Sachs’ grandfather was a wealthy diamond merchant, but Sachs’ parents managed to squander his legacy. When he was seventeen, Maurice had to arrange for his mother’s quick escape to England after she wrote her creditors a large check guaranteed to bounce. He disliked his family so much he fantasized in his memoir about the family he wished for: “My father comes in all muddy from foxhunting, my mother gets up from the piano where she has been singing a simple ballad.” He claimed the only things he inherited from his parents were his father’s laziness and his mother’s “lack of balance.”
His parents rid themselves of the responsibility to raise Maurice by sending him off to a boarding school. By his account, French boarding schools were just as much hotbeds of sadomasochism and homosexual as English ones. Maurice skirted the approaches of masters and upperclassmen but fell in love with a fellow student and appears to have accepted his sexual preference with remarkably little angst.
After leaving school, he set himself up in Paris with what he’d saved from his grandfather’s estate and dove headfirst into the city’s social and cultural life. “How good it felt to be twenty, in those days. This was the reign of gaiety and license,” he recalled. He met the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and fell under the spell of his piety. Sponsored by Maritain and his wife, Sachs converted to Catholicism in 1925 and soon after entered a seminary to become a priest.
It was to be a short stay. Sachs put on his soutaine in January 1926; by the end of September, he had been ejected from the order. While enjoying a short vacation on the Riviera, he made the acquaintance of the American writer Glenway Westcott, who in turn introduced him to a handsome (and wealthy) teenager named Tom Pinkerton. Sachs fell madly in love with Pinkerton. Though Sachs maintained the relationship remained platonic, Pinkerton’s mother complained to the Bishop of Nice.
Sachs acknowledged that “I mistook an ephemeral enthusiasm for an eternal vocation.” He also confessed that he felt “a mixed delight” in the trappings of the church “that was not entirely pious.” He loved his soutaine, for example: “The black was becoming, and made me look slender.” He is also reported to have had his lined with pink silk crêpe du Chine.
He went from one institution to another. Leaving the seminary made him eligible for military service, and he was soon stationed with the French army of occupation along the Rhine in Germany. While his first job was monitoring latrines, he was soon put in charge of the officer’s library after a colonel found him reading Montesquieu at his post. About the only thing he took away from his time in the army was his lifelong friendship with the poet Max Jacob.
Back in Paris again, he indulged himself in the two vices he’d become acquainted with in the military: sex and drink. Though he claimed not to have known of their existence, he began frequenting Paris’s male brothels, including the Bains du Ballon d’Alsace, notorious as the scene of Marcel Proust’s more extreme sexual experiences. He also became a profligate drinker: “it was difficult, if not impossible, for me to sit down to a meal without having drunk about ten cocktails.”
Sachs rarely held back his passions. If Cocteau learned to be wary of Maurice’s charms, Sachs gave into his enchantment with the poet and artist completely: it was, he wrote, “total, immediate, and delicious.” “When we left this magician,” Sachs recalled, “I knew beyond all doubt that I was going to live only for him.” Cocteau’s response to Sachs was friendly but cautious.
He did, however, recommend the young man to Coco Chanel, who hired him to assemble a private library. Then “on the point of no longer counting her fortune,” Chanel gave him a monthly budget of 60,000 Francs and carte blanche in his commission. “I had no problem making a good living out of this sum,” Sachs wrote in something of an understatement. It’s unlikely that much of Chanel’s investment made it to her shelves. He took full advantage of her largesse:
I had an apartment, paintings, a car, a secretary, two servants, a masseur, expensive love affairs; I spent my nights in cabarets, my afternoons at the tailor’s, I bought books and bibelots, and this was perhaps the moment of my life when I enjoyed the highest degree of physical comfort. What young man would not have been intoxicated by so many absurd grandeurs which he believed to be the result of his personal genius?
By the time he’d exhausted Chanel’s good humor, however, he’d managed to convince other investors of his genius as well. Lucien Demotte hired Sachs to help assemble collections of French paintings that were shown in Paris and London. The pair then headed, artworks in hand, to New York, where Demotte owned a gallery on East 57th Street. Unfortunately, they landed in New York with perhaps a million dollars’ worth of merchandise which had little prospect of being sold. Sachs was able to hang onto Demotte’s coattails for a while, standing in as a groomsman when Demotte married the daughter of the Franco-American tycoon Felix Wildenstein in early 1931, but he soon had to fend for himself.
He came up with a solution with the help of Harold Peat, director of a lecture tour agency. Impressed with Sachs’ good looks and suave manners, he agreed to take Sachs on as a lecturer. The only problem was: on what?
“What will you talk about?”
“About art.”
“There can’t be more than three hundred people who are interested in that. We need three thousand. Why not talk about politics?”
“Because I don’t know anything about politics.”
“Just read the morning papers, and that evening tell what you read in your own words.”
