? Turnover in 1943 rose to 463 million francs, from 67 million in 1941. The fashion magazines continued to publish photographs of Parisian high society with details of what the women were wearing, at least until February 1943, when the Germans, not wishing to encourage an appetite for clothes its own women could not satisfy, finally banned the distribution of photographs of French fashion. Those regularly buying the latest Parisian couture designs included wives of German officers, wives of Parisian collaborators, journalists, film stars and wives of industrialists with flourishing businesses. Among them were the actress wife of ‘Steve Passeur’, nom de plume of Etienne Morin, a journalist and dramatist popular at the time who occupied a suite at the Ritz; Fran?oise Luchaire, wife of Jean; Mme Lisette de Brinon, newly created honorary Aryan; and Josée de Chambrun. They formed a distinct and limited circle of women intent on keeping up their position in society as they attended a plethora of Franco-German receptions.
* According to this account, as told to her biographer George Perry, she was interviewed by the Gestapo. But 84 Avenue Foch was the headquarters of the SD and the SiPo, the Sicherheitspolizei. As the two were complementary, Bluebell may easily have been mistaken in thinking it was the Gestapo – in fact headquartered at 11 Rue de Saussaies – who interviewed her.
* In one of her hideouts, a cabin in the forest near Montfort-l’Amaury, she finished a diary she had started at Rothschild which was later found by her son, Doda Conrad, while going through papers to write his own autobiography, Dodascalies: ma chronique du XXe siècle, Arles, Actes Sud, 1997.
* In this handwritten schedule of 26 July 1943 the Germans have tidily boxed away the Lévys, Kasriels, Dreyfuses, Schwabs, Nathans and others, identifying all their allotted tasks such as bread, vegetables, painting, hygiene and medical. The sense of order, the notion that this was where the Jews belonged, in their boxes, is chilling.
1944 ? (January–June)
PARIS AWAITS
On 17 January 1944 at around 8.30 in the evening, an air-raid warning sounded especially loudly in the Marie-Louise clinic at the top of Rue des Martyrs, the street which led to Pigalle with its ever busier nightclubs and brothels. The wailing drowned out the cries of a baby girl, born in the middle of the raid to a young single mother, Madeleine Hardy. Madeleine, twenty-three years old, a poorly paid accounts assistant, had recently had an abortion but badly wanted this child, even though she knew that the father, a married man with whom she was not especially in love, would not leave his wife to become her husband. He, however, a well-to-do and financially secure manager of a calculating-machine business, twenty years older than Madeleine, was madly in love with this statuesque free spirit and so rented a small two-room flat in the Rue d’Aumale, where he continued to visit his mistress and admire his new daughter, Fran?oise. This arrangement did not displease Madeleine. A few months later she was again pregnant with his child. But this time, with the war still far from over and food in the city as scarce as ever, the father wanted nothing to do with the new baby. Madeleine, being strong-minded, determined to keep the child, another girl (Michèle, born in July 1945), and enlisted the active help of her own mother so that she could return to work. The elder daughter kept her mother’s name and, as Fran?oise Hardy, went on to become one of the country’s best-known pop singers in the 1960s. She was scornful of her father and of how little he provided for the family.
Paris was a dangerous place for most of 1944. As long as the Germans stayed, the curfew remained in force and one night, when Fran?oise’s father was caught out too late to get home, Madeleine refused to let him into the flat he paid for, suspecting he had been with another woman. He found shelter, but this was unforgivable behaviour as the Gestapo were ratcheting up the tension in those months, resorting to any excuse or none to arrest people in Paris, aware that the tide of war was turning. Following the German defeat at Stalingrad the previous year, the Russians were now gaining on the eastern front and the Allies, known to be preparing European landings, were also pursuing the Germans from southern Italy after successfully securing North Africa. The resistance in Paris itself was becoming bolder. On one occasion when there was a volley of gunfire in the street, Madeleine threw herself on top of the pram to protect her baby from the bullets.