Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

Copyright © Paul Kix 2017

Design and illustration by Leo Nickolls

Paul Kix asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007553808

Ebook Edition © December 2017 ISBN: 9780007553815

Version: 2018-11-28

Dedication

For Sonya, as always

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

About the Publisher

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a work of narrative nonfiction, meant to relay what it was like for Robert de La Rochefoucauld to fight the Nazis from occupied France as a special operative and résistant. I relied on a few primary sources to tell this story, most notably La Rochefoucauld’s memoir, La Liberté, C’est Mon Plaisir: 1940–1946, published in 2002, a decade before his death. La Rochefoucauld’s family, ever gracious, also gave me a copy of the audio recording in which Robert recounted his war and life for his children and grandchildren. This was great source material, as was a DVD I received, which was directed, edited, and produced by one of Robert’s nephews, and which tells the tale of his storied family, specifically his parents, his nine brothers and sisters, and the courage that Robert himself needed to fight his war. The DVD, like the audio recording, was made for the La Rochefoucauld family to share with successive generations, but Robert’s daughter Constance was kind enough to make me a copy.

I spoke with her and her three siblings at length about their father—in person, over Skype, on the telephone, and by email. I kept contacting them long after I said I would, and kept apologizing for it. But Astrid, Constance, Hortense, and Jean were always amenable and happy to share what they knew. I’m eternally grateful.

This narrative is the result of four years of work, with research and reporting conducted in five countries. I talked with dozens of people, read roughly fifty books, in English and French, and parsed thousands of pages of military and historical documents, in four languages. Despite all this, and no doubt because of the secret nature of La Rochefoucauld’s work, there are certain instances where Robert’s account of what happened is the best and sometimes only account of what happened. Thankfully, in those spots, Robert’s recollections are vivid and reflect the larger historical record of the region and time.

PAUL KIX, JANUARY 2017

PROLOGUE

His family kept asking him why. Why would a hero of the war align himself with one of its alleged traitors? Why would Robert de La Rochefoucauld, a man who had been knighted in France’s Legion of Honor, risk sullying his name to defend someone like Maurice Papon, who had been charged, these many decades after World War II, with helping the Germans during the Occupation?

The question trailed La Rochefoucauld all the way to the witness stand, on a February afternoon in 1998, four months into a criminal trial that would last six, and become the longest in French history.

When he entered the courtroom, La Rochefoucauld looked debonair. His silver hair had just begun to recede, and he still swept it straight back. At seventy-four, he carried the dignified air of middle age. He had brown eyes that took in the world with an ironic slant, the mark of his aristocratic forebears, and a Roman, ruling-class nose. His posture was tall and upright as he walked to the stand and gave his oath and, lowering himself to his seat at the center of international attention, he appeared remarkably relaxed—his complexion even had a bronze tint, despite the bleak French winter. He remained a handsome man, nearly as handsome as he’d been in those first postwar years, when he’d moved from one girl to the next, until he’d met Bernadette de Marcieu de Gontaut-Biron, his wife and mother of his four children.

On the stand, La Rochefoucauld wore a green tweed check jacket over a light blue shirt and a patterned brown tie. The outfit suited the country squire, who’d traveled to Bordeaux today from Pont Chevron, his thirty-room chateau overlooking sixty-six acres in the Loiret department of north-central France. He radiated a charisma that burned all the brighter when set against the gray sobriety of the courthouse. La Rochefoucauld looked better than anyone in the room.

A reputation for bravery preceded him, and almost out of curiosity for why someone like La Rochefoucauld would defend someone like Papon, the court allowed him an opening statement. La Rochefoucauld nodded at the defendant, who sat in a dark suit behind bulletproof glass. The makings of wry exasperation curled La Rochefoucauld’s lips as he recalled events from fifty years earlier.

“First, I would like to say that in 1940, although I was very young, I was against the Germans, against Pétain and against Vichy. I was in favor of the continuation of the war in the South of France and in North Africa.” He was sixteen then, and came from a family that despised the Germans. His father, Olivier, a decorated World War I officer who’d re-enlisted in 1939, was arrested by the Nazis five days after the Armistice in part because he’d tried to fight beyond the agreed-to peace. His mother, Consuelo, who ran a local chapter of the Red Cross, was known to German officers as the Terrible Countess. On the stand, La Rochefoucauld skipped over almost all of what happened after 1940, the acts of bravery that had earned him four war medals and a knighthood. He instead focused his testimony on one episode in the summer of 1944 and experiences that greatly compromised the allegations against Papon.