Two weeks later, Peat was selling his new client as “Maurice Sachs: Famous French Economist,” whose talks promised to “Train a Spotlight on the Secrets of Europe.” Sachs also found support for his new career in an admiring member of his early lectures. Gwladys Matthews, whose father was pastor of the largest Presbyterian congregation in Seattle, was an aspiring writer who wanted to get free of her family.
Sachs claimed he told her of his preference for men but said he was interested in gaining a wife for the sake of a future political career. He charmed Reverend Matthews with the sincerity of his passion: “I love your daughter,” he told Matthews. “If you do not give your consent to our marriage, I shall marry her all the same.” Regardless of who was fooling whom, Maurice and Gwladys were married in Seattle in June 1932, her father officiating.
In Witches’ Sabbath, Sachs referred to Seattle as “Morpheus,” which gives a clue to the prospects for the marriage. The couple honeymooned in the Adirondacks then returned to the West Coast, taking an apartment in San Francisco. It was there, in April 1934, that Gwladys filed for divorce on the grounds of desertion. “Brilliant Romance to End” read the Associated Press headline for the news. In fact, what would prove Maurice’s longest romantic involvement had begun – according to the divorce papers – in February 1933 he ran off with a young Californian he refers to in the book as Henry. As usual, Sachs was honest about his dishonesty: “I had married her like a madman; I left her like a coward,” he wrote.
Gwladys, by the way, later moved to Hollywood, worked as a screenwriter and married the pioneering photographer Ned Scott in 1936. Before his desertion, she also did Sachs the favor of translating his memoir, The Decade of Illusion: Paris 1918-1928, which Knopf published just weeks after Maurice took off with Henry.
The book, now long out of print, received good reviews. “A charming and delightfully kaleidoscopic parade,” wrote C. Norris Millington in The American Magazine of Art. “staged in the smart salons, attics, theatres, studios and by-ways of France.” Millington credited Sachs for his “dramatis personae”: “practically every well-known painter, composer, musician, poet, politician, dressmaker, critic, author, bookseller, art dealer, and publisher who has gravitated to Paris in the last ten years or so.” Others thought he took his personal Who’s Who too far, noting that his index listed 770 names, or roughly three names for every page.
Maurice and Henry took the advance for Decade of Illusion and bought berths on a cattle boat returning to Le Havre. Sachs returned to a family devasted by the Depression. “Nous n’avons rien” he wrote: “We have nothing left.” Sachs’ mother had suffered a heart attack; his Uncle Richard had committed suicide. Though Sachs’ most tolerant, if skeptical, supporter, André Gide, helped him get a job editing a new series for La Nouvelle Revue Française, the money wasn’t enough to support the two lovers and Maurice had to fill in as a desk clerk at the cheap hotel where they stayed. Sachs’ description of the hotel (which he calls the Hotel Saint-Joachim but was actually l’hôtel Saint-Yves) and its residents are some of the best passages in Witches Sabbath.
A man who stays in a hotel, far from his habitual milieu, inwardly liberated, rarely constrains himself. The employee sees him naked. In two years of the hotel business, I learned a great deal about human behavior. I have seen maniacs, debauchees, paragons of virtue, monsters of anger, the timorous, the greedy, and the generous; I have observed vanity and folly, dreadful aberrations, charming virtues, conduct full of inner distinction, and incredible abasement I have watched, and a horrible spectacle it was, thousands of individuals eat, whom it was my duty to watch as they did so (spaghetti dinners were always the worst). The toilet that doesn’t work, the bath that overflows, the bed in which, in spite of everything, a lady believes she has found a mischievous flea, oblige a curious participation in the intimacy of people whom you know too much about and whom you don’t know. The intimacy that no sympathy motivates is as painful as a promiscuity of the flesh.
Even with this income, Sachs wrote, “There was almost no day when I knew exactly how we were going to eat that evening.” He admits to hanging around the bookstalls across the river from the Louvre for the purpose of stealing books. Cocteau later wrote that during this time, Sachs would stuff his pockets with toilet paper, rustling it so others thought his pockets were full of 1,000-Franc notes. “It gives me confidence,” Sachs told Cocteau.
Sachs’ way of coping with poverty disgusted some of his acquaintances. Marcel Jouhandeau, who later collaborated with the Nazis, claimed that it was his encounters with Sachs that led him to write a notorious article, “How I Became an Anti-Semite,” for the journal of the far-right party, Action Française.
Sachs was saved by the actor Pierre Fresnay, best known among English-speaking audiences for his role as the aristocratic Captain de Boeldieu in Jean Renoir’s 1937 film, La Grande Illusion. Fresnay encouraged him to write for the stage. Though most of Sachs’ attempts never reached completion, let alone the stage, his translation of the Terence Rattigan play, French Without Tears was a success. Fresnay enlisted Sachs to work as stage manager when he organized a run of plays performed on alternating nights in London’s West End in 1938. Sachs returned to Paris exhausted. It is here that Witches’ Sabbath ends. “I am leaving. I don’t know where I am going, where I shall go. To the East, if I have any luck.”
