But it wasn’t only Jews who were being picked up in the febrile atmosphere of 1942. One hot morning in September two men came to arrest Drue Tartière while she was gardening. She described them later simply as a huge German soldier and a smaller Frenchman, but Nadine, her housekeeper, told her they were from the local Gestapo. Drue was in dirty overalls, earth between her toes and under her fingernails, but they refused to give her time to wash and change, insisting she had to come immediately. She managed, by offering them a cognac, to delay them just long enough so that Nadine could warn Jean Fraysse, her former boss at Paris Mondial with whom she was by now heavily involved in resistance work. Then, promised that her interrogation would last only an hour, she went off to the local prison. After twenty-four hours without food or drink she burst into the office of the Kommandant and brazenly pulled up her overalls to show him blood trickling down the insides of her legs. Her period had just begun and she made use of it by shouting at him: ‘If I am going to spend my life in this filthy hole, at least send to my house and get me some clean clothes and, above all, some sanitary napkins.’ The embarrassed Kommandant was shocked into complying with her demands, which gave Drue the chance to contact Nadine and ask her to send urgently not only sanitary napkins and other essentials but a medical certificate which she had cleverly acquired about ten months before stating she had cancer of the womb. From now on she was going to have to fake this condition and starve herself to within an inch of her life.
Drue, together with several other women, had been rounded up because she was American, an enemy alien, and not because, as she had at first feared, they had discovered she was Drue Leyton, the American actress with a price on her head; or indeed because she and Jean were planning to receive arms, ammunition and other material on her property. She was soon being held at the makeshift camp in the Grand H?tel at Vittel in north-eastern France, along with other American women she had known in Paris such as Sylvia Beach, whose well-known book shop, Shakespeare and Company, had been forced to close soon after the Occupation with most of the stock hidden upstairs. Drue persuaded the Jewish camp doctor, Dr Jean Lévy, who was also being held hostage, that in order to continue with her resistance work she had to get out. He agreed to play along with her ruse that she had cancer of the womb and, although he had to prescribe medicine to stop her haemorrhaging, told her to throw that down the toilet and instead take the haemorrhage-inducing medicine which she had brought with her as part of a preconceived plan. This made her very weak, and as an experienced actress she had little difficulty in staging fainting fits when the Nazi doctor came by. Dr Lévy quickly became worried that if she went on losing blood at such an alarming rate her health really would be compromised. But in early December the Germans agreed that she could go to a hospital in Paris for the X-ray treatment she kept demanding. Severely anaemic by now, she registered at the Clinique de l’Alma and was told she would require blood transfusions for at least the next year. But, after visiting Dr Lévy’s mother to reassure her that her son was alive and well and doing brave things for so many women, she went back to her house outside Paris where she lay low for a while to avoid reinternment.
In September 1942 Béatrice de Camondo wrote a heartfelt letter to a childhood friend she addressed as ‘Ma Bonne Moumouche’ (Mme de Leusse) in which she gave veiled descriptions of the present fearful situation in Paris and explained that she was preventing her daughter Fanny, who was referred to simply as ‘there’ (presumably in the unoccupied zone), from coming back to Paris as journeys were too dangerous. Béatrice said that she was still enjoying being able to ride every morning, smelling ferns and leaves, but that she now had to take the train every morning to a new place, closer to Paris, as she had stabled her horse with some new friends. Her divorce was proceeding but she wondered if it was worth the struggle, especially because ‘I am certain that I am miraculously protected, that I have been for years but it is only this year that I have understood from where all my blessings come. But will I have enough years to thank God and the Virgin adequately for their protection? I am such a small thing, and such a novice, so unworthy …’
Exactly three months later, on 5 December 1942, Béatrice and the twenty-four-year-old Fanny were arrested and taken to Drancy, now overflowing with 2,420 internees. According to some stories the Camondo women were arrested while having tea with a friend, but the official Nazi explanation for their arrest claimed that they had not been wearing their yellow stars, or that they were not in full view. This could be true only if they were outdoors. One week later the two women were joined there by Léon, Béatrice’s husband, and Bertrand, her son.
Among the desperate mass of humanity in Drancy was Bernard Herz, the pearl-dealer arrested on 2 November for a second time following a denunciation insisting that he, a Jew, was still running the business. Suzanne Belperron had been arrested the same day, she at her office and private showroom at the Rue de Chateaudun and he at his home at 38 Avenue du Président Wilson. Both were questioned at Gestapo headquarters, and in the car on the way there the policeman showed Belperron the letter of denunciation which alleged that she was running a Jewish business where one could not buy rings for less than 75,000 francs and cited the jewels of Lord Carnarvon. It was the mention of this name that made Belperron realize that she had been set up. A woman had visited her showroom a few weeks earlier asking for a particular type of ring similar to those she had made for Lord Carnarvon, the Egyptologist, before the war but offering to pay no more than 40,000 francs. Belperron told her that such a ring would cost at least 75,000 francs and, according to current regulations, she would need to supply more of her own gold. As the story reveals, Paris had become a city where nobody could be trusted, denunciations were rampant and bellies were filled with foreboding and fear.