Maurice Papon had been an administrator within the German-collaborating Vichy government. He rose to a position of authority in the Gironde department of southwestern France, whose jurisdiction included Bordeaux. The charge against Papon was that from his post as general secretary of the Gironde prefecture, overseeing Jewish affairs, he signed deportation papers for eight of the ten convoys of Jewish civilians that left for internment camps in France, and ultimately the concentration camps of Eastern Europe. In total, Vichy officials in the Gironde shipped out 1,690 Jews, 223 of them children. Papon had been indicted for crimes against humanity.

The reality of Papon’s service was far messier than the picture the prosecutors depicted. Despite Papon’s lofty title, he was a local administrator within Vichy and so removed from authority that he later claimed he didn’t know the final destination of the cattle cars or the fate that awaited Jews there. Furthermore, Vichy’s national police chief, René Bousquet, was the person who had actually issued the deportations. Papon claimed that he had merely done as he was told, that he was a bureaucrat with the misfortune of literally signing off on orders. When the trial opened in the fall of 1997, the historian who first unearthed the papers that held Papon’s signatures, Michel Bergès, told the court he no longer believed the documents proved Papon’s guilt. Even two attorneys for the victims’ families felt “queasiness” about prosecuting the man.

Robert de La Rochefoucauld (pronounced Roash-foo-coe) knew something that would further undercut the state’s case against Papon. As he told the court, in the summer of 1944, he joined a band of Resistance fighters who called their group Charly. “There was a Jewish community there,” La Rochefoucauld testified, “and when I saw how many of them there were, I asked them what was the reason for them being part of this [group]. The commander’s answer was very simple: … ‘They had been warned by the prefecture that there would be a rounding up.’” In other words, these Jewish men were grateful they had been tipped off and happy to fight in the Resistance.

In the 1960s, La Rochefoucauld met and grew friendly with Papon, who was by then Paris’ prefect of police. “I learned he was at the [Gironde] prefecture during the war,” Robert testified. “It was then that I told him the story of the Jews of [Charly]. He smiled and said, ‘We were very well organized at the prefecture.’” Despite La Rochefoucauld’s own heroics, he said on the stand it took “monstrous reserves of personal courage” to work for the Resistance within Vichy. “I consider Mr. Papon one of those brave men.”

His testimony lasted fifteen minutes, and following it one of the judges read written statements from four other résistants, whose sentiments echoed La Rochefoucauld’s: If Papon had signed the deportation documents, he had also helped Jews elude imprisonment. Roger-Samuel Bloch, a Jewish résistant from Bordeaux, wrote that from November 1943 to June 1944, Papon hid and lodged him several times, at considerable risk to his career and life.

The court recessed until the next morning. La Rochefoucauld walked outside and took in a Bordeaux that was so very different from 1944, where no swastika flags swayed in the breeze, where no people wondered who would betray them, where no one listened for the hard tap of Gestapo boots coming up behind. How to relay in fifteen minutes the anxiety and fear that once clung to a man as surely as the wisps of cigarette smoke in a crowded café? How to explain the complexity of life under Occupation to generations of free people who would never experience the war’s exhausting calculations and would therefore view it in simple terms of good and evil? La Rochefoucauld was beyond the gated entryway of the courthouse when he saw Papon protesters move toward him. One of them got very close, and spit on him. La Rochefoucauld stared at the young man, furious, but kept walking.

What people younger than him could not understand—and this included his adult children and nieces and nephews—was that his motivation for testifying wasn’t really even about Papon, a man he hadn’t known during the war. La Rochefoucauld took the stand instead out of a fealty for the brotherhood, the tiny bands of résistants who had fought the mighty Nazi Occupation. They knew the personal deprivations, and they saw the extremes of barbarity. A silent understanding still passed between these rebels who had endured and prevailed as La Rochefoucauld had. A shared loyalty still bound them. And no allegation, not even one as grave as crimes against humanity, could sever that tie.

