EXTRACT FROM PAUL BEEKMAN TAYLOR'S:

GURDJIEFF'S AMERICA:
Mediating the Miraculous

In this extract from Chapter 13 'Gurdjieff’s American Oil Well', Taylor tells for the first time the true story of how Gurdjieff survived financially in Paris during the occupation by German troops in the Second World War, how he managed 'to keep his person and his limited teaching unscathed.'

His larder full of contraband foodstuffs was no secret to his guests whom he fed generously from the time the Germans entered Paris in June 1940 to the end of the Occupation in 1944. He told people that he had gotten credit from local merchants during those years by claiming that he owned oil wells in Texas whose income he would recuperate at war’s end. (Ref. 1). Nonetheless, it is doubtful that merchants would have dared extend credit to him over such a long period of time, considering their own pecuniary shortcomings and strictly enforced rationing. It was more likely that he found what he needed on the Black Market.

In effect, the oil-well story was a calculated "lie." His "Texas oil well" was, in fact, a wealthy French hotel-owner and non-Stetson wearing horse breeder, François Dupré, and the pipeline to Gurdjieff was his Romanian-born wife Anna Stefanna ("Anci"), who had good reasons for keeping her identity hidden from all but Jeanne de Salzmann and Gurdjieff himself. Her involvement with Gurdjieff is a chapter in an intriguing domestic drama with her husband, who, like Cutting before him, had never set eyes upon Gurdjieff. Unlike Cutting, however, Dupré took utmost pains not to see Gurdjieff and unlike Cutting, Dupré contributed a considerable sum of money to maintain him.

The story is worth telling here. François Dupré, born in 1888, served honorably in the Great War as an officer in the 3rd Dragons of the French Cavalry but was wounded seriously at Verdun in 1914. During his convalescence, he contracted mumps, the after-effects of which left him sterile. After a long hospitalization in Aix-Les-Bains, in 1917 he married Daisy Singer-Polignac, great granddaughter of Jules, Prince de Polignac and niece of Edmund de Polignac (Ref.2). Though the couple divorced after only a few years of marriage, Dupré had acquired a considerable fortune through the Singer family, known in the nineteenth century for the sewing machine—invented by Isaac Merrit Singer (1811–1875)—and in the twentieth century for French automobiles as well. Dupré invested in hotels and by the mid-thirties he could boast owning the prestigious George V, the luxurious Plaza Athenée off the Champs-Elysées and Ritz in Montréal, Canada. He owned residences off the Avenue Foch in the Square de Bois du Boulogne in the 16th Arrondissement in Paris, and houses in Montreal and Nassau, Jamaica. Besides these properties, he had a large stable of horses, and though he took little interest in racing himself, he was an eminently successful breeder of horses.

After his first marriage had ended in divorce, Dupré met a young Serbo-Hungarian chambermaid named Anna Stefanna Nagy, then twenty-five, on board the CGT Normandie in 1937. They were married a year later in Montréal, but Dupré kept his sexual infirmity from Anci, as she was known familiarly. Their marriage went well, and even the occupation of France did not disturb the relative luxury of their life, since the commandeering of Dupré’s hotels as billets for high-ranking German officers provided a good deal of money for his coffers. Shortly before the beginning of the war, Anci had suffered painful intestinal problems. Her doctor diagnosed a tumor that because of its location at the base of the liver he felt was inoperable. In discomfort, she looked for advice elsewhere, and an acquaintance of her husband, the poet and essayist René Daumal, sent her to Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff felt about her abdominal and thoracic regions and then held the palm of his right hand over the tumor. He told her to return if the pain persisted (Ref. 3). Within a day, the pain and signs of the tumor were gone.

From that day onward, she became devoted to Gurdjieff, and in gratitude, with the prompting of Jeanne de Salzmann, to whom Gurdjieff had entrusted Daumal and his wife, she offered to support Gurdjieff financially (Ref. 4). With Salzmann she approached her husband to offer an income for Gurdjieff. Dupré wanted nothing to do with Gurdjieff himself, though he was willing to satisfy his wife’s wishes. Anci rarely attended a Gurdjieff meeting, however. In fact, she was not directly engaged with his teaching either because she did not understand his ideas or because she was loathe to have Gurdjieff cure her of her inordinate sexual appetite. Whether her husband knew and tolerated, or was simply unaware of them, she had had a series of lovers. For her it was enough to stay in close contact with and be of service to the man who had saved her life.

Dupré’s acquiescence in his wife’s support of Gurdjieff was threatened when, on New Years’ Eve, 1942, with expectations of her husband’s joy, Anci announced that she was pregnant. Dupré, after disclosing to her the secret of his infirmity, stormed out of the house and, despite the curfew, managed to reach his mother’s apartment on the Champs-Elysée where he spent the night on a couch. He had his personal belongings moved out of the Square du Bois de Boulogne the next day and renounced his wife. The father of her unborn child was Luc Dietrich, himself identified by Gurdjieff as one with uncontrollable yearning for women, but Dietrich had neither means nor desire to take Anci into his care (Ref. 5).

