But war, of course, is neither about merely statistics nor about playing with reputations. War destroys lives. Toquette Jackson never fully recovered her health after Ravensbrück and lived quietly at the family home at Enghien-les-Bains, outside Paris, until she died in 1968 at the American Hospital, where her husband Sumner had worked so tirelessly. She had been continually ill, too sick to return to nursing or even to work at all, although she had talked about having a small business in Paris as a way of affording life in the city. She struggled, but retained both her dignity and her courage and was decorated with many awards, including the Croix de guerre, the Croix du combattant volontaire and, in 1946, Chevalière of the Légion d’honneur, promoted to Officier in 1964. No amount of medals could, however, compensate for loneliness. Some days she wrote in her diary simply: ‘Nobody came …’ In the event Phillip, her son, looked after his mother. He too was highly decorated, testified at the War Crimes Tribunal at Hamburg in May 1946, studied to be an engineer, married and brought up a family. At the time of writing he is a resident of Les Invalides, the distinguished home for war veterans in the centre of Paris, where we met to discuss his mother.
Wallis and Edward, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, no matter how hard they tried, failed to shift perceptions of themselves in the postwar world as defeatists or, worse, as Nazi sympathizers, and were from then on purposeless exiles, part of European café society moving from one reception to another. From time to time Wallis complained to the British Ambassador that her husband was not being informed of current events or invited to official receptions, or both. Hoping in vain that the British royal family would see fit finally to give Wallis her royal initials – HRH – thus ensuring that she was curtseyed to and therefore enabling the couple to return to England unashamed, they declined to find a permanent home anywhere else. New York, Canada (Edward had a ranch in Alberta) and the south of France, where they continued to rent their heavily staffed, pre-war villa La Cro?, were all considered. They became an isolated element of postwar Paris life, or of a certain part of it, le gratin, invited to fashion shows, to jewellers and in Wallis’s case to the Elizabeth Arden beauty salon, which she especially liked as she rarely paid and was always given her own robe with the initials SAR (Son Altesse Royale) – the French version of royal initials – on the pocket. But waiting to see what would happen in Britain was an unsettling existence, so in 1948 they rented 85 Rue de la Faisanderie, a palatial building where some of the decoration had been created by Wallis’s pre-war friend Elsie de Wolfe, but for which neither of them felt any particular affection. And then, after the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, when it became clear that the royal family’s attitude towards Wallis had not softened, they decided to settle in Paris.
They accepted an offer from the French government to live at 4 Champ d’Entra?nement, a fine three-storey, turn-of-the-century mansion in the Bois de Boulogne, a house which came with four acres as well as its own history, having been expropriated from Renault after the war on the grounds that the motor manufacturer had collaborated. Louis Renault had initially refused to produce tanks for the Germans but ended up making trucks. In the poisonous atmosphere of the Liberation, he was arrested on 23 September 1944 and taken to Fresnes, where he died in ‘mysterious circumstances’ a month later, awaiting trial. The company was then nationalized by General de Gaulle, who briefly lived in the Bois de Boulogne house himself – his wife, the ever modest Yvonne, described it as ‘a degree above what I would have liked’. It was offered to the Windsors on a fifty-year lease for a peppercorn rent and it was here that Wallis undertook some grand entertaining (the Duke died in 1972). It was not until the 1980s that the formidable lawyer known as Ma?tre Suzanne Blum came to dominate the Duchess’s life. During the Second World War, Suzanne Weill (as she then was) and her lawyer husband managed to escape to New York, returning to Paris in 1945. From the moment she established her law practice in Paris, Ma?tre Blum began acquiring a remarkable list of clients, mostly prominent figures in the film industry, but she also defended Bernard Fa?, the prominent collaborator, protector and friend of the American writer, Gertrude Stein. In her spare time, under a pseudonym, Ma?tre Blum wrote detective stories. Her own complicated life would have provided a good plot.