La Rochefoucauld hadn’t said any of this, of course, because he seldom said anything about his service. Even when other veterans had alluded to his exploits at commemorative parties over the years, he’d stayed quiet. He was humble, but it also pained him to dredge it all up again. So his four children and nieces and nephews gathered the snippets they’d overheard of La Rochefoucauld’s famous war, and they’d discussed them throughout their childhood and well into adulthood: Had he really met Hitler once, only to later slink across German lines dressed as a nun? Had he really escaped a firing squad or killed a man with his bare hands? Had he really trained with a secret force of British agents that changed the course of the war? For most of his adult life, La Rochefoucauld remained, even to family, a man unknown.

Now, La Rochefoucauld got in his Citroën and began the five-hour drive back to Pont Chevron. Maybe one day he would tell the whole story of why he had defended someone like Papon, which was really a story of what he’d seen during the war and why he’d fought when so few had.

Maybe one day, he told himself. But not today.

CHAPTER 1

One cannot answer for his courage if he has never been in danger.

—François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims

On May 16, 1940, a strange sound came from the east. Robert de La Rochefoucauld was at home with his siblings when he heard it: a low buzz that grew louder by the moment until it was a persistent and menacing drone. He moved to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the family chateau, called Villeneuve, set on thirty-five acres just outside Soissons, an hour and a half northeast of Paris. On the horizon, Robert saw what he had long dreaded.

It was a fleet of aircraft, ominous and unending. The planes already shadowed Soissons’ town square, and the smaller ones now broke from the formation. These were the German Stukas, the two-seater single-engine planes with arched wings that looked to Robert as predatory as they in fact were. They dove out of the sky, the sirens underneath them whining a high-pitched wail. The sight and sound paralyzed the family, which gathered round the windows. Then the bombs dropped: indiscriminately and catastrophically, over Soissons and ever closer to the chateau. Huge plumes of dirt and sod and splintered wood shot up wherever the bombs touched down, followed by cavernous reports that were just as frightening; Robert could feel them thump against his chest. The world outside his window was suddenly loud and on fire. And amid the cacophony, he heard his mother scream: “We must go, we must go, we must go!”

World War II had come to Soissons. Though it had been declared eight months earlier, the fight had truly begun five days ago, when the Germans feinted a movement of troops in Belgium, and then broke through the Allied lines south of there, in the Ardennes, a heavily forested collection of hills in France. The Allies had thought that terrain too treacherous for a Nazi offensive—which is of course why the Germans had chosen it.

Three columns of German tanks stretching back for more than one hundred miles had emerged from the forest. And for the past few days, the French and Belgian soldiers who defended the line, many of them reservists, had lived a nightmare if they’d lived at all: attacked from the sky by Stukas and from the ground by ghastly panzers too numerous to be counted. In response, Britain’s Royal Air Force had sent out seventy-one bombers, but they were overwhelmed, and thirty-nine of the aircraft had not returned, the greatest rate of loss in any operation of comparable size in British aviation history. On the ground, the Germans soon raced through a hole thirty miles wide and fifteen miles deep. They did not head southwest to Paris, as the French military expected, but northwest to the English Channel, where they could cut off elite French and British soldiers stuck in Belgium and effectively take all of France.

Soissons stood in that northwestern trajectory. Robert and his six siblings rushed outside, where the scream of a Stuka dive was even more horrifying. Bombs fell on Soissons’ factories and the children ran to the family sedan, their mother, Consuelo, ushering them into the car. Consuelo told her eldest, Henri, then seventeen, one year older than Robert, to go to the castle at Châteaneuf-sur-Cher, the home of Consuelo’s mother, the Duchess of Maillé, some 230 miles south. Consuelo would stay behind; as the local head of the Red Cross, she had to oversee its response in the Aisne department. She would catch up with them later, she shouted at Henri and Robert. Her stony look told her eldest sons that there was no point in arguing. She was not about to lose her children, who ranged in age from seventeen to four, to the same fiery blitzkrieg that had perhaps already consumed her husband, Olivier, who—at fifty—was serving as a liaison officer for the RAF on the Franco-German border.

“Go!” she told Henri.

So the children set out, the bombs falling around them, largely unchecked by Allied planes. Though history would dub these days the Battle for France, France’s fleet was spread throughout its worldwide empire, with only 25 percent stationed in country and only one-quarter of that in operational formations. This left Soissons with minimal protection. The ceaseless screaming whine of a Stuka and deep reverberating echo of its bombs drove the La Rochefoucaulds to the roads in something like a mindless panic.