The Hunt ( La chasse à courre), Sachs’ last and incomplete memoir, picks up a two years later in May 1940, as the German Blitzkrieg was approaching Paris. Sachs had managed to attach himself to the staff of the government radio network and fled with it to the Third Republic’s final capital in Bordeaux. There, he first encountered the deceit, greed, and hypocrisy that would characterize much of French life under the Occupation. After a few weeks of sharing an over-priced bed in an overcrowded hotel, he returned to Paris.
There, he found the black market was already booming. “What was I going to do if not the black market?” he asked. Once again, Sachs relied on his charm and connections to work his way in. He became a specialist in moving jewelry and precious goods, often working on consignment. He lied and was lied to on a daily basis. “I was up to my neck in the very finest garbage,” he wrote.
And exceptional garbage it was. While rationing and deprivation was the rule for ordinary Parisians, with the right connections and enough money, the life of luxury rolled on: “the Chataigné … turned out a delectable lobster au beurre blanc, Philippe served the foie gras at the height of rationing, chocolate mousse, and meat without coupons, the Vieux Pont-Neuf, where they had cakes made with real cream, Gaffner served beefsteaks, Lola Tosch offered leg of lamb, et cetera….” It took a furious amount of wheeling and dealing to keep up this lifestyle, however, and Sachs’ accounts of his many transactions are both dizzying and mind-numbing.
After a point, however, the reader loses interest in knowing how much he took from the Duchesse d’Y or sold to the Comte de T.. Sachs came to feel the same way. “The fatigue, the boredom, yes, above all the boredom of these incessant transactions, the unreality, the roguery, the disgust I felt for myself and for others suddenly seized me by the throat,” he wrote. He teamed up with the ex-wife of one of his friends and retreated to the quiet of a village in Normandy.
In The Hunt, he refers to the woman as Pomme. In reality, she was Violette Le Duc, who later became famous for her memoir, La Bâtarde. Though they spent months together – continuing to keep up a steady black-marketing operation, only now in produce, meats and cheeses – it would be hard to tell from comparing their respective accounts. In The Hunt, Pomme is a pleasant companion with an absurd crush on him. In La Bâtarde, he is the brilliant, handsome, and talented Maurice Sachs – Le Duc refers to him by his full name at least 50% of the time. Sachs ultimately found her suffocating. Le Duc credits him with inspiring her to write:
Maurice said to me next day: “Your unhappy childhood is beginning to bore me to distraction. This afternoon you will take your basket, a pen, and an exercise book, and you will go and sit under an apple tree. Then you will write down all the things you tell me.”
That afternoon, Le Duc began to write what would become her first book, L’Asphyxie. If you are interested in a third version of this story, you can watch director Martin Provost’s 2013 film, Violette.
Maurice and Pomme were accompanied to Normandy with Karl-Heinz, a German Jewish orphan that Sachs took a notion to adopt. The Rothschild family had taken in a group of Jewish orphans ejected from Germany a few months before the outbreak of war in hopes of finding homes with good French families. One doubts two black marketeers hiding out in the country were quite what they had in mind. And Sachs’ treatment of Karl-Heinz demonstrated the dangers of boutique parenting.
Sachs was attracted by the twelve-year-old’s good looks, but as soon as the boy opened his mouth, he left his foster father with a longing to flee. Karl-Heinz was not interested in books or art or music. His ambition was to be a waiter. Sachs was glad to learn of an American Quaker organization that was arranging for orphans to be sent to families in the U.S. and soon Karl-Heinz was standing at the nearest train station, ticket in hand. “My burning love for Karl-Heinz had already been extinguished in the tepid waters,” Sachs confessed, happy to be rid of the boy’s “appealing mediocrity.”
Sachs returned to Paris and the 24×7 life of deal-making, but his luck in coming out on the profitable end of these increasingly complicated three-, four- and five-way transactions was on the wane. By the beginning of autumn 1942, he was looking for another way out.
In October 1942, Sachs finally headed East. To Hamburg. His rationale is unclear from The Hunt and none of the several biographies written since the 1960s have come up with a definitive answer, but the most likely reasons relate to lust and greed. Sachs was infatuated with the strong, self-confident blond Aryans he encountered in smart uniforms in Paris and saw a chance to carouse with more of them in the Fatherland. He also thought the Nazis would pay well for information supplied by a willing Frenchman operating inside the forced labor organization supplying thousands of workers for German factories.
