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Shakespeare’s King John, translated by Clara Longworth de Chambrun, opened at the Théâtre de l’Odéon on 3 May 1943 to good reviews.

Parisians welcome an Allied tank during the Liberation of Paris, 26 August, 1944.

American flags on the Champs-Elysées, August 29, 1944.

Ernest Hemingway in Sylvia Beach’s flat following the liberation of Paris, 1944.

Phillip “Pete” Jackson in the uniform of the Royal Ambulance Corps, soon after he escaped death on the SS Thielbek.

Charlotte “Toquette” Jackson, June 1945, in Sweden following her release from Ravensbrück concentration camp where she had become disabled from starvation and exhaustion.

EIGHTEEN

New Perils in Paris

RENÉ DE CHAMBRUN BECAME CLOSER to Pierre Laval following his father-in-law’s expulsion from office on 13 December 1940. Laval was spending more time with his family, including the Chambruns, in Paris. He let them know of his dissatisfaction with his successor, Admiral Jean-François Darlan. In May 1941, Darlan had gone to Berchtesgaden, where he acquiesced to Hitler’s request for the use of French air bases in Syria against the British in Iraq. The British responded by occupying, with the Free French, Syria and Lebanon. Laval asked René to help him publicize his disapproval of Darlan’s concessions to Hitler. René obliged enthusiastically. With the Paris press unlikely to publish criticism of Darlan, René called his friend, the American correspondent Ralph Heinzen of the United Press. ‘I traveled to Vichy to get him,’ René wrote. In his exclusive interview in Paris with Heinzen on 25 May, Laval ‘stressed how greatly the policy of collaboration, as he understood it, differed from Darlan’s policy of surrender–though he did not name Darlan directly’. Clara exhibited no misgivings over her son becoming, in effect, Laval’s press secretary.

On 3 June 1941, Dr Jackson wrote to Edward B. Close in New York, ‘I have just received word stating that I have not enough money in my account with the Chase Bank to pay the premium on my War Risk Insurance ($417) due July 1st. ... Would you mind having the dollars due me from the Hospital deposited to my credit at the Chase Bank N.Y.? … apparently something has gone haywire with some of my holdings, so I shall rely on you to get this arranged for me.’ Close immediately ordered the transfer of the money, confirming it at the end of July by letter through the Morgan Bank at Le Puy in the Unoccupied Zone.

Keeping his War Risk Insurance up to date was characteristic of the canny Maine native. His salary was only $150 a month, plus room and board at the hospital. If the worst happened to him, only an insurance policy would rescue his wife and son from penury. There was not much war risk in Paris, where the fight had ended on 14 June 1940 before it began. But for those who abetted prisoner escapes, the risk of death never abated. Dr Jackson was, so far, lucky. None of his fugitives had been captured, and no one had implicated him in anything. The Germans were either unable to check which prisoners failed to return to their camps from the hospital or accepted Dr Jackson’s assurances they were dead. He kept his work secret even from his wife, Toquette, and his son, Phillip. In the meantime, he and Toquette enlisted in a separate Resistance operation from their flat in the avenue Foch. It assisted escapees, but its main objective was to convey military intelligence to London.

Communications between occupied France and the United States were censored and extremely difficult, but General de Chambrun kept the board in New York informed of important matters by censored transatlantic telegram. On 18 June, he cabled board president Nelson Dean Jay via RCA Radiogram in New York: ‘JAY MORGAN BANK WALL STREET NEWYORK HOSPITAL RUNNING SMOOTHLY MAY DEFICIT SIXTY THOUSAND INCLUDING TWENTYFIVE THOUSAND FOR PERMANENT IMPROVEMENTS INFORM EDDY–CHUMBRAN [sic].’ On 20 June, a letter from William Nelson Cromwell of New York’s Sullivan and Cromwell law partnership to Dean Jay