But the roads were almost at a standstill. The Germans bombed the train stations and many of the bridges in Soissons and the surrounding towns. The occasional Stuka strafed the flow of humanity, and the younger children in the La Rochefoucaulds’ car screamed with each report, but the gunfire always landed behind them.

As they inched out of the Nazis’ northwestern trajectory that afternoon, more and more Frenchmen joined the procession. Already cars were breaking down around them. Some families led horses or donkeys that carried whatever possessions they could gather and load. It was a surreal scene for Robert and the other La Rochefoucauld children, pressing their faces against the windows, a movement unlike any modern France had witnessed. The French reconnaissance pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry saw the exodus from the sky, and as he would later write in his book, Flight to Arras, “German bombers bearing down upon the villages squeezed out a whole people and sent it flowing down the highways like a black syrup … I can see from my plane the long swarming highways, that interminable syrup flowing endless to the horizon.”

Hours passed, the road stretched ahead, and though the occasional Stuka whined above, the La Rochefoucaulds were not harmed by them—these planes’ main concern was joining the formation heading to the Channel. News was sparse. Local officials had sometimes been the first to flee. The La Rochefoucauld children saw around them cars with mattresses tied to their roofs as protection from errant bombs. But Robert watched as those mattresses served a more natural purpose when the traffic forced people to camp on that first night, somewhere in the high plains of central France.

Makeshift shelters rose around them just off the road, and though no one heard the echo of bombs, Henri ordered his siblings to stay together as they climbed, stiff-legged, out of the car. Henri was serious and studious, the firstborn child who was also the favorite. Robert, with high cheekbones and a countenance that rounded itself into a slight pout, as if his lips were forever holding a cigarette, was the more handsome of the two, passing for something like Cary Grant’s French cousin. But he was also the wild one. He managed to attend a different boarding school nearly every year. The brothers understood that they were to watch over their younger siblings now as surrogate parents, but it was really Henri who was in charge. Robert, after all, had been the one immature enough to dangle from the parapet of the family chateau, fifty feet above the ground, or to once say shit in front of Grandmother La Rochefoucauld, for the thrill it gave his siblings.

The children gathered together, Henri and Robert, Artus and Pierre Louis, fifteen and thirteen, and their sister Yolaine, twelve. The youngest ones, Carmen and Aimery, seven and four, naturally weren’t part of their older siblings’ clique. They were not invited to play soccer with their brothers and Yolaine, and only occasionally did they swim with them in the Aisne river, which flowed around the family estate. They were already their own unit, unaware of the idiosyncrasies and dynamics of the older crew: the way Artus favored the company of his younger brother Pierre Louis to Henri and Robert’s, or the way all the boys tended to gang up on Yolaine, the lone girl, until Robert defended her, sometimes with his fists, the bad brother with the good heart.

Years later Robert would not recall how they spent that first night—on blankets that Consuelo had quickly stored into the trunk or with grass as their bedding and the night stars to comfort them. But he would remember walking among the great anxious swarm of humanity, who settled in clusters on a field that, under the moonlight, seemed to stretch to the horizon. Robert was as scared as the travelers around him. But, in the jokes the refugees told or even in their silent resolve, he felt a sense of fraternity spreading, tangible and real. He had often lived his life at a remove from this kind of experience: He was landed gentry, his lineage running through one thousand years of French history. When Robert and his family vacationed at exclusive resorts in Nice or Saint Tropez, they avoided mass transit, traveling aboard Grandmother La Rochefoucauld’s private rail car—with four sleeper cabs, a lounge and dining room. But the night air and communion of his countrymen stirred something in Robert, something similar to what his father, Olivier, had experienced twenty years earlier in the trenches of the Great War. There, among soldiers of all classes, Olivier had dropped his vestigial ties to monarchy and become, he said, a committed Republican. Tonight, looking out at the campfires and the families who laid down wherever they could, with whatever they had, Robert felt the urge to honor La France, and to defend it, even if the military couldn’t.

