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his head to see what the row is about’. Neighbours were denouncing one another, and patriots were murdering collaborationists and black marketeers. ‘In spite of all this sound and the fury,’ she said, ‘Paris is deceptively calm. Avenging bullets echo deep below the surface of daily life. Though there is little bread there are plenty of circuses. People escape from the galling irritation of perpetual difficulties into the realm of art. Theatres and talkies are crowded even in winter when the halls are unheated. The Grand Opera is sold out both for opera and ballet half an hour after the opening of the box office.’

Miss Cannel did not say why she left Paris after having stayed for so long. But she gave the impression that the city was afraid of what would happen to hasten the liberation: ‘The Paris air is more highly charged with menace than at any time since the French Revolution. Invasion, civil war, siege, famine, prison–whatever form the future may take–Parisians are minutely expecting the deadliest phase of the war.’

King John opened for a second season at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in the spring of 1944, when the Allies were bombing the industrial suburbs of Paris. Occasionally, air raid sirens interrupted the play and forced the audience into underground shelters. At the same time, rumours of what Clara de Chambrun called the Allies’ ‘eagerly expected landing’ somewhere on the coast of northern France were giving hope to the increasingly oppressed people of Paris. One short passage in the play that had gone unremarked in 1943 suddenly resonated with the spectators. In Act Four, a Messenger declared to King John,

Never such a power

For any foreign preparation

Was levied in the body of a land.

The copy of your speed is learn’d by them;

For when you should be told they do prepare,

The tidings come that they are all arrived.

The audience reacted with frenzied cheers and applause. Clara worried: ‘Each time the enthusiasm grew louder. We feared the Germans would hear of it and close the theater. To cut out the passage would have been a moral lowering of the flag; strangely enough, it sufficed to warn the actor who spoke the lines not to stress them but to deliver his message in a conversational tone. Thenceforth expression of approval went on more moderately until the last day.’ By this time, ‘foreign preparation’ to liberate France was ready. Clara and her son were not.

The spring of 1944 added aerial hazards to the hardship of occupation on the ground. From March, when the winter weather abated, Allied bombing of German-occupied Europe intensified. ‘Life in Paris,’ wrote Clara, ‘which had become almost untenable, grew steadily more difficult and dangerous owing to the heavy bombardments from the sky by the R.A.F. and the American Air Forces. We took it for the prelude of the dreamed-of landing, and during the month of March as a necessary evil from which the hoped-for good would spring.’

While the Allies concentrated bombing sorties on the Pas-de-Calais to convince the Germans it was the invasion point, they did not spare the industrial outskirts of Paris. The targets were factories making munitions for the Wehrmacht, and the bombs often exploded in working class neighbourhoods nearby. ‘Those who listened, as most people did, to the British radio on April the twenty-first, learned that eight thousand planes had poured down fifteen thousand tons of bombs over Europe,’ Clara wrote.

We could not then estimate what proportion of these was destined for us. But when midnight struck, the alarms showed that the different workmen’s centers, St. Denis, St. Ouen, La Courneuve, Noisy-le-Sec, Bobigny, the market gardens of Romainville and Athis-Mons, had been subjected to a furious bombardment which cost almost two thousand lives in these regions which lie in the immediate vicinity of Paris. Eleven large shell holes were counted in close proximity to the Sacré-Coeur Basilica at Montmartre. In the fashionable residence section of the sixteenth Arrondissement, the building containing the reserve stock of the Croix-Rouge was