Francis Stuart

Le Dôme

Francis Stuart (Townsville, Australia, 1902 - Co. Clare, 2000) abandoned wife and children at their home in Laragh, Co. Wicklow in 1937 to go on a drinking binge in the French capital, left Ireland again in 1939 for Germany, and then crawled back to Paris in disgrace in 1945.

Stuart's 1937 stay in Paris seems to have passed in a drunken haze. He initially stayed in the Hotel Terminus, close to the Gare Lazare, but then moved to a hotel in the rue de Gaîté in Montparnasse to be close to the Dôme (Boulevard du Montparnasse, 6th arrondissement), where he may have met Samuel Beckett one evening. In his autobiographical novel Black List Section H - his masterpiece - Stuart describes the sojourn of his alter ego, H, in the following terms: "For weeks, H never saw Paris by daylight, leaving the Dôme, they told him, around three or four of a morning and making his short way to the hotel in a drunken trance, always stopping en route, without being able to recall doing so, to buy Italian wine at a shop in the rue Delambre that stayed open all night."

The Villa Rothschild, rue Victor Hugo

Much less joyful was his arrival in the city in a train full of refugees in August 1945 after spending much of the war broadcasting propaganda on behalf of the Germans and teaching English in Berlin university. He was initially sent to a reception area for displaced persons in the villa Rothschild in the rue Leonardo Da Vinci, off the Place Victor Hugo (16th arrondissement) and took his meals around the corner in the rue Leroux. He later moved into a cheap hotel in the rue Copernic (also in the 16th arrondissement) and was given a fawn raincoat by the Quakers in rue des Martyrs (9th arrondissement). He also went to ask for assistance at the Irish consulate in the rue Rude (16th arrondissement), but there he was told that "his appearance in Paris wasn't a matter of official rejoicing for the representatives of his native land".

Francis Stuart and Madeleine Meissner

A couple of months later, still in danger of being arrested and tried by the British, he made it back to Austria to see Madeleine, his girlfriend (real name Gertrud Meissner). Both were locked up by the French forces of occupation (better them than the British), before making it back to Paris in 1949, where Madeleine found work as a cleaner and they both found lodgings in a chambre de bonne in the Avenue de Breteuil (7th arrondissement). They struck up a friendship with Liam O’Flaherty and his wife, Kitty, before they eventually moved to England in 1951 and then Ireland. By that time, Stuart had convinced himself the coast was clear and that neither the British nor the Irish authorities were likely to give him much stick for his wartime activities.

 

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