When I began this book a male historian suggested I spend hours in the subterranean Bibliothèque Nationale reading the diaries of men like Hervé Le Boterf and Jean Galtier-Boissière. But, important though these may be, I have tried to find an alternative, often quieter and frequently less well-known set of voices. I have relied on interviews with women who lived through the events, of necessity as children, as well as on diaries, letters, ration cards and memoirs of those no longer alive, both published and unpublished. I have watched intensely dramatic films, read hundreds of letters of denunciation, seen and touched hollow jewellery made with limited materials as well as cork or wooden-soled shoes, whose clackety-clack provided the soundtrack to the Occupation. Some voices weave in and out of the story, occasionally in different locations, others disappear entirely from the narrative either through death or because they leave France. It was always going to be hard finding women who admitted that they had worked for a German victory (although there are some) and so occasionally I have relied on a male account of a situation pertaining to women or used historical records of women who betrayed.
It has been exciting and rewarding to discover that women’s influence and activities during these years were considerably greater than might be expected from the public roles they were allowed to play in society at that time. Before 1939 women in French society were often politically invisible, without a vote and needing permission from husbands or fathers to work or own property. Yet women were actively using weapons in the resistance, hosting evaders on the run, delivering false identity papers, at the same time as they were performing all the old familiar tasks of cooking, shopping and caring for their homes. Women were now in charge, looking after the elderly as well as the children, duties which often prevented their own escape, and sometimes they were holding down a job too. Shortages and lack of refrigeration forced women to queue, for an average of four hours a day, to gather enough to feed the family they were being encouraged to bring into the world. Some women resorted to collaborating and some were straightforwardly victims, but others were simply bystanders, caught in the crossfire, and it is their role that occasionally proved crucial.
One more thing: the word ‘Parisienne’ may summon up to many the image of a chic, slim woman who wears fashionably elegant clothes and is alluring to men. Undeniably, women in Paris used fashion to defy the occupier in a small way, perhaps by adopting culottes to ride bicycles when the fuel ran out or by making ceramic tricolore buttons. Yet this is not a book about fashion, even though fashion was important both to Parisiennes themselves and to the German occupiers. But, while admitting that the glamorous description fits some of the women in this book – women who wore designer suits while risking their lives to deliver vital information, women who believed that wearing an outrageously large hat was a form of resistance – I am giving it a wider meaning. Many typically Parisian women found themselves, through necessity, living or subsisting outside Paris, while others in this story, though remaining in the city, were not Parisiennes in the accepted use of the word. If I had been in any doubt about using the term to describe a woman not living in the city but imprisoned in a camp, wearing rags, with sores on her skin, scars from lashings and unwashed hair, I felt justified when I learned that, instead of eating the ounce or so of fat she was given daily, she massaged it into her hands after concluding that these needed preserving more than her stomach. That seemed to me the reasoning of a true Parisienne.
PART ONE
WAR
1939
PARIS ON THE EDGE
When the future looks uncertain some women get married, others get divorced, yet more buy jewels and hundreds go into hiding. Just a few, a very few, give such opulent balls that the world seems for a moment to have tilted on its axis.
On 1 July 1939 Elsie de Wolfe, an American-born interior decorator and failed actress, gave one of the grandest and most bizarre parties ever hosted by a private individual. Elsie, by then aged eighty-one and married for the previous thirteen years, much to everyone’s surprise, to the retired British diplomat Sir Charles Mendl, had shown her mettle during the First World War when she had remained in Paris volunteering in a hospital and winning the Croix de guerre and the Légion d’honneur for her relief work with gas-burn cases. Now she nursed a passion for parties. Owner of the newly fabulous Villa Trianon, a Louis XV chateau in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, Lady Mendl was the best-known American hostess in Europe. She had devoted the last thirty-five years of her life – both as Lady Mendl and long before when she was the close companion of the theatrical agent Elisabeth Marbury – to the villa’s restoration and redecoration (it had been unlived in for many years). Giving lavish and original parties there was now her life’s work. She had recently created a dance pavilion with a specially imported spring-loaded floor, and had installed glass walls so that the views to the gardens were unimpeded; she had also had the space wired for sound under the supervision of her friend Douglas Fairbanks.