Several of those who had attended the circus ball fled the capital as soon as they could. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor swiftly made plans to leave Paris and return to England. But as no palace, castle or royal residence was put at their disposal by the British royal family they were forced to stay at the Sussex house of their loyal friend and the Duke’s erstwhile best man ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe. Since it was clear that the British authorities were not going to provide them with a wartime home, like many others they soon returned to Paris and continued to live with uncertainty, watching and waiting. Many others among le tout Paris, finding themselves without servants, moved into the Ritz Hotel, where they were observed by the playwright No?l Coward, who remarked that September when he started working in the city for the British government, ‘Paris is beautifully “War gay”. Nobody ever dresses and everybody collects at Maxim’s.’ Coward found himself a beautiful flat in the Place Vend?me, exactly opposite the Ritz, ‘where they have the most well prepared air raid shelter’. The Ritz shelter, frequented by some of the best-dressed women in Paris, was soon famous for its fur rugs and Hermès sleeping bags. Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel, the influential designer who, as soon as war broke out, closed her Rue Cambon boutique, thereby throwing hundreds of women out of work, declared that this was ‘not a time for fashion’ – a decision that seemed deeply unpatriotic. She then moved into a suite at the Ritz for the duration of the war. Although the Chanel perfume and jewellery business remained open, she was not the owner, a situation that she was to dispute after the war.
Soon Chanel, approaching sixty, was openly consorting with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage, a tall, blond and handsome German officer in the Abwehr or German Military Intelligence, known as Spatz. Spatz had been previously married for fifteen years to Maximiliane von Schoenebeck (who was known as Catsy), the Jewish half-sister of the writer Sybille Bedford. Sybille later settled in England. But in 1935, as soon as the Nuremberg laws, the anti-Jewish statutes, came into force, Spatz quietly divorced Catsy while remaining on friendly terms with her, so that few people realized they had parted. It was several months later, after another affair, that he took up with Chanel. The hapless Catsy had been briefly interned in 1938 ‘pour espionnage’, having been under surveillance for the previous two years partly because she was a German alien. Described by French military intelligence in 1939 as ‘Baronne Dincklage’, she was ordered in November to be interned again, as her presence in France apparently represented a danger, presumably owing to Dincklage’s well-known Nazi connections. In the early 1930s, when the couple lived together at Sanary-sur-Mer, a resort to the west of Toulon stuffed with German refugees, rumours were rife about his espionage activities, but there is no evidence that Catsy, who was punished, was involved in them.
Elsie Mendl insisted on sitting out the rest of 1939 in Paris, even though her husband, Sir Charles, in spite of his protestations about having no religion, was keenly aware that in Nazi eyes he was Jewish and therefore in danger. One evening, Elsie invited No?l Coward to dine. Fellow guests included the Windsors, who were in fine defeatist form. The Duke held forth about the coming battle, insisting that ‘the German spirit was very important because they are awfully dogged and capable of really surprising endurance in the face of practically anything, which is very important’. Not many in Paris in 1939 shared his views on German superiority.
While most of the German army was engaged in Poland, and as long as French soil had not yet been violated, many Parisians could close their eyes to the imminent dangers because they were convinced they would swiftly repel the Germans. For them, war seemed a distant event concerning other people. Hence this period soon came to be known in France as la dr?le de guerre and in England as the ‘phoney war’. The playwright and avant-garde artist Jean Cocteau was missing his lover, who had been mobilized and was serving at the front. So when one of his friends offered to drive him there, he accepted with alacrity, ignoring any risks, entranced by the prospect of a clandestine lovers’ meeting.
The friend was Violette Morris, a lesbian former athlete who ran a car-parts store and therefore had access to transport. Yet Morris, an eccentric outsider with dangerous opinions, then living on a houseboat on the Seine with an actress lover, was not someone to tangle with. This convent-educated, former boxer and javelin-thrower had, in 1928, been refused a licence to participate in the forthcoming Olympics by the Fédération Fran?aise Sportive Féminine (FFSF – French Women’s Athletic Federation) largely because of complaints about her overtly public lesbian lifestyle. With her cropped hair, Morris had been dressing as a man since 1919 and was a heavy smoker, considered unacceptable in female society at the time. Morris appealed against the ban, and, when she lost, had both her breasts removed, apparently so that she could sit more comfortably in a racing car. Although she was a talented athlete excelling in many sports and had served as a nurse on the Somme in the Great War, she increasingly felt an outcast from French society, declaring: ‘We live in a country made rotten by money and scandals … governed by phrasemongers, schemers and cowards. This land of little people is not worthy of survival. One day, its decline will lead its people to the ranks of slavery but me, if I’m still here, I will not become a slave. Believe me, it’s not in my temperament.’