The request from Béatrice de Camondo Reinach, daughter of the wealthy Jewish banker Mo?se de Camondo, was also rejected. That summer Béatrice had been receiving instruction from a Catholic priest who, on 1 July, baptized her and four days later confirmed her into the faith. She continued riding in the Bois de Boulogne with the German officers from Neuilly she counted as her friends, and hunting in the forests near Senlis along with her close friends such as Marie-Louise de Chasseloup-Laubat, a high-profile hunt member who, unlike poor Béatrice, had been granted a valuable exemption certificate. Throughout the summer of 1942 Béatrice remained convinced that her brother’s death in action, her divorce, her conversion to Catholicism, her family’s gifts to the state and, above all, her friends in high places would surely protect her. While she herself was not a collector, she had grown up in an ambience where collecting French eighteenth-century art, preserving the ancient French patrimony, was more important than anything else, certainly religion. She had happily overseen the gift of her family’s home and collections to the state of which she was part and to which she belonged. She continued to feel secure within its boundaries. After all, her own mother, now Irène Sampieri, permanently immortalized by Renoir, seemed safe enough, albeit out of Paris. The child with the shimmering hair was to survive. But the horse-loving daughter was ultimately abandoned by friends as well as her mother, defined by her religion.
Béatrice was not alone in discovering that friends were not always robust. Renée Puissant was born Rachel Van Cleef on 22 October 1896. Her Jewish parents Alfred Van Cleef and Esther Arpels were double cousins who had married in 1895 in Paris when she was eighteen, he twenty-two. A generation earlier, Alfred’s father Salomon had left Ghent in Belgium after his first wife died and come to Paris, where he married Melanie Mayer, a linen merchant’s daughter. (Melanie’s sister, Theresa, married Salomon Arpels, and Esther was their daughter.) Salomon Van Cleef joined his father-in-law’s linen business, but when he died in 1883 his son Alfred was only eleven years old and it was decided that he should be apprenticed to a stonecutter. By 1906 Alfred and Esther were ready to open a fine jeweller’s in the Place Vend?me, following the example of Frédéric Boucheron, who had been the first to establish himself, in 1893, in the area near the new opera house. From the start they were in competition with Cartier, Chaumet, René Boivin and several others who had shops there. In 1908 they opened a branch in Dinard, followed by branches in other resorts such as Nice, Deauville and, in 1913, the important spa town and centre of much socialite activity, Vichy. There followed a period of rapid social advancement for the family. Esther, who now called herself by the less Jewish and more French name Estelle, served as a nurse during the First World War and was decorated four times for her work, culminating in 1921 when she received the Légion d’honneur.
But Renée, the only child of Alfred and Esther, never enjoyed a good relationship with her mother, who always felt more of an Arpels than a Van Cleef and was possibly jealous that her husband had left Renée rather than herself in control when he died in 1938. Renée was a deeply creative woman with a good business brain and an instinctive understanding of style, but she could not draw, so it was largely thanks to the appointment in 1922 of the designer René Sim Lacaze, who could interpret some of Renée’s ideas, that the company had developed its reputation for its innovative designs and daring originality.
At the outbreak of war, when some of the Arpels family were in the United States and others in the south of France, Esther decamped to Cannes. Renée, left in charge of the Paris store, courageously oversaw an aryanization of the business whereby in March 1941 the majority shareholder became Comte Paul de Léséleuc, in a deal which enabled Van Cleef & Arpels to continue trading. Renée, however, had already removed much of the stock in an extremely heavy suitcase to Vichy, where she took an apartment at the H?tel Parc et Majestic, the principal hotel, which housed Laval on the second floor and Pétain and his entourage on the third. She was alone but felt safe there, convinced she would be protected by her friendship with Josée de Chambrun and with René Bousquet’s cousin, Colonel Marty, the trusted administrator of her father, Alfred Van Cleef, who knew both her parents well. So she continued running the shop as a boutique, housed directly below the hotel.*