If it was a difficult path for entertainers, the hostesses, especially the three Maries – de Noailles, Bousquet and de Polignac, all pillars of 1930s café society and regulars at Le Boeuf sur le Toit or Maxim’s in pre-war years – now found entertaining Germans in their drawing rooms came rather naturally. A number of women made themselves useful to the authorities in this way by introducing Francophile Germans such as Ernst Jünger, Gerhard Heller and Otto Abetz to writers, musicians and artists such as Cocteau, Christian Bérard, Sacha Guitry and others ready to socialize with their new masters. Several regular attendees, having made the connections, then agreed to visit Germany. The outspoken anti-Semites, such as Brasillach, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and even Rebatet, mostly did not frequent these fashionable salons.
Few of these hostesses were quite as aristocratic as their names might indicate. As a recent study of café society makes clear, many of the French elite had married American or Jewish money in the previous decades, so there were now few ‘pure-bred’ aristocrats. Comtesse Marie-Blanche de Polignac was the daughter of the self-made dress designer Jeanne Lanvin and heir to the fashion house her mother had created. Marie-Louise Bousquet, no beauty, was famously derided by Chanel for having the face of a monkey and the mouth of a sewer, but she was the immensely influential editor of the French Harper’s Bazaar, and a wide variety of cultural and political figures including the cellist Pierre Fournier attended her musical soirées at 3 Place du Palais Bourbon, where her (almost next-door) neighbours were the extremely influential de Chambruns.
Josée de Chambrun, Pierre Laval’s adored only child, was stylish and attractive, with olive skin, dark hair and an engaging smile. She had been well educated, spoke excellent English and could play golf and ride, both useful accomplishments. The bond between father and daughter was intense and when she accompanied him, aged twenty, to the United States in 1931 on his triumphant visit as the new French Prime Minister, the American press went wild in their praise for this chic, gay Parisienne. Three years later, at a dinner party, she met an aristocratic lawyer with dual French and American nationality, Count René de Chambrun, known as Bunny, a descendant of the original Marquis de La Fayette, the French aristocrat who fought for America at the time of the Revolutionary War. De Chambrun ran a successful international law practice which boasted Chanel among its clients. His mother was Clara Eleanor Longworth, a relation by marriage of President Roosevelt, who managed to keep the American Library in Paris open during the war. Josée and René were married in 1935, did not have children and were soon indulging in a frenetic social whirl of partying and race-going at the centre of Parisian social life. They knew everyone. As an indication of how useful these evenings were for smoothing Franco-German relations at various levels, the de Chambruns helped provide financial assistance for the Bousquet salon, and Josée introduced the popular film actress and former music-hall singer Arletty to a handsome young Luftwaffe officer, Hans-Jürgen Soehring. Though he was ten years younger than Arletty, she fell passionately and publicly in love and they were seen eating lobsters and oysters together, quaffing champagne and attending the opera, as well as visiting Megève, the ski resort in the Haute-Savoie favoured by Germans and wealthy collabos. On one occasion Soehring even introduced Arletty to G?ring, on one of the latter’s famous shopping trips to Paris. Arletty’s collaboration may have been romantic, but that of her friend Josée went deeper than merely accepting and enjoying a way of life in the capital and eating with her father at the best restaurants.
According to the author William Stevenson in his exposé of wartime spying, A Man Called Intrepid, Pierre Laval had used his daughter in November 1940 as a courier to take messages to the Vichy Embassy in Washington because she had diplomatic immunity through her husband’s work.* He believed she would not attract attention to herself and that her bags, containing documents revealing Vichy post-war aims for France to join a victorious Germany, would not be searched. But when the flying boat was delayed overnight in Bermuda, her possessions were seized.