For the next two years her luck held as she soon met several of the German officers who had been her friends at Dinard and who were now working on secret projects. Jeannie was overhearing the most sensitive possible information – tales of special weapons that were being designed in eastern Germany and whose uses she did not entirely comprehend. Both she and Georges Lamarque suspected that she had stumbled upon one of the great military secrets of the war and understood how crucial such information was for the Allies. Lamarque urged her to seek out every morsel she could. But such work came with a high risk factor at a time when most pretty girls her age would be dating, even starting a family. Yet Jeannie felt compelled to do this instead.
Claude du Granrut, now an octogenarian living in the centre of Paris within sight of the Palais-Royal apartment where Colette spent the war years, was a schoolgirl of ten when war broke out. Looking back, trying to understand why some chose the path to resist and others to collaborate, she believes that for her family too it was a straightforward decision. ‘My family took another route,’ she said. ‘I never saw a single German at my home. Pff no! That was very important … nor would my parents resort to the black market. But they were desperate for me, the youngest of the family, to grow up healthy so they often sent me away to the country where I could get fresh milk and vegetables.’ Mostly life continued as normal for young Claude, who still went with her class to weekly matinées at the Comédie-Fran?aise. But she was well aware of the ‘complications’ many in Paris experienced in making up their minds how to respond. Could one fight the Germans? Or was it best to put up with them in order to continue the cultural life of France with its books, movies, plays and haute couture? Her father, Robert, Comte de Renty, was a veteran of the Great War, a German-speaking businessman involved in agrochemicals, who, she thought in her childhood, went off every day to his office in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, perhaps lunching at the exclusive Jockey Club, the one place in Paris which German officers did not penetrate. Her immensely elegant mother Germaine, the Comtesse – so chic that all Claude’s schoolfriends told her they were jealous of her having such a glamorous mother, ‘une vraie Parisienne’ – was involved in social work, visiting underprivileged women in the 20th arrondissement in the east of the city, distributing clothes, and sending parcels to prisoners of war. She was not, as Claude wrote of her later in her memoir, Le Piano et le violoncelle, someone whose presence could be overlooked. ‘She was serene and welcoming to all.’ But Claude was only vaguely aware of the welfare visits. ‘She was working to maintain France in a certain way and to show solidarity with my father, who was doing much more in the way of resistance. But I did not know that at the time and it was certainly not discussed at home.’ In fact, Germaine de Renty and Jeannie Rousseau were friends, but that too Claude did not know until later.
The de Renty family listened to Radio Londres, the BBC broadcasts from London in French, organized by the Free French who had escaped there – ‘something we had to be very careful about when other families visited’ – and followed carefully what was happening in the rest of the world. What changed for many Parisians in 1941, Claude du Granrut believes, was first the German invasion of Russia in June, followed, at the end of the year, by the American entry into the war as a result of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. ‘Little by little, families like ours believed that the war could be won and the Germans defeated.’ The Russian invasion not only freed communists to resist but also helped motivate waverers to do something. But there was also a deeper motive for women, she believes. ‘For the first time young women decided they had to do something for their country. They couldn’t vote or be in the army but they felt the country had been so damaged they wanted to show that as women they could s’engager. It was something completely unique.’