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owner, he had given up racing when he decided the fences were harming his animals. Wilkinson had amassed an art collection that included Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of George Washington and some of the finest Holbeins in private hands. Hermann Goering knew of Wilkinson’s paintings and, on a pre-war visit to Paris, stopped by his flat at 18 quai d’Orléans on the Ile Saint-Louis to see them. Although this acquaintance gave him access to Goering and his minions, the American was no collaborator. Behind the carved mantelpiece of his lavish apartment overlooking the Seine was a cache of short-wave radios and weapons for the Resistance. His wife, Kathleen Marie Rose, had been the most famous dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies under her stage-name, Dolores Rose. She was also helping the Resistance and the downed Allied airmen whom Drue Tartière brought to her. Wilkinson had assured Adrienne in November that Sylvia would be released within a few weeks. Sylvia, however, remained interned, to Adrienne’s disappointment.

Christmas at Vittel was nonetheless merry. The Dramatic Society’s 150 members staged plays, and internees watched a series of films in the 1,000-seat camp auditorium: The Corsican Brothers, Fort Dolores, Stage Door and If I Were Boss. Midnight Mass was held on Christmas Eve in three different chapels for Catholics and Protestants, and on Christmas Day the women held a big party for the children. On New Year’s Eve, there was a ‘Fancy Dress Ball’.

When Sylvia moved out of the hospital to lodge with the main body of American internees in the Hôtel Central, she threw herself into work as camp postmistress. She sorted and delivered letters, much as she used to collect mail and put it in cubby holes at Shakespeare and Company for her writer friends. ‘Every day I went over to the Grand Hotel where the mail was deposited, and brought ours in a pouch to the hotel where we lived,’ Sylvia wrote. ‘Some of the internees were rather unreasonable and when I was unable to produce a letter for them accused me of keeping it back.’ Organizing the kitchen in the new location was more difficult: ‘There were no utensils to cook our miserable soup in nor to make our acorn coffee in.’ Nor was there any china, as in the Grand Hotel. The task of making the kitchen function was assigned to ‘a young, pretty woman with high heels and a long cigarette holder: to my surprize [sic], she took hold of the kitchen problem which was serious when we were suddenly installed in our hotel … This blonde girl made such a row that the articles we needed were finally provided. Every day at noon we filed up for the soup–hot water with a hint of potatoes, cabbage and little else–and the bowls were to contain enough for supper as well as lunch.’ Only Mabel Gardner, the Montparnasse sculptress with the golden hair, liked the prison food. All she took from the Red Cross packages was cigarettes. She happily spent her time carving firewood into voluptuous statues.

THIRTY

The Bedaux Dossier

IN ALGIERS, EDMOND TAYLOR, the former Chicago Tribune correspondent, was working for the OSS and the US army’s Psychological Warfare Branch. His memoirs, Awakening from History, contain his account of the decisive role he played in Charles Bedaux’s life:

From acquaintances in the Deuxième Bureau [French military intelligence], responsible at the time for counterespionage activities in Algeria, I had learned that Bedaux had been stranded in Algiers while on an economic mission to West Africa on behalf of the German High Command in France. Since he was a naturalized U.S. citizen–though a Frenchman in every other respect–there appeared to be a prima facie case of treason against him. The Deuxième Bureau professed to be mildly surprised that the American authorities were uninterested in the matter. Its own interest, however, was no more than tepid, mainly, I gathered, because Bedaux was a frequent dinner guest at tables of several influential and politically conservative French hostesses who were currently launching the post-invasion social season in Algiers; several of my superiors