The children were on the road for four days. As many as eight million people fled their homes during the Battle for France, or one-fifth of the country’s population. The highways became so congested during this exodus that bicycles were the best mode of travel, as if the streets of Bombay had moved to the French countryside. Abandoning their car and walking would have been quicker for the La Rochefoucaulds, but Henri would have none of it. Thousands of parents lost track of their children during the movement south, and newspapers would fill their pages for months afterward with advertisements from families in search of the missing. The La Rochefoucaulds stayed in the car, always together, nudging ahead, taking hours just to cross the Loire River on the outskirts of southern France, on one of the few bridges the Germans hadn’t bombed.

The skies were clear of Stukas now, yet the roads remained as crowded as ever. This was a full-on panic, Robert thought, and though he wasn’t the best of students he understood its cause. It wasn’t just the invasion people saw that forced them out of their homes. It was the invasion they’d replayed for twenty years, the invasion they’d remembered.

World War I had killed 1.7 million Frenchmen, or 18 percent of those who fought, a higher proportion than any other developed country. Many battles were waged in France, and the fighting was so horrific, its damage so ubiquitous, it was as if the war had never ended. The La Rochefoucaulds’ own estate, Villeneuve, had been a battle site, captured and recaptured seventeen times, the French defending the chateau, the Germans across the Aisne river, firing. The fighting left Villeneuve in rubble, and the neighboring town of Soissons didn’t fare much better: 80 percent of it was destroyed. Even after the La Rochefoucaulds rebuilt, the foundation of the estate showed the classic pockmarks of heavy shells. The soil of Villeneuve’s thirty-five acres smoldered for seven years from all the mortar rounds. Steam rose from the earth, too hot to till. Well into the 1930s, Robert would watch as a plow stopped and a farmhand dug out a buried artillery round or hand grenade.

The 1,600-year-old cathedral in Soissons, where the La Rochefoucaulds occasionally went for Mass, carried the indentations of bullet and artillery fire, clustering here and boring into the edifice there, from its stone foundation to its mighty Gothic peaks. Storefronts all around them wore similar marks, while veterans like Robert’s father hobbled home after service. For Olivier, an ankle wound incurred in 1915 limited his ability to walk unassisted. His injury intruded into his pastimes: When he hunted game, he brought his wife, and Consuelo carried the gun until Olivier spotted the prey, which allowed him to momentarily ditch his cane and hoist the rifle to his shoulder. Olivier was lucky. Other veterans were so disfigured, they didn’t appear in public.

“Throughout my childhood, I heard people talk mostly about the Great War: my parents, my grandparents, my uncles,” Robert later said. But even as it remained a constant topic, Olivier seldom discussed its basic facts: his four years at the front, as an officer whose job was to watch artillery shells land on German positions and relay back whether the next round should be aimed higher or lower. Nor did Olivier discuss the more intimate details of the fighting, as other veterans did in memoirs: stepping on the “meat” of dead comrades in an offensive or the madness the trenches induced. Instead Olivier walked the halls of Villeneuve, in some sort of private and almost unceasing conversation with the ghosts of his past. He was a distant father, telling his children that they “must not cry—ever,” and finding solace in nature’s beauty. He had earned a law degree after the war, but spent Robert’s childhood as Villeneuve’s gentleman farmer. Olivier felt most at ease talking about the dahlias he planted. Consuelo, who’d lost two brothers to the trenches, was far more outspoken. She instructed her children that they were never to buy German-made goods and told her daughters they could not learn such an indelicate tongue. Even her job moored her to the past: As chair of the Aisne chapter of the Red Cross, Consuelo spent most of her time helping families whose lives had been upended by the war.

The La Rochefoucaulds were not unique: No one in France could look beyond his disfigured memories. The French military was itself so scarred that it did nothing in the face of Hitler’s mounting power. In 1936, the führer’s army reoccupied the Rhineland (the areas around the Rhine River in Belgium), in violation of World War I treaties, without a fight, even though France had one hundred divisions, and the Third Reich’s crippled army could send only three battalions to the Rhine. As Gen. Alfred Jodl, head of the German armed forces operational staff, later testified: “Considering the situation we were in, the French covering army could have blown us to pieces.” But despite overwhelming numerical strength, the French did nothing, and Germany retook the Rhine. Hitler never feared France again.

