This only served to emphasize that the armistice agreement of 1940 offered nothing that could justify the Vichy regime. As the Germans could no longer rely on Vichy to remain a neutral state in opposition to the Allies, they promptly occupied the whole of France, north and south. The Vichy administration was not officially disbanded but from now on it was increasingly a tool of German policy, and German repression was more draconian than ever. Any fiction that the unoccupied zone was free was now totally dispelled, and it was hard to see precisely what authority remained with the government in Vichy. In an odd reversal of the regime’s moral philosophy, married women, forbidden in 1940 from working in the public sector when husbands were in a position to provide for them, were now allowed to work without the permission of their husbands, so many of whom were either dead or prisoners of war. The country needed the workforce, the wives needed the money, so the laws were repealed.
Quite possibly, when police came to arrest her, Renée panicked, the events of November all too clearly consuming her thoughts, and threw herself out of the window from her third-floor bedroom. According to Arlette Scali, who had grown up with the Arpels family and whose second husband, Elie Scali, had once been one of Renée’s lovers, Renée was completely alone in her hotel, depressed and close to a breakdown. ‘She could not cope with all the goings-on, all the laws, and had been counting on Colonel Marty – the trusted administrator of her father, Alfred Van Cleef’ – to protect her. ‘She was not only frightened, she was sick with fright.’ She had been humiliatingly forced to move from the H?tel Parc et Majestic, where all the important Vichy leaders were living, to a third-floor room at the less prestigious Queen’s H?tel, not far away but a move which led her to believe that any protection she might have been entitled to had now evaporated. Unknown to her, however, on 6 November a letter from one Vichy police administrator to another stated in a handwritten postscript with double underlining, ‘Ne pas inquiéter sur Madame Renée Puissant Van Cleef’. What seems clear is that for her, as for Némirovsky, the final humiliation had been the law which came into force the previous day, requiring all Jews throughout France to wear a yellow star.
It is worth lingering on the connection with Colonel and Mme Marty. In the mid-1930s, when Elie Scali and Renée Puissant were lovers, René Marty had been a good friend of both. He had been l’homme de confiance of Renée’s father. Now, as a cousin of René Bousquet, the hugely powerful Vichy police chief, he could be extremely useful and indeed was for Elie Scali, providing him with many permits to travel from the free zone to Paris and back to enable him to continue overseeing his apparently aryanized leather business, which was clearly a vente fictive, the term used for a false sale. When the Scalis moved to Graullet, a village in the mid-Pyrenees, after their Paris apartment had been expropriated by the Germans, it was the Martys who ensured that they were protected by introducing them to the police in the Tarn department. In return, Arlette Scali sent to Mme Marty frequent food parcels of eggs, turkeys and whatever else they had access to on their land. They well knew they owed their lives to Colonel Marty and they did not desert him at the Liberation, pleading on his behalf when he was, for a short time only, interned in Drancy.