‘We were all amateurs,’ recalled Vivou (née Chevrillon), the young music-student cousin of Claire Chevrillon who was desperate to be involved in something more serious than customizing ready-made cork-soled shoes with fabric, important though that was if she was to look chic among her peers in Paris. Vivou had three brothers, one still a schoolboy, but the older two had both left home to join de Gaulle, encouraged by their remarkable mother who, so keen to help them resist, drove her nineteen-year-old son to the Spanish border to help him get out to fight. Like many young women of her circle, Vivou was not a formally registered resister but nonetheless was involved in important and potentially dangerous work creating false identity papers, forging the signature of the Paris Préfet, Amédée Bussière.*
Claire was arrested that eventful summer and on her release, after weeks in Fresnes prison, ‘it was my buoyant cousin Vivou, twenty, who marched me to a hairdresser on Rue Royale and stayed the whole time laughing and talking nonsense lest I run away’. Another friend gave a dinner party, which took two days to prepare, to celebrate Claire’s freedom. But the constant threat of a knock on the door in the middle of the night meant that for anyone with something to hide it was difficult to sleep. Some remember hearing dogs barking or whining during the night, others the anguished cries of torture victims or of those being arrested. Many people lived with a small bag packed in case they had to make a sudden escape. The uncertainty created by constantly changing hideouts and by often poorly forged identity cards, which would not have withstood close scrutiny, was taking its toll on already frayed nerves. The resistance seemed to be suffering one disaster after another in 1943. The Germans’ charm offensive during the first eighteen months of Occupation gave way to repressive control throughout the country, often relying on informers keen to win a promised reward, usually no more than a hundred francs. Many resisters were betrayed and captured in this way, culminating in the arrest in Lyons on 21 June (and subsequent torture and death) of Jean Moulin, the man parachuted back into France and charged by de Gaulle with unifying the various resistance groups under one umbrella. On 27 May the courageous Moulin, known for wearing a scarf wrapped around his neck to hide a previous attempt at suicide, had held the first meeting of the National Council of the Resistance in Paris but was betrayed just a few weeks later. His death along with the arrest of several of his associates was a major blow, leaving the local Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie in total control in Lyons. Paris, larger and with more opportunities for hiding, became a necessary but still intensely dangerous centre for resistance.
Immediately after her release, Claire went back to teaching at the Collège Sévigné, where her pupils treated her as a heroine. But the euphoria was short-lived. On 23 September her flatmate, the beautiful twenty-two-year-old aristocrat Jacqueline d’Alincourt, was arrested at their flat on the Rue de Grenelle after a landlady had denounced one of her contacts. Jacqueline found several Gestapo officers awaiting her when she returned to the flat and she tried to escape towards an inner stairway that led to the roof:
I was overtaken, handcuffed behind my back, and the interrogation began then and there. I tried in vain to overcome the trembling that took hold of me, head to foot, distressed at the idea that the men would notice it. Questions rained down on me thick and fast, and, because I refused to answer, one of them yelled at me, ‘We have ways of making you talk!’ I answered immediately: ‘I am sure you are capable of anything.’ I was slapped in the face and the trembling stopped. A feeling of relief came over me. The strength now within me would not abandon me throughout the five long days and nights that awaited me.
Fortunately Claire was out at the time of the arrest but, as the one who had introduced Jacqueline when she first came to Paris from her home in Poitiers two years previously to Jean Ayral, regional head of the Office of Air Operations (BOA) and a close collaborator of Jean Moulin, she was distraught.