German military might grew, and as a new war seemed imminent, the French kept forestalling its reality, traumatized by what they’d already endured. In 1938, the French Parliament voted 537 to 75 for the Munich Agreement, which gave Hitler portions of Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile, the World War I veteran and novelist Jean Giono wrote that war was pointless, and if it broke out again soldiers should desert. “There is no glory in being French,” Giono wrote. “There is only one glory: To be alive.” Léon Emery, a primary school teacher, wrote a newspaper column that may as well have been a refrain for people in the late 1930s: “Rather servitude than war.”

This frightened pacifism reigned even after the new war began. In the fall of 1939, after Britain and France declared war on Germany, William Shirer, an American journalist, took a train along a hundred-mile stretch of the Franco-German border: “The train crew told me not a shot had been fired on this front … The troops … went about their business [building fortifications] in full sight and range of each other … The Germans were hauling up guns and supplies on the railroad line, but the French did not disturb them. Queer kind of war.”

So at last, in May 1940, when the German planes screamed overhead, many Frenchmen saw not just a new style of warfare but the nightmares of the last twenty years superimposed on the wings of those Stukas. That’s why it took four days for the La Rochefoucauld children to reach their grandmother’s house: Memory heightened the terror of Hitler’s blitzkrieg. “We were lucky we weren’t on the road longer,” Robert’s younger sister Yolaine later said.

Grandmother Maillé’s estate sat high above Châteauneuf-sur-Cher, a three-winged castle whose sprawling acreage served as the town’s eponymous centerpiece. It was a stunning, almost absurdly grand home, spread across six floors and sixty rooms, featuring some thirty bedrooms, three salons, and an art gallery. The La Rochefoucauld children, accustomed to the liveried lifestyle, never tired of coming here. But on this spring day, the bliss of the reunion gave way rather quickly to a hollowed-out exhaustion. The anxious travel had depleted the children—and the grandmother who’d awaited them. Making matters worse, the radio kept reporting German gains, alarming everyone anew.

That very night, the Second Panzer Division reached Abbeville, at the mouth of the Somme river and the English Channel. The Allies’ best soldiers, still in Belgium, were trapped. A note of panic rose in the broadcasters’ voices. The Nazis now had a stronghold within the country—never in the four years of the Great War had the Germans gained such a position. And now they had done it in just ten days.

Consuelo rejoined the family a few nights later. She told her children how she had barely escaped death. Her car, provided by the Red Cross, was bombed by the Germans. She was not in it at the time, she said, but it quickened her departure. She got another car from a local politician and stuffed family heirlooms into it, certain that the German bombardment would continue and the Villeneuve estate would be destroyed again. Her Red Cross office was already in shambles. “This is it. No more windows, almost no more doors,” Consuelo had written in her diary on May 18, from her desk at the local headquarters. “Two bombings during the day. The rail station is barely functional. We have to close [this diary] … until times get better.”

But after reuniting with her children, times did not get better. The radio blared constantly in the chateau, and the reports were grim. On June 3, three hundred German aircraft bombed the Citroën and Renault factories on the southwestern border of Paris, killing 254, 195 of them civilians. Parisians left the city in such droves that cows wandered some of its richest streets, mooing. Trains on the packed railway platforms departed without destination; they just left. The government evacuated on June 10 to the south of France, where everyone else had already headed, and the city was declared open—the French military would not defend it. The Nazis marched in at noon on June 14.

Robert and his family bunched round the radio in their grandmother’s salon that day, their faces ashen. The reporters said that roughly two million people had fled and the city was silent. Then came the news flashes: the Nazis cutting through the west end and down the Champs-Elysées; a quiet procession of tanks, armored cars, and motorized infantry; only a few Frenchmen watching them from the boulevards or storefronts that had not been boarded up; and suddenly, high above the Eiffel Tower, a swastika flag whipping in the breeze.

And still, no one had heard from Olivier, who had been stationed somewhere on the Franco-German border. Consuelo, a brash and strong woman who rolled her own cigarettes from corn husks, appeared anxious now before her children, a frailty they rarely saw, as she openly fretted about her country and husband. The news turned still worse. Marshal Philippe Pétain, who had assumed control of France’s government, took to the radio June 17. “It is with a heavy heart that I tell you today that we must try to cease hostilities,” he said.

Robert drew back when he heard the words. Was Pétain, a nearly mythical figure, the hero of the Great War’s Battle of Verdun, asking for an armistice? Was the man who’d once beaten the Germans now surrendering to them?

