Chanel, too, although arrested and questioned by the FFI in August 1944 on account of her well-known love affair with Spatz, Hans Günther von Dincklage, the suspected spy, was quickly released. According to one story, she reported ‘with snobbish disdain’ afterwards that ‘the most ghastly thing about her arrest was hearing her armed captors say “tu” to the doorman.’ There has been much speculation about whether or not Churchill himself intervened on her behalf as he felt an attachment to her ever since her affair more than a decade before with his great friend, Bendor, Duke of Westminster. She had written to Churchill in a complicated attempt to arrange the release of her nephew, André, from a prisoner-of-war camp, controversial negotiations which also involved her friend Vera Lombardi in Madrid and another German officer, Captain Theodore Momm, known to Chanel. While there is no proof that her activities were treasonous, they were certainly unsavoury, and it is clear that she was prepared to consort with Germans when it suited her, that she uttered ‘long tirade[s] against the Jews’ and that she was extremely lucky to escape a more severe prison sentence or worse.
Malcolm Muggeridge, the British journalist turned intelligence officer working for MI6 and sent to Paris after the Liberation, was shocked by the vindictive fury and chaotic conditions he encountered. After a visit to Fresnes, where he was appalled to find five or six women in a cell intended for one, he concluded that the judicial and prison systems were bursting. His main task was to investigate the writer P. G. Wodehouse and his wife Ethel (who became lifelong friends) as well as Chanel, suspected of spying partly because of her association with von Dincklage. The Wodehouses had been living in Le Touquet near Boulogne until the town was captured by the Germans in May 1940, whereupon he was interned in various camps for more than a year. Released in June 1941 on account of his age (he was sixty), he was sent to Berlin where he was joined by Ethel, who had also been detained in France, and agreed to write and record five talks describing his experiences. The talks, entitled How to be an Internee without Previous Training, were not political but were intended to be humorous anecdotes about Wodehouse’s experiences as a prisoner. They were initially broadcast only to the United States, with which Germany was not, at the time, at war. But they were also later broadcast to England where they caused a storm. The content was not objectionable, but by giving talks on German radio it was felt that he had aided the Nazis. Muggeridge, however, having considered the case, concluded that there was no evidence whatever that he had acted traitorously or had intentionally given any aid to the enemy, and judged that the broadcasts were neither anti-nor pro-German, but just ‘Wodehousian’.* Having done that, Muggeridge turned his attention to Chanel and decided that her success in withstanding the first épuration assault had been achieved ‘by one of those majestically simple strokes which made Napoleon so successful a general; she just put an announcement in the window of her emporium that scent was free for GIs, who thereupon queued up to get their bottles of Chanel No. 5, and would have been outraged if the French police had touched a hair of her head’.
American soldiers queuing in front of 31 Rue Cambon to collect their free bottles of Chanel No. 5.
Muggeridge described Chanel at sixty-two as looking ‘immensely old and incorporeal; I had the feeling that she might expire that very evening’, prematurely aged perhaps as a result of years of taking drugs. In pre-war days she and her confidante Misia Sert had made numerous visits to Switzerland together to various clinics and to stock up on morphine. In January 1942 this became more difficult and her good friend the journalist Boulos Ristelhueber had to make an emergency visit to an all-night pharmacy for opium supplies for Chanel and Misia, both hopelessly addicted. When Muggeridge came to write his report on his evening with her he concluded that ‘really there was nothing to say except that I was sure the épuration mills, however small they might grind, would never grind her – as indeed proved to be the case’.
Summary justice was occasionally still resorted to on both sides throughout 1944 but punishments were now increasingly organized by courts, however imperfect. Elie Scali, friend and former lover of Renée Van Cleef, who had committed suicide in 1942, now gave evidence in support of René Marty, the Vichy bureaucrat and first cousin of Vichy police chief René Bousquet. Marty had supplied Scali with many official passes enabling him to cross the demarcation line from one zone to another and had turned a blind eye to his business activities. Colonel Marty was subsequently employed by Van Cleef & Arpels after the war where, according to a woman whose mother had worked since 1919 as a polisher at the company, he clearly continued to receive ‘de très hautes protections’. Marty was extremely useful whenever there was a problem with various authorities. ‘For example, there had been a series of thefts at Van Cleef, of gems and jewellery, and the “Colonel” solved the problem since he deduced that it must be a staff member. All staff were questioned by police and the culprit was discovered.’