Among the smart summer arrivals from Paris was Elisabeth de Rothschild, born Elisabeth Pelletier de Chambure, the exquisitely chic daughter of wealthy Catholic aristocrats from the Burgundy region whose ancestors included the famous Napoleonic General Laurent Augustin Pelletier de Chambure, and whose father was the local mayor. Elisabeth, known as Lili, was married first to a Belgian aristocrat, Marc Edouard Marie de Becker-Rémy, but she soon embarked on a passionate affair with the handsome, swashbuckling Baron Philippe de Rothschild, owner of one of France’s most famous vineyards, Chateau Mouton Rothschild. Although their daughter, Philippine, was born in 1933 the couple could not marry until 1935, after Elisabeth’s divorce had come through. In 1938 Elisabeth and Philippe had a second child, Charles, a severely disabled boy who survived only a few days, and by then the stormy marriage was already foundering. Philippe knew that Lili believed he was to blame for the tragedy. ‘She had taken pills to make her sleep all through the pregnancy and she couldn’t sleep, she said, because of me.’
Philippe, promiscuous and a womanizer by his own admission, had had numerous affairs before meeting Elisabeth, including one with the Russian-born countess Mara Tchernycheff, who became one of the most notorious Parisian black-marketeers during the Occupation. Mara had been a teenage model for Chanel, then a shop assistant at Schiaparelli before becoming Philippe de Rothschild’s mistress in the early 1930s. His connections helped with her brief career in film, but then he married Lili and Mara married a failed actor. Mara survived the war through a highly lucrative alcoholtrafficking partnership with the arch-collaborationist Max Stoecklin, providing Germans with supplies of hard-to-buy champagne, armagnac and cognac. This enabled her to rent a new flat near the Trocadéro, renew her wardrobe and embark on a further affair with an SS officer, Hans Leimer. Later, thanks to her close friendship with another collaborator, the petty criminal Henri Lafont, she had at her disposal a four-storey mansion – 3 bis Place des Etats-Unis – where she ran her own buying office and furnished the floor that became her office with furniture stolen from an abandoned Jewish flat in Rue de Courcelles. German soldiers under Lafont’s influence helped her with the removals.* Perhaps it was Countess Mara whom Philippe de Rothschild had in mind when he explained how words like collaboration ‘change colour as the years pass’. In his memoirs, Milady Vine, he cited a smart Parisienne whom he knew looking back on the war years as a time when ‘it was so much more chic to collaborate’.
Rothschild’s estranged wife was also consorting with pro-Nazi types who knew where anything could be bought for a price. ‘I did not much care for Lili’s behaviour during the German Occupation,’ he wrote later. His marriage to Elisabeth had initially been one of great mutual passion but soon turned to tempestuousness and mutual recrimination. Early in the war Philippe was imprisoned in Algeria by Vichy forces but the moment he was released, in 1942, he decided he should go to London to join the Free French. Elisabeth, who according to Philippe ‘was influenced by some of our former friends who had thrown in their lot with Vichy’, did not want to leave France. She reverted to using her maiden name, Pelletier de Chambure, and believed that the Germans would respect her as the daughter of an old French Catholic family. However, the Gestapo – two men in grey suits, according to Rothschild family retainers at 17 Rue Barbet de Jouy who witnessed the arrest – came for her at 8.30 one May morning, three weeks before the Normandy landings. Ten-year-old Philippine had just left for school with her governess. The men charged up the stairs, pushed the butler, Marcel, to one side and shouted outside Elisabeth’s bedroom door, ‘Open up, Gestapo!’
‘“What are you doing here?” we heard her say. They ordered her to get dressed and took her away in a van. Marcel followed on his bicycle.’
Later that day she was brought back and allowed to have some lunch while they searched the house. During this time Elisabeth asked to see Philippine, who was home from school but whom the staff were desperately trying to hide. There was then a discussion among the Gestapo men about whether they should take the child too, but in the end they decided against. Elisabeth, trying to remain calm, said a casual ‘goodbye, see you later’ to Philippine and then told the Germans imperiously that she had a hairdressing appointment. They disabused her of that notion and drove her away to prison instead. Philippine was swiftly smuggled out of Paris in an ambulance, with her legs in fake bandages, to stay with her grandfather.
Quite why Elisabeth was picked up as the war was ending has never been made clear. She had never become Jewish and was now separated from her Rothschild connections, or so she thought. It is possible that the Germans wanted her to reveal the whereabouts of Philippe, by then back in France fighting with Allied forces and whose name had been mentioned on the German-controlled Radio-Paris. According to Odette Fabius, a pre-war acquaintance, the fact that Elisabeth didn’t understand why she was in a camp compounded her suffering.