* Fry volunteered for the Emergency Rescue Committee, which had been set up shortly after the fall of France to rescue intellectuals and others hunted by the Nazis in Vichy, and which saved at least 2,000 people.
* The French resistance comprised many different movements and networks, often containing smaller units called réseaux, each of which had a specific purpose such as gathering intelligence, sabotage or helping evading airmen find an escape route.
* A statute, or ordonnance, was effectively a law which would normally be ratified by a parliament while a decree was secondary legislation, usually complementary, and gave details of how the law should be interpreted. However, given that Vichy was an authoritarian regime, it did not always follow correct constitutional procedure.
* In 1945, she fell in love with Simon Nora, a French Jewish resistance fighter. Her furious family managed to have her interned in a Swiss psychiatric clinic, but Nora and some of his resistance comrades freed her and in January 1947 they were married, whereupon Marie-Pierre de Cossé-Brissac’s family disowned her (Benjamin Ivry, ‘Confronting Father’s Mountain of Exaggerations’, Forward, 13 October 2012).
* Miriam finally came to London in 1945 and married her fiancé Ben Stanton.
* Baur, thought to be Jewish because of his name, was arrested in 1942. But although he was released when no Jewish origins could be proved, he died shortly afterwards.
* The Cahen d’Anvers family had also donated a villa outside Paris and a great-aunt, Béatrice Ephrussi-Rothschild, had bequeathed the rose-pink villa at Cap Ferrat to the Académie des Beaux Arts.
? A reference Degas intended to be insulting by comparing him with the popular painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau and suggesting he might frequent the cabaret-café le Mirliton in Montmartre, owned by Aristide Bruant, friend of Toulouse-Lautrec.
* When Irène’s mother, Fanny, learned what had happened to the furs and jewellery she complained, but Irène responded through an intermediary that she had assumed her mother would be thrilled to help her daughter survive.
* Count René de Chambrun, godson of Marshall Pétain, son-in-law of Pierre Laval and cousin of Franklin Roosevelt, was impeccably well connected. He served as a captain in the French army until the collapse of France in May 1940 and, from that experience, believed that Britain’s Royal Air Force was superior to the Luftwaffe and would ultimately stop Germany from winning the war. He was therefore sent, at the request of U.S. Ambassador William Bullitt, as special emissary to Washington to stiffen his cousin’s resolve in providing arms for Britain to resist the Nazis.
* In 1952 she was commissioned by Paul Rosenberg to paint his four-year-old granddaughter, Anne Sinclair.
* Henri Lafont and Pierre Bonny, part of the corrupt Parisian underworld, took advantage of the Occupation to set up a criminal gang known as the Bonny-Lafont gang headquartered at 93 Rue Lauriston, where they carried out numerous acts of interrogation and torture.
1942
PARIS RAVAGED
On 20 January 1942 senior Nazi officials gathered at a lakeside villa just outside Berlin. The aim of the meeting, known to history as the Wannsee Conference, was to agree the procedure for the implementation of the ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question whereby most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe would be murdered. This gave new impetus to the thousands of German officers in France who, in addition to ensuring that everything was being done to ensure military victory, now, at the same time and with the help of Vichy officials, devoted themselves to the relentless task of ridding the country of its Jewish population. Of course not every German in France was aware of the project for mass extermination and some, had they known, would not have supported such a plan. At the top was Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, Commander in Chief in France from February 1942, increasingly an opponent of Hitler who eventually paid for his opposition with his life.* But in 1942, fresh from serving successfully on the eastern front where he had ordered many reprisals against partisans and where he was not known for his opposition to mass executions of Jews, he had little room for action. There were other non-Nazis in Paris, but most of them, aware of the risks, toed the line and waited.