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é’s help to Britain in its most difficult hour. The embassy sent a cable to the Foreign Office in London recommending that René and Josée be denied transit visas for Bermuda, where the Pan Am Dixie Clipper stopped on its way across the Atlantic. (On René’s first return to France from New York in August, he had carried an introduction from Lord Lothian asking the Governor of Bermuda to offer him full hospitality.) An embassy officer named Mr Butler wrote on 14 November of René, ‘He is a plausible anti-British talker and the Passport Control Officer agrees that he and his wife be granted visas for the outward journey [to France], and his return [to the United States], if possible, be impeded. He possesses United States citizenship as well as French, but difficulties may be put in the way of him using a United States Passport on return.’ A handwritten note in the margin signed ‘MS’ added that ‘we don’t like the Chambruns’.

NINE

Back to Paris

POLLY PEABODY TIRED OF VICHY IN MID-AUGUST and obtained a pass to drive to Paris. ‘It was late afternoon when we reached the Gates of Paris,’ she recalled. ‘We rolled into the Capital which had become a vast garrison. Millions of black boots stomped noisily along the stone pavements, the Swastika fluttered from building fronts, road signs in German characters were pinned on the street corners. A cloud of sadness hung over the city.’ She stayed in a borrowed flat on the Left Bank, where the concierge was wary until she ascertained that the blonde Polly was not German. The concierge told her that she and her friends, despite German prohibitions, listened to BBC radio transmissions from London. It was not the only defiance the young American detected. On the terrace of Fouquet’s restaurant near the Arc de Triomphe, where ‘sword-scarred, bemedalled’ German officers feasted, she saw a drunken old Parisienne watching the Nazis from the sidewalk. The woman ‘put both fists on her hips and yelled out: “Eh bien, moi je vous dis MERDE!” [“All right, me, I say to you SHIT!”] The waiters bumped into each other trying to conceal their amusement, while I and the few French people present laughed heartily into our napkins.’ Polly observed, ‘This was my introduction to the spirit of resistance which existed in the occupied zone.’ It was a contrast to what she had seen in her last six weeks at Vichy, although hardly representative of all Paris.

France’s internal frontiers deprived Clara and Aldebert de Chambrun of news from Paris for the first weeks of the occupation. Train service soon resumed between Paris and Vichy, at least for those privileged to possess a German travel permit, the much-coveted Ausweis. Vicomte de Poncins arrived from Paris to tell Clara that Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering had seized the Senate building, the Palais du Luxembourg, opposite her house at 58 rue de Vaugirard, for his headquarters. Empty flats in the rue de Vaugirard became billets for his officers. The vicomte comforted her with the assurance that her housekeeper, Mlle d’Ambléon, ‘continued to hold the fort’ at Number 58. Clara wrote, ‘My old lady, though frightened out of her wits, showed energy and character by insisting that the premises were not empty and that the proprietors would be back before the first of September. “We shall see on September the first if what you say is true,” the German officer said significantly.’

The threat determined Aldebert and Clara to return to Paris. ‘Our cure was finished,’ she wrote of their six weeks in the spa town. On 1 September, they drove home. When Clara entered the city through the Porte d’Orléans, ‘a German official handed out an order to present our car for requisition within forty-eight hours. It was our first indication that what we possessed was not really our own.’ She was relieved to discover the Germans were not, as rumoured, capturing and killing dogs like her darling Tsouni, who was buried beneath her skirts. At Vichy, she had heard rumours about the new German Paris: ‘The use of the sidewalks was reserved for the Wehrmacht; citizens were kicked off the