Paris and Central Europe - 1938
In Chapter Twelve I introduced the Société des Amis de la Raison and its secretary Henri Voclain. I tried to be fair to Voclain - to show him as a careful man drawing a careful conclusion from the evidence available to him, pursuing his project without cruelty, motivated by something he believed was the prevention of harm rather than the perpetration of it.
I am going to try to be equally fair in this chapter. It is harder.
The organization Voclain founded did not dissolve in 1847 as its records suggested. It changed its name, its address, and its public face several times across the nineteenth century, but the acquisition program continued without interruption. By the 1930s it was operating under the name Institut pour l'Etude de l'Ordre Historique - the Institute for the Study of the Historical Order - a name that was both accurate and misleading, accurate because the study was genuine, misleading because study was not the only purpose.
What follows is drawn from a set of internal documents recovered from the Institut's archive, which was captured by Allied forces in 1945 and which has been held in a French government archive since then, largely uncatalogued. I obtained access through a researcher I had known since before the war, who flagged the materials in 1958 and made arrangements for me to review them.
What I found is not evil. I want to say this plainly, the way I said it about Voclain. The people in these documents are not villains. They are methodical, patient, convinced of the rightness of their project, and wrong in the same way Voclain was wrong - wrong in a way that requires a different way of seeing rather than a counterargument.
They also came very close, in 1938, to finding something they should not have found.
— T.M., 1961
Henri Maurois was the Institut's director of acquisitions from 1931 to 1940. He was forty-four years old in 1938, a graduate of the Ecole des Chartes, trained in the history of medieval documents with a specific expertise in ecclesiastical records. He was, by any professional measure, an excellent archivist. He was also the fourth generation of his family to work for the organization, which had been called different things in different generations and which he understood, from his father and his grandfather before him, as the custodianship of a necessary project.
His private papers, which are part of the Institut's captured archive, include a journal he kept from 1931 to 1940, in which he documented his acquisitions work with the thoroughness of a professional who understood that the record mattered. Reading it, I find a man who is neither comfortable nor uncomfortable with what he does - who has made his peace with it the way people make peace with inherited projects, by deciding that the project's continuity is itself a form of virtue, that the work one generation has done earns the obligation of the next.
I find, also, a man who is very good at his work.
In the spring of 1938 Maurois received information from a correspondent in Vienna - a professor of medieval studies at the University, who had been a contact of the Institut's for eleven years and who reported the existence of certain materials in Bohemia that matched the acquisition criteria. The correspondent had encountered a reference in a catalog of the Jesuit college in Prague, describing materials held by a private individual, notated in a system the correspondent recognized from a training document the Institut had circulated to its network in 1927.
The training document had been prepared by Maurois himself. It described the notation system in enough detail that a trained archivist who encountered it in the wild would be able to identify it. This was the Institut's standard operating procedure by the 1930s - building the recognition capability into its network, so that the materials could be identified at a distance before acquisition was attempted.
The reference in the Prague catalog was indirect - not the materials themselves, but a description of a private library that included certain items of interest, held by a Catholic priest in the Vinohrady district. The correspondent had not made contact. He had simply reported what he found, as he was trained to do.
Maurois read the report in Paris in April of 1938 and made a note in his journal: Vinohrady. Priest. Notation confirmed. Timeline unclear. Will send Reinhardt in autumn if the situation stabilizes.
The situation did not stabilize. By autumn of 1938 the Sudetenland had been annexed and the situation in Czechoslovakia had become, as Maurois noted in his journal with the understatement of a man who kept his journal in a professional register, complicated.
He sent Reinhardt anyway. In November of 1938, six weeks after Munich.
Ernst Reinhardt was the Institut's field agent for Central Europe - a position that required languages, discretion, and the specific quality of patience that comes from understanding that some acquisitions take years. He arrived in Prague in November of 1938 and spent three weeks in the city, working the ecclesiastical network, making contacts, moving toward the Vinohrady priest by the standard method of approaching something valuable obliquely, through intermediaries, building the relationship before making the approach.
He got close.
What stopped him was not the chain's keeper. What stopped him was the political situation accelerating past the timeline Maurois had assumed. The German occupation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March of 1939 changed the conditions in ways that made a French agent in Prague, conducting inquiries about a Catholic priest's private library, suddenly untenable. Reinhardt left Prague in February of 1939, one month before the occupation, with his notes and his contacts and no materials.
He wrote in his debrief: the Vinohrady priest is aware that his materials are of interest to certain parties. He has not been approached directly but he is careful in a way that suggests he knows or suspects something. He will not be easy to acquire from. Recommend delay until the political situation clarifies.
The political situation did not clarify. The war came. The Institut's operations in Central Europe were suspended.
The Vinohrady priest was Father Josef Novák. He gave the materials to a student named Teodor Maren in March of 1942, one month before Reinhardt's operational window would have reopened under the occupation's administrative normalization. He died at Mauthausen in September of 1942.
Reinhardt's notes, recovered in the 1945 capture of the Institut's archive, describe the Vinohrady materials as: notation confirmed, contents unknown, acquisition incomplete. The notation has survived and is presumably now with an unknown keeper in an unknown location.
They were with me in Alton, Illinois.
I have read Reinhardt's notes many times since 1958 when I first obtained them. I have read Maurois's journal entries about the Prague operation - the careful professional prose of a man tracking an acquisition the way a careful professional tracks any acquisition, without sentiment, without malice, simply doing the work.
What I feel reading them is not what I expected to feel. I expected something like fear, or anger, or the retrospective relief of a man who has learned how close the thing he was keeping came to being found. I feel those things, at the edges.
What I feel most is something harder to name. The recognition that the people on the other side of the chain have been at this for a very long time - longer, in continuous institutional terms, than the chain has had any single institutional home. They are patient in the way of organizations that have learned that patience is the only strategy that works. They are methodical in the way of people who believe their project is correct and who therefore bring to it the full professional competence of people doing important work.
They came within one month of finding the materials that Father Novák gave me.
One month. The occupation's administrative normalization, which would have given Reinhardt his window back, came in April. Father Novák gave me the chalice case in March.
I do not think Father Novák knew about Reinhardt. I think he made his decision on his own assessment of the situation - the arithmetic he had done about his own survival, the watching he had done of a student named Teodor Maren, the Tuesday morning in the sacristy. I think the timing was what it was because that was when it was time.
The chain holds by the width of a month.
It holds anyway.
The Institut pour l'Etude de l'Ordre Historique was dissolved officially in 1947. Its archive was captured and catalogued between 1945 and 1958. It is held in Paris.
Its work continues under a different name. I do not know what name. I know it continues because certain materials that should be in the record are not, and the gaps have the same shape they have always had.
The fourth generation of the Maurois family would be approximately forty years old now, as I write this.
— T.M., 1961