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The army delivered Bedaux to Miami on 23 December. At 6 a.m., an hour after his plane landed, he was released and given $2,300 in cash that had been taken from him at the time of his arrest. He went to a hotel, but the Immigration and Naturalization Service found him there and arrested him soon afterwards. INS patrolmen took him to the Immigration Detention Center at 525 North East 30th Street in what had been an opulent beach house near Biscayne Bay. Bedaux was lodged in the former chauffeur’s apartment above the garage, the latest of his many prisons. He had been in custody without charges for more than a year.

When he was first arrested on 5 December 1942, Bedaux had in his possession what Janet Flanner called ‘an invaluable, meticulous source of information on himself, for it had always been his custom to carry with him a small library of private papers and a whole gallery of photographs of his family and his interesting friends’. The FBI, after examining the files, gave the full list to Miss Flanner. She recorded that, in addition to the Vichy and German documents that Bedaux had copied for Robert Murphy, there were

code telegrams; business telegrams; tender love letters from his wife; carbon copies of letters from the Nazi High Command; carbons of inconsequential letters to Admiral Darlan; photostats of Bedaux’s family birth certificates for two generations back; photographs of Otto Abetz’s children in peasant costume; an envelope marked ‘Edward,’ containing the Candé snapshots of the Duchess of Windsor and the Duke mowing the lawn … notes about important luncheon appointments for the previous year; a bicycle license; a letter from the Snowflake Herald, of Snowflake, Arizona; clippings from the Journal-American; a red leather box containing pen points; a green leather folder containing nothing; and a package of Medinal sleeping tablets.

The French Brigade of Surveillance had returned his effects to him when they let him go on 29 December 1942. Bedaux apparently did not re-examine them before he gave them to the US army Judge Advocate’s office on 17 January 1943 for safekeeping. The three weeks the French held the papers would have been long enough for someone to remove–or to insert–documents without his knowledge. When he arrived in Miami on 23 December, the weapons that could destroy him were waiting.

At Christmas 1943, the usual festivities were held at the American Library and Hospital. Those who had been to the three previous Christmas celebrations recalled their resolutions of those years: ‘This time it really is the last; next Christmas we shall be free.’ At the library, Boris Netchaeff had recovered sufficiently from his wound to brew his traditional Christmas rum punch. The chef at the hospital once again slaughtered and roasted the pigs he had been hiding from the Germans. The celebration was melancholy, if only because the occupation, far from abating, was becoming more oppressive. Food, coal, soap, clothing and shoes were in short supply. The Germans, with Pierre Laval’s assistance, were drafting more French workers for labour details in Germany. They were also executing more hostages as Resistance attacks on their troops increased. Jews, already suffering brutal discrimination and the yellow star emblem, were sent with Vichy’s cooperation in greater numbers to the Nazi death camps in Poland. Clara and Aldebert, who kept the two main American institutions in occupied France functioning while their names were sullied in the American press, exhibited a brave front to the doctors, nurses and patients gathered for their fourth Christmas under occupation. When Christmas dinner ended, they left the hospital to reach the avenue de Vaugirard before curfew.

Coming home from the western suburb of Neuilly by public transportation was not an easy affair for the revelers. Having been tempted to linger, we almost broke our shins in feverish efforts to catch the last metro, terrified by the apprehension that if we lost it we must pass the night in the guardhouse … I remember that