Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [127]
Some of the women were released quickly because of ill-health or age. Miss Greenough, who would be over the 65-year age limit in two weeks, was permitted to return home. Fern Bedaux was freed for other reasons. Drue watched as a ‘group of French collaborationists, obviously personages high in treachery, arrived with an important German in uniform. They were very respectful to Mrs. Bedaux, helped her pack her things, and out she swept while the rest of us were enraged at this exhibition of the power of social and political influence.’ United Press reported from Vichy a few days later, ‘Mrs. Charles Bedaux, who was arrested at the castle she and her husband provided for the honeymoon of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, has been released but her French-born husband is still interned at St.-Denis.’
On Monday morning, 28 September, the Germans took 292 of the American women from the monkey house to buses just outside the zoo. They gave each one ‘a sausage, a small piece of cheese and a loaf of bread’. Among this group of Americans were Drue Tartière, Gladys Delmass and sculptresses Elsa Blanchard and Mabel Gardner. While they waited to board their bus, a nurse screamed, ‘My God, Drue, you still in this country!’ It was Ruth Dubonnet, American wife of André Dubonnet, the former First World War aviator and friend of Charles Bedaux and Aldebert de Chambrun. Ruth, who looked ‘very chic in her Red Cross uniform’, shouted again, ‘What are you doing here?’ Then, even louder, she demanded, ‘Is it true what I’ve heard about Jacques being killed?’ Drue shuddered and shouted back, ‘No, I don’t think so, that’s the first I’ve heard of it.’
Drue knew that her husband, Jacques Tartière, was dead. Since the fall of France, when Jacques escaped to London to join Charles de Gaulle, Drue had denied all knowledge of his whereabouts. She told the police in Barbizon that she was waiting for his return, possibly from a prisoner of war camp, and let them believe she had a lover. This gave Drue a reason to remain in France that the police would accept. It also removed suspicion from Jean Fraysse, the putative boyfriend, when he stayed at her house in Barbizon to pass messages to his agents. Fraysse, Drue’s former director at Radio Mondiale, had enlisted Drue in one of the earliest Resistance networks. Taking part in the Resistance was her way to support her husband and his country. Jacques was killed fighting for the Free French in 1941, when the British captured Syria and Lebanon from Vichy. Drue told no one of his death, lest the Germans investigate the widow of a Gaullist officer. To continue working effectively as a résistante, the former Hollywood actress posed as a harmless wife abandoned by a roaming French husband.
At the Paris zoo on the morning of 28 September, Drue feared that Ruth Dubonnet’s chance remark, if overheard by the Germans, would endanger Jean Fraysse and the rest of his network. No one else appeared to hear, but Drue was not reassured when Ruth, whom she now saw as a collaborator, said, ‘I’m going to get you out of this, don’t worry.’
Drue asked the French driver of her bus to send a letter to one of her accomplices in Barbizon. The driver, who said he was ashamed to be driving for the Germans, hid her letter and promised to mail it. He recognized Mabel Gardner, his neighbour in Montparnasse, and offered to convey messages for her. Mabel recited a list of greetings for the cobbler, his daughter, the cheese seller and the rest of the neighbourhood. The driver told Drue that Mabel was ‘much loved in our quarter’. As the buses pulled out, the French husband of the other sculptress, Elsa Blanchard,