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to the Château de Candé to play golf and ping-pong with Charles and Fern Bedaux. Charles and Fern were masterful golfers. Having Laval’s daughter to visit helped to cement their friendship with her father. Laval, after all, would be useful if he became prime minister again. Josée bumped into Hans Jürgen Soehring, the German officer who was living with her actress friend, Arletty. In the evening, René joined Josée at the chateau for dinner with the Bedauxs and other friends. René and Josée drove from Candé at midnight to the Villa Argizagita near Biarritz, where Aldebert and Clara de Chambrun were waiting for them. On Sunday, amid the splendour of the Pyrenees, they celebrated Easter together. Clara did not record whether René confided in her the degree to which he had become involved in Vichy politics or that Laval was about to return to office. As an admirer of Laval, she would have approved anything her son did to bring him back. When the Easter festivities ended, both Chambrun families returned to Paris.

In Paris, Josée became embroiled in another kind of Franco-German dispute. Arletty and her German lover, Soehring, were squabbling. Arletty sought Josée’s advice, and Soehring called to accuse her of stirring up trouble between them. On 8 April, René went to Châteldon by train with Josée, François Monahan and Monahan’s brother-in-law, Alexandre de Marenches. On board, they met Ernst Achenbach, counsellor at the German Embassy, and the pro-German journalist Jean Luchaire. If René was not a collaborator, the company he was keeping left little room for another interpretation.

On 13 April, Pétain made his choice: Laval and Hitler over Darlan and Roosevelt. Six days later, Laval became prime minister with Darlan in the government as military chief. Including Darlan was not sufficient to placate Roosevelt, who reacted immediately. He recalled Admiral Leahy from Vichy, and the US navy disarmed the French fleet in France’s Caribbean colonies. The United States blamed René de Chambrun for instigating Laval’s coup, but he pleaded that his involvement had come by chance while trying to help François Monahan. Like his mother, René was guided more by family and friendship than politics.

The Americans were not the only ones displeased to see Laval back in office. Josée had begged her father not to serve under Pétain, whom she had hated since the 13 December affair. Jeanne-Eugénie-Elizabeth Laval, Pierre’s wife, was even more adamant. When German Ambassador Otto Abetz arrived at Châteldon to congratulate Laval, Jeanne Laval refused to welcome him or to accept flowers from his French wife, Suzanne. ‘I don’t want to see Germans in my house,’ she told her husband, as she went on making jam in the kitchen.

In the summer of 1942, Germany appointed a new Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich, 56-year-old career soldier and First World War veteran General Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, to replace his cousin, General Otto von Stülpnagel. Otto had implemented Hitler’s policy of shooting hostages in retaliation for Resistance attacks. His successor, who had been involved in an aborted but undiscovered conspiracy to depose Hitler in 1939, believed that killing hostages both violated the soldier’s code and failed to intimidate the Resistance. In fact, martyrdom attracted more people into its ranks. But Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel was deprived of the powers his cousin had to police Occupied France. They went instead to Major-General Karl Oberg of the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi Party’s security agency known as the SD. The SD tracked down the Reich’s enemies, and the Gestapo took action against them. The 45-year-old Oberg looked like the archetype of Hollywood’s evil Nazi: shaved head, rimless glasses, black uniform and pug face. Born in Hamburg, Oberg joined the SS in 1931, two years before Hitler became chancellor of Germany. Now, he was in Paris as Höherer SS und Polizeiführer, Higher SS and Police Leader, to take over policing of the Occupied Zone from the Wehrmacht. Oberg was the protégé of Reinhard Heydrich, tasked with emulating the vicious