Just before her arrest Agnès had been agonizing over how to earn a living, having been sacked by the Vichy government from her curatorial post as art historian at the Musée des Arts et Traditions. She and a friend came up with the ruse that, before it was too late – given the new aryanization law whereby Jews were prevented from engaging in commercial activities or owning businesses – they should pretend to buy an art gallery belonging to a Jewish dealer while drawing up a private contract with him guaranteeing to return it after the Germans had left. ‘The extraordinary upturn in the art market should enable us to earn a very decent living over the months to come,’ she wrote. They never got around to it, but others were making fortunes from the frenzied looting of works of art and from the desperation not only of impoverished aristocrats but also of wealthy Frenchmen and women who saw an opportunity to sell heirlooms and raise cash. Paris became an antique-dealer’s paradise.
At the very start of the Occupation, a law was passed by the Vichy government declaring that French nationals who had fled the country between 10 May and 30 June 1940 were no longer citizens and their property could be seized and liquidated. The Germans had already passed a similar law for the occupied zone even though theoretically the French were still responsible for law-making. The Vichy administration, believing itself independent and wishing to show it was not merely a Nazi tool, had complained about this on the grounds that, according to the Hague Convention, an occupying power might not interfere with the civil laws of a conquered nation. But even though the German expropriation policy was putting Franco-German relations under increasing strain, Gestapo officers continued removing articles from abandoned Jewish shops and houses, with a list supplied them by Ambassador Abetz of the names and addresses of the fifteen principal Jewish art-dealers in Paris. With French police providing the vans, the Germans now set about removing whatever was still to be found on the premises of the Wildenstein, Seligmann, Paul Rosenberg and Bernheim-Jeune galleries, including books, furniture and even kitchen utensils, as well as the contents of a fine Rothschild residence in the Rue Saint-Honoré. These were taken first to the German Embassy in the Rue de Lille, then to the Louvre to be catalogued and stored. But there were so many thousands of works of art which had been stolen that it was decided instead to use the Jeu de Paume, a smaller museum but deemed by the Nazis to be a more suitable space once the Germany Embassy in Paris could hold no more. By the end of October, more than 400 boxes had been brought in under the overall direction of a taskforce known as the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) to undergo a meticulous and systematic classification process in order to decide who was to have what. There were various destinations, but G?ring himself, who came to the Jeu de Paume twelve times in 1941 alone, was especially greedy. He was looking for Old Masters, especially those Germanic in origin, both for his own personal collection at Carinhall, his home, and for the planned gallery at Linz, in Austria. Rembrandts, Vermeers and works by Cranach the Elder were favourites, while examples of impressionist and modern art, which the Germans dubbed degenerate, were sold to Swiss dealers in Lucerne and Zurich, who did a brisk trade. The Germans might barter them for Old Masters, while dealers in Paris, in exchange for supplying information, were allowed to choose a selection of paintings. Other works were ‘sold’ in shady French deals, supposedly to benefit French war orphans. While all the various interest groups were squabbling, the stupefied curator in charge of the Jeu de Paume was the unlikely-looking Rose Valland, a forty-two-year-old spinster who at first, amazingly, was allowed to make an inventory of everything that arrived there and where it went. Her cataloguing skills and attention to detail were to prove invaluable in the post-war search for stolen paintings.