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says, disappear in the magpie’s secret cache.’ The corn was growing well, ‘but there are no lima beans this year’. Sylvia’s First World War expertise from working the land as a Volontaire Agricole served her well with the flowers and vegetables on Carlotta’s land. In the same letter, she sent sad news of the Armenian friend Carlotta had asked her to visit in November 1940: ‘Your friend Mme Barseghian died on May 19th. Her son is a prisoner. The neighbors told me all about them. An operation on her eyes was unsuccessful.’ She wrote that Marcel and Gertrude de Gallaix, who were also using the house, would return ‘soon after the 15th when I shall be going back to town’. The two German officers assigned to live in the house in 1940 must have left by the time of Sylvia’s stay, because her letters did not refer to them.

Eleven days later, Sylvia returned to Carlotta’s house near Bourré. On 25 August, she wrote to Adrienne Monnier,

Food is missing completely in this countryside–not a chicken nor eggs nor butter nor cheese nor rabbits … But I have been to all my relations here to prostrate myself to have a chicken, a duck, a goose with no result … One may give me some eggs to be crushed on the trip to Paris with the mob I’ll find on the trains at the end of the month.

I hope that you have taken your vacation and that you are rested like me. You need it after all the months of exhaustion and privation to stand another winter of the kind that awaits us … Until Saturday night at 8 o’clock, I kiss you, Sylvia.

Back in Paris, Sylvia saw more of her friend Sarah Watson. Born in South Carolina in 1885, Miss Watson had lived in France since 1918 and was directress of the students’ hostel for girls in Paris, the Foyer International des Etudiantes, in the boulevard Saint-Michel. She and Sylvia met occasionally for lunch in the hostel’s cafeteria. Their views on the Nazis were identical. Miss Watson wrote home, in words that might have come from almost any American in occupied Paris, ‘If only America can wake up before it is too late, if she can realize this is not just another war–it is a new religion that is conquering the world.’

The last letter that Sylvia’s sisters received from her was sent in June 1941. A parcel of clothing that they sent her never arrived, because the British were seizing packages sent from the United States to France. Holly posted a letter to Sylvia in September, but it ‘was returned to me unopened’. George Antheil, Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish and other friends from her Golden Age in the 1920s wrote to her as well, but their letters came back. Paris was increasingly closed off, and Sylvia was closed off with it.

In the summer of 1941, Charles Bedaux was working on his equivalism project at Roquefort in Les Landes. His Ausweis from Otto Abetz allowed him to return to the Occupied Zone for weekends with Fern at the Chateau de Candé. At one of Candé’s lavish dinner parties, a German guest mentioned that the Luftwaffe planned to bomb the British petroleum refinery at Abadan. This information troubled Bedaux, who had studied the refinery on the Iranian shore of the Persian Gulf for its owners, Britain’s Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in 1937. In July 1939, he had advised Anglo-Iranian’s chairman, Lord Cadman, in London to protect the oil refinery from bombardment. Abadan, a prime asset in war and peace, was the world’s largest refinery with production of twelve million tons of fuel a year. Much of the oil came by pipeline from British-owned fields in Iraq. Petrol and lubricants from Abadan were vital to the British war machine in Iraq, Transjordan, Palestine and Egypt. Without it, Britain’s tanks and warplanes could neither deter the indigenous populations from seeking independence nor face the German threat.

To the German high command, denying petrol to Britain’s Middle East forces made military sense. A pro-German faction of the Iraqi officer corps under politician Rashid Ali al-Gailani had just seized power in Baghdad and sought German support against the British occupier. Syria and Lebanon were in the