Dupré ordered her to have an abortion outside of France. He would arrange for the necessary transit papers. She contacted Jeanne de Salzmann and René Daumal who were in Peyvoux in the High Alps. Anci joined them in Evian, where they gave her the names of a doctor and a “safe house” in Geneva where she could be lodged. She crossed the frontier through German border controls into Switzerland with an Ausweiss her husband procured from German authorities. Jeanne de Salzmann accompanied her to Geneva where a gynecologist friend Luc Danon, performed the abortion. She was in her fifth month of pregnancy.

Back in Paris, she and Dupré reached an amicable agreement to the effect that she would remain his wife and stay at the Square du Bois while he would live in the Hôtel George V. Anci was terrified by Dupré’s divorce threat, but did not know that he could not file for divorce. For some reason he had purposely not registered the Canadian marriage with French authorities, and since copies of the marriage certificate could not be obtained from Montreal during the war, he could not register it now. While France accepted a Canadian marriage, without a French registration of the marriage he could not terminate it. That was not all. The marriage contract he had drawn up in Montreal and which she signed stipulated that she was not to be his heir. Such a condition, while legal under Anglo-Saxon statutes, is contrary to the French Civil Code. Evidently, at the time of the marriage, Dupré was afraid he might have been making a mistake and intended to guard himself against the consequences.

Anci continued to finance Gurdjieff throughout the war with her husband's money. Just as valuable for Gurdjieff were her husband's business connections with the German Occupation authorities. Through his influence in authoritative quarters Gurdjieff was able to protect a number of Jews. His "dealing" with the Germans, therefore, referred to deals made through the intermediary of Dupré. Of course, Dupré profited in many ways himself from his German connections. Besides being paid for the use of his hotels, German authorities supplied his stables with fodder and construction materials.

Following the Liberation, Dupré was imprisoned for collaboration simply because he had abetted Occupation forces by billeting the Werhmacht (as if he had much of a choice in the matter), and regained freedom only after paying an exorbitant fine. Gurdjieff was seized after the Liberation for illegal possession of foreign currency found under his bed, but he was released almost immediately on the grounds that he was a poor old man who did not understand his crime. Anci was untouched by the French authorities, though it was rumored that she had had a German lover after Dietrich’s death. When Gurdjieff in 1948 told Americans that all his French debts had been liquidated, it was assumed that Ouspensky’s former group had paid the debt, but it was Anci Dupré (after Gurdjieff’s death, Anci put forward the balance of funds demanded by publishers for the publication of All and Everything).

Ref. 1 Moore, Gurdjieff, p. 278; Patterson, Ladies of the Rope, p. 174. Hulme, Undiscovered Country, p. 215. P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1949), pp. 325–26 describes Gurdjieff in the role of an oilman on a train between Petrograd and Moscow. In Meetings with Remarkable Men (London: Arkana, 1985), p. 270, Gurdjieff says "I participated in oil wells and fisheries."

Ref.2 The American dancer, Isadora Duncan, was Polignac’s mistress.

Ref. 3 This account is my sister's, Eve Chevalier, who was Anci's traveling companion in 1950 and 1951, confirmed by my mother who had known François Dupré since World War I. The treatment Gurdjieff used was known as "animal magnetism." Anton Mesmer, to whom Gurdjieff refers in Tales, pp. 561–62, is credited with first using it for medical purposes. "Notes taken by Solita Solano (Kanari) from 1935–40 in Paris," 25 January 1936, describes Gurdjieff’s cure of a woman’s paralysis by hypnotic and physical touch.

Ref. 4 The story of Anci and François Dupré that follows is documented by Jacqueline Decour of Veyrier, Switzerland, Dupré's biographer and daughter of Dupré's first cousin. Jeanne de Salzmann, Edith Taylor and Eve Chevalier confirmed Anci’s financial support of Gurdjieff.

Ref. 5 A sculpture of the joined hands of Anci and Luc Dietrich is extant. According to my sister, her bedroom was filled with photos of Dietrich. Louis Pauwels, Gurdjieff (Douglas, Isle of Man: Times Press, 1964), pp. 351–61, writes of Luc Dietrich's affair with Irène Reweliotty during the war, and of Reweliotty's suicide which, he suggests, was caused by Gurdjieff. Rewoliotty's notebook entry for June 20 1945 says she had "an explanatory scene with Madame D.," undoubtedly Anci Dupré. Pages of Paul Sérant, Ritual Murder (Le meurtre rituel), reprinted in Pauwels, pp. 326–42, describe Gurdjieff's influence among his French pupils in 1946 in very negative terms, claiming that his and his wife’s love was being destroyed by the spiritual master. He had just joined the group, had practiced the movements and, when finally invited to Gurdjieff's table, was forced to eat standing. In brief, for Sérant, Gurdjieff’s teaching produced rather than alleviated anxiety.