Coco Chanel_ An Intimate Life - Lisa Chaney [177]
Halfway through Tatiana’s assignment, walking down the avenue Kléber, she was startled to hear a man calling out her name. Turning, she saw von Dincklage, dressed as an officer, and climbing out of a Mercedes. As we saw, almost no one but German officers drove cars. When Tatiana asked von Dincklage:
“What are you doing here?” he replied:
“I’m doing my work.”
“And what is the nature of your work now?” Tatiana demanded.
“Same as it’s been for decades,” von Dincklage cheerfully responded, “I’m in army intelligence.”
Tatiana told him he was “a real bastard! . . . You posed as a down and out journalist, you won all our sympathy, you seduced my best friend [Hélène Dessoffy], and now you tell me you were spying on us all the time!”31
It transpired that von Dincklage knew everything about Tatiana’s recent movements and warned her not to stay long in Paris. He asked her to deliver a message to Conte Dessoffy, his lover Hélène’s husband. Hélène’s letters to von Dincklage had been intercepted by French intelligence, and she was now in prison. If her husband could get word to her, telling her to say that she knowingly collaborated with von Dincklage, he could get her out of prison. Tatiana did get the message to her friend, but Hélène Dessoffy refused to perjure herself. After the war, she was acquitted of the charge of collaboration.32 During this period, Gabrielle herself was to have her own (modest) experience of a collaboration charge.
One day, in the summer of 1942, the Ritz was suddenly “alive with German soldiers” deployed outside the entrance; inside, they had been ordered to search every room. Early that morning, two Resistance fighters had appeared and kidnapped Gabrielle from her suite. According to the management, their entry was a mystery (in fact, the manager’s wife was a Resistance sympathizer), and Gabrielle, who had been blindfolded, had no idea where she was taken. Three hours later, having been questioned about her relationship with Lifar and von Dincklage, she had been brought back to her room. The Resis-tants had told her that collaborators could face disfigurement or death, and instructed her to change her ways: “You are a French woman, and an important one. You are good for France, and France has been good to you.”33
Von Dincklage was furious at Gabrielle’s treatment and, with General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, demanded an explanation from the Ritz director. He said he could give none.
Meanwhile, a woman who worked in the Chanel boutique, and who had met von Dincklage on a number of occasions, recalled that she had never seen him in a uniform. Perhaps in Tatiana du Plessix’s anger she misremembered von Dincklage’s outfit. If, however, he did wear a uniform, he took care never to do so when he visited Gabrielle at her apartment on rue Cambon. The couple also spent time together outside Paris. Holidaying in Switzerland more than once, they traveled through to the occupied zone to stay at La Pausa. In the autumn of 1942, the architect Robert Streitz, a member of an important Resistance network, asked von Dincklage to intercede on behalf of a Jewish physicist, arrested by the Gestapo. Apparently, von Dincklage tried to help, but someone else would be more successful in bringing about the physicist’s release.34
Contrary to the impression that Gabrielle had nothing to do with any Germans except von Dincklage, the son of her previous lover Antoinette d’Harcourt remembers going several times to rue Cambon with his mother for entertainments given by Gabrielle. At these gatherings, there were a number of German officers present: “I don’t know exactly what their ranks were but they were very senior officers. Most people spoke in French, not German, but they had a German accent.”35 It appears that on these occasions, Antoinette