At the end of the year, Corinne Luchaire, having spent the previous six months recovering in a sanatorium, married the French aristocrat Guy de Voisins-Lavernière. He was a shady character who had business relationships with the powerful and dangerous Bonny-Lafont gang, part of the Gestapo Fran?aise, the network which supplied the Germans with a wide variety of material objects through black-market contacts and worked with German police to chase Jews and resistance fighters.* There was a ridiculously lavish wedding party but it was the prelude to an extremely brief marriage. Although Mary Pickford had hailed Corinne as ‘the new Garbo’, she later wrote pathetically: ‘No doubt it was my destiny to be involved in major international events without understanding them.’
On Sunday 7 December 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and within days the United States was at war with Germany. Americans were now enemy aliens in France and subject to arrest. Drue Tartière was allowed to remain in the country since her husband (albeit away fighting) was French and the Germans had not realized that she was in fact the American actress Drue Leyton, for whom they had five times issued a death warrant on air because of the pro-British, anti-German messages she had been broadcasting on Paris Mondial right up until the fall of France. Drue had decided she would engage in whatever small acts of resistance she could undertake, based in her farmhouse just outside the capital at the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, from where she could make regular trips to the centre of Paris to keep in touch with other women who were starting to resist. In September she learned that her husband Jacques had been killed fighting in Syria for de Gaulle’s Free French Forces. He had been shot in the back in Damascus by a French Vichyite prisoner-of-war whose surrender he had just accepted. Drue did not know these details immediately but she understood that she had to keep his death a secret from all in her village. If it was known that Jacques had been with the Free French, she would immediately be a suspect herself.
The final months of 1941 saw the resistance, emboldened, now taking to armed action on the streets and organized sabotage. What started in August with a young communist firebrand firing two shots into the back of a German naval cadet, as he stepped into a departing train at Barbès Métro station, continued with further acts of escalating violence in Paris and Lille, as well as strikes at the Renault motor factory in Paris, which meant that Renault were producing a quarter of the vehicles intended for Germany. The repercussions were swift and dramatic. On 20 October, after the Feldkommandant of Nantes had been shot in the back, the Germans put up posters around Paris and elsewhere in France announcing the immediate shooting of fifty hostages, with fifty more hostages to be taken if the guilty persons were not arrested by midnight on 23 October. Almost 150 Frenchmen, mostly communists, were shot in these reprisals and, although both Pétain and de Gaulle urged restraint on both sides, the atmosphere had now changed irreparably. In December the Nazis came up with a further demand, as retaliation for these resistance activities: that French Jews should pay a fine of 1,000 million francs to be collected by the UGIF and that a thousand Jews should be arrested prior to deportation for forced labour in the east. When Otto Abetz, who had a French wife, was informed of the plan he immediately telephoned the German Foreign Office to make sure that the hostages were described not as Frenchmen, but as ‘Soviet and Secret Service agents of Judaeo-Communist and de Gaullist origin’.
And so, on 12 December, the Gestapo came for Maurice Goudeket, Colette’s Jewish husband, one of 753 picked up that day; he was ‘charged with the crime of being a Jew, of having served voluntarily in the last war and of having been decorated’, explained a distraught Colette. Writing openly for several occupation and Vichy organs had not been enough to protect her husband. Now, on discovering that Maurice had been taken to the camp at Compiègne, Colette was horrified at the fate that might befall him and used every collaborationist contact she could muster to free him. Her most valuable ally was Suzanne Abetz, who had been introduced by mutual friends and was a keen admirer of her writing. In early February Maurice was released, thanks to the Abetz intervention, and there followed an effusive exchange, with thank-you flowers from Colette and some books from Suzanne Abetz which were delivered by chauffeur and which she wanted signed, along with an invitation to tea for Colette and Maurice. They were well aware this was not the end. For most of the others picked up that day, who finally left Compiègne for Auschwitz on 27 March 1942 with the unhappy distinction of being the first 1,112 deportees from France, it very definitely was.
* The law against women wearing trousers, never enforceable since its introduction in 1800, was finally rescinded only in February 2013, after 213 years. From August 1941 women were not allowed to receive ration tokens for tobacco for reasons of ‘moral regeneration’ which caused considerable stress for some. See here for example of Jeanne Bucher.
* The title was Oddon’s suggestion, in homage to the actions of Marie Durand, one of the great icons of the French Protestant world, who resisted religious intolerance in the eighteenth century.