Sachs managed to slip out of occupied France in November 1942, sleeping with his guide along the way. The final section of The Hunt is drawn from letters he sent back to Paris. At first, he found the experience of going to work with hundreds of other French workers tedious: several pages of The Hunt are devoted to cataloguing the character flaws and bad habits of Bretons, Gascons, and others. And “Need I add that they had never heard the word ‘conversation’ in their lives?” He was proud, however, of what he referred to as his “little Ministry of Internal Affairs.”
Sachs was in Hamburg when some of the cities’ most devastating bombing raids took place. “The city is really nothing more than a heap of charred rubble in which I still have a room without water, without electricity, almost without anything,” he wrote after one raid. Still he felt more at home than he had in occupied France. “No doubt about it, I adore this country: the only one where I find it easy to be happy, where I’m instinctively happy, as it were.” And there was no shortage of sexual partners: “There’s love for all through the town,” he reported almost giddily.
In June 1943, he wrote with excitement – and suspicious ambiguity – of getting a new job. “I am well paid, newly clothed, and well thought of,” he crowed. The job undoubtedly involved collaboration with the Gestapo, but it also provided him with opportunities to seduce young Frenchmen of the LVF and the occasional willing Nazi. He may not have known that at the age of 36, he was already being referred to as Maurice la tante — Maurice the aunt.
The Nazis were less susceptible to Sachs’ charm, however. In November 1943, he was arrested for his homosexual activities and sent to the Fuhlsbüttel prison. What happened to Sachs after this was for some years a mystery. When La chasse à courre was first published in Paris in 1947, it ended with a postscript added by the publisher stating Sachs’ whereabouts were unknown. Later, it was reported he had been lynched by inmates. Finally, a German reporter was able to confirm that in April 1945, Sachs and the other prisoners in Fuhlsbüttel were evacuated to avoid the approaching British Army and forced to march to another facility in Kiel. Walking through the snow without food, water, or proper clothing, many of the inmates died along the way. When Sachs and another prisoner failed to join the formation on the morning of April 14, 1945, they were shot in the head by a Belgian SS guard.
Le Sabbat (subtitled souvenirs d’une jeunesse orageuse — Memoirs of a Stormy Youth) caused “a considerable furor in literary and salon circles,” as Janet Flanner reported in a 1946 “Letter from Paris” in The New Yorker. One French reviewer described it as “The chronicle of a vicious drunk and pervert, whose struggles to refashion his life and regenerate his soul are blocked by a voluptuous pleasure in guilt and loathsomeness.” Even untranslated, the assessment of another reads like a seminarian’s list of venal and deadly sins: “Mal élevé, vicieux, orgueilleux, vaniteux, adonné aux pires excès, aux perversions les plus scandaleuses, homosexuel, renégat, mufle, il représente le point extrême de la jeunesse débauchée et cynique.” An American academic reviewer put it more bluntly: “Young Jew writes je as easily as Jean-Jacques.”
The book was first translated into English by Robin King in 1953 as Days of Wrath: Confessions of a Turbulent Youth. It’s a rendition best left forgotten. The TLS reviewer called the translation “slapdash” and “disfigured by an exasperating carelessness in the proof-reading.” And despite his claim that the book was of greater literary than documentary value, King also chose to bowdlerize the text. As Benedict Nicolson put it in his New Statesman review, “There can be no excuse” for King’s editorial decisions: “… reproducing parts of chapters, omitting a phrase here, a paragraph there, in so arbitrary a fashion that one is continuously driven back to the French text to discover what the author intended.”
Spurl Editions has wisely chosen to reissue the 1964 Richard Howard translation, titled Witches’ Sabbath, instead. At the time of its original publication, Anthony Powell called it “a near-classic of its kind.” Powell had an elegant way of describing Sachs’ elusive manner of dealing with facts. “Although one suspects there is little here that is not, within its context, true, the skill of the narrative makes truth almost beside the point.” Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick Modiano was so inspired by Sachs’ handling of the truth that he brought Sachs back to life as an aging and unrepentant collaborator in the first novel of his “Occupation trilogy,” La Place de l’Etoile (1968).
A year after Witches’ Sabbath, its sequel The Hunt, Richard Howard’s translation of La chasse à courre was also published by Stein and Day in the U.S. and Calder & Boyars in the U.K.. Although a much shorter and obviously incomplete book, Sachs’ charm was still on display. “There’s a racy, flaunted untrustworthiness about Sachs which keeps you on your guard just as surely as it keeps you reading,” David Williams wrote in The Daily Telegraph. The New Yorker, on the other hand, had the opposite of Robin King’s assessment, saying the book had far more documentary interest than literary merit.
Spurl Editions has done readers a great favor with its reissue of Witches’ Sabbath. At a time when people are looking for a good book to hunker down and enjoy, this is an excellent way to spend a few days while you’re barricaded behind your walls of toilet paper. You can order the book now from Spurl or from Amazon as of April 3.