For the next few months Jeannie enjoyed her work. ‘The Germans still wanted to be liked then,’ she recalled. They were happy to talk to someone whose German was fluent enough to enable them to engage in conversation yet who, they concluded, was surely too young and pretty to understand all that they let spill about names and numbers and plans. Soon the British were receiving so much intelligence about German operations in the Dinard area, partly thanks to Jeannie who had been approached by a local resister, that some Germans believed there must be a well-placed agent there. In January 1941 Jeannie was arrested by the Gestapo and held at Rennes prison for a month. But when a German army tribunal examined her case, the Wehrmacht officers from Dinard defended their charming translator, insisting that she couldn’t be a spy. She was released, but clearly there was still some doubt surrounding her and so she was ordered in any case to leave the coastal area.
Now, having acquired the taste for resistance through listening, she went back to Paris where she quickly found a new job acting as an interpreter, this time for a French industrialists’ syndicate, a sort of national chamber of commerce for French businesses trying to sell in Germany, with offices on the Rue Saint-Augustin. Jeannie soon became a key member of the organization, a role which involved meeting regularly with the German military commander’s staff, whose headquarters were at the H?tel Majestic. She would visit the Germans almost every day to discuss commercial issues, such as complaints that the Nazis had commandeered inventories and offers from French businessmen to sell strategic goods like steel and rubber to the Germans, and was accumulating a vast amount of basic intelligence. But she felt her information was going to waste.
It was then that she met an old friend, Georges Lamarque, a mathematician several years older than her who remembered her gift for languages and suggested she might like to join him in his work. It was not an entirely chance meeting since Jeannie was travelling on a train to Vichy in a bid to find out what was going on there, instinctively recognizing that there might be an opportunity to use her knowledge but not yet knowing how. So in response to Lamarque’s invitation, she unhesitatingly said yes. She told him there were certain offices and departments at the H?tel Majestic that were out of bounds because the Germans were working in those rooms on special weapons and projects, but she thought that because she was trusted – she was just twenty-one, headstrong and extremely pretty – she could get into those restricted areas. Lamarque made her part of his small réseau, or network, known as the Druids, and gave her the codename Amniarix.*
Talking about it later, she said that the information was there for the plucking. ‘It was very simple … I used my memory. I knew all the details about the plants and commodities in Germany. We were building up knowledge of what they had, what they did; we could keep an eye on what they were doing – “we” being me. And I couldn’t be dangerous, could I?’