Stevenson recounts how Josée, ‘cold with anger’, protested: ‘This is an outrage against diplomatic protocol.’ But while the arguments proceeded, the papers were photographed for the British before being returned to her, revealing Laval’s conviction that Britain was finished. In early 1941 René de Chambrun returned to France, having had little success in his mission to persuade President Roosevelt to send food shipments to alleviate hunger for many thousands of refugees as well as displaced French in Vichy. Disappointed, he returned to Paris with Josée where the couple were swiftly engulfed in a round of lunches and dinners with Otto and Suzanne Abetz, as well as the German consul-general, Rudolph Schleier, and, of course, Arletty. ‘For a soldier who resisted the German invasion and a lobbyist who opposed the Germans in the United States, René adapted quickly to the new order that his father-in-law and his wife were introducing him to.’
Marie-Laure de Noailles had the most fascinating, if potentially dangerous, background of all the hostesses who entertained Germans: her father was Maurice Bischoffsheim, the affluent banker of German-Jewish and American Quaker descent. One of her great-great-great-grandfathers was the Marquis de Sade, and her maternal grandmother, Laure de Sade, Comtesse de Chevigné, inspired at least one character in Proust. It was Bischoffsheim money that enabled the Vicomtesse de Noailles to live in such splendour at 11 Place des Etats-Unis in a magnificent h?tel particulier built by her grandfather Bischoffsheim and which was high on the German list for requisition. Here Marie-Laure danced, placing herself at the centre of Parisian avant-garde style and acting as the patron and muse of artists, filmmakers and musicians such as Man Ray, Luis Bu?uel, Alberto Giacometti, Cocteau, Salvador Dalí and Francis Poulenc. Marie-Laure had remained in this house where she had grown up, with Serge Lifar as house guest, during the invasion and, thanks to help from Ambassador Bullitt, who claimed that the property was American, managed to keep hold of her unrivalled art collection of Goyas as well as paintings by Watteau, Van Dyck and Mondrian and several modernist sculptures.
Most notable among the other salonnières who contributed to the illusion that life in Paris was continuing as normal was the glamorous Florence Gould, born to an American mother and a French father in San Francisco in 1895. Florence Lacaze had trained as an opera singer but, after her first marriage ended in divorce, married in 1923 the much older, fabulously wealthy Frank Jay Gould, son of railroad millionaire Jay Gould, and gave up her operatic studies. The Goulds lived mostly in the south of France where the couple had built several enormous hotels and casinos, and entertained a wide swathe of society at their villa in Cannes. When the Occupation began, Frank bought tickets for them both to go back to America – as Americans they had ample opportunity to do so. But Florence refused to leave, and in 1941 she returned to Paris while Frank remained in Juanles-Pins. When she discovered that the Germans had requisitioned both her Parisian homes – a Boulevard Suchet apartment and her Maisons-Laffitte villa – she brazenly took up residence at the H?tel Bristol on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a hotel with a reputation for being able to acquire black-market food.