The war itself never reached Grandmother Maillé’s chateau, roughly 170 miles south of Paris, but in the days ahead the family heard fewer grim reports from the front, which was unsettling in its own way. It meant soldiers were following Pétain’s orders. June 22 formalized the surrender: The governments of both countries agreed to sign an armistice. On that day, the La Rochefoucaulds gathered round the radio once again, unsure how their lives would change.

Hitler wanted this armistice signed on the same spot as the last—in a railway car in the forest of Compiègne. It seemed the Great War had not ended for him either. At 3:15 on an otherwise beautiful summer afternoon, Hitler arrived in his Mercedes, accompanied by his top generals, and walked to an opening in the forest. There, he stepped on a great granite block, about three feet above the ground with engraving in French that read: HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER 1918 SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINAL PRIDE OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE—VANQUISHED BY THE FREE PEOPLES WHICH IT TRIED TO ENSLAVE.

William Shirer stood some fifty yards from the führer. “I look for the expression in Hitler’s face,” Shirer later wrote. “It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph. He steps off the monument and contrives to make even this gesture a masterpiece of contempt … He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide part. It is a magnificent gesture … of burning contempt for this place now and all that it has stood for in the twenty-two years since it witnessed the humbling of the German Empire.”

Then the French delegation arrived, the officers led by Gen. Charles Huntziger, commander of the Second Army at Sedan. The onlookers could see that signing the armistice on this site humiliated the Frenchmen.

Hitler left as soon as Gen. Wilhelm Keitel, his senior military advisor, read the preamble. The terms of the armistice were numerous and harsh. They called for the French navy to be demobilized and disarmed and the ships returned to port, to ensure that renegade French boats did not align themselves with the British fleet; the army and nascent air force were to be disposed of; guns and weapons of any kind would be surrendered to the Germans; the Nazis would oversee the country but the French would be allowed to govern it in the southern zone, the unoccupied and so-called Free Zone, in which France’s fledgling provisional government resided; Paris and all of northern France would fall under the occupied, or Unfree Zone, where travel would be limited and life, due to rations and other restrictions, would be much harder.

Breaking the country in two and allowing the French to govern half of it would later be viewed as one of Hitler’s brilliant political moves. To give the French sovereignty in the south would keep political and military leaders from fleeing the country and establishing a central government in the French colonies of Africa, countries that Hitler had not yet defeated and where the French could continue to fight German forces.

But that afternoon on the radio, the La Rochefoucaulds heard only about the severing of a country their forebears had helped build. Worse still, all of Paris and the Villeneuve estate to the north of it fell within the Germans’ occupied zone. The family would be prisoners in their own home. Listening to the terms broadcast over the airwaves, the otherwise proud Consuelo made no attempt to hide her sobbing. “It was the first time I saw my mother cry over the fate of our poor France,” Robert later wrote. This led his sisters and some of his brothers to cry. Robert, however, burned with shame. “I was against it, absolutely against it,” he wrote, the resolve he’d felt under the stars amid other refugees building within him. In his idealistic and proud sixteen-year-old mind, to surrender was traitorous, and for a French marshal like Pétain to do it, a hero who had defeated the Germans at Verdun twenty-four years ago? “Monstrous,” La Rochefoucauld wrote.

In the days after the armistice, Robert gravitated to another voice on the radio. The man was Charles de Gaulle, the most junior general in France, who had left the country for London on June 17, the day Pétain suggested a cease-fire. However difficult the decision—de Gaulle had fought under Pétain in World War I and even ghostwritten one of his books—he had left quickly, departing with only a pair of trousers, four clean shirts, and a family photo in his personal luggage. Once situated in London, de Gaulle began to appeal to his countrymen on the BBC French radio service. These soon became notorious broadcasts, for their criticisms of French political and military leadership and for de Gaulle’s insistence that the war go on despite the armistice. “I, General de Gaulle … call upon the French officers or soldiers who may find themselves on British soil, with or without their weapons, to join me,” de Gaulle said in his first broadcast. “Whatever happens, the flame of French Resistance must not and shall not die.”

De Gaulle called his resistance movement the Free French. It would be based in London but operate throughout France. Robert de La Rochefoucauld listened to de Gaulle day after day, and though he had been an aimless student, he began to see how he might define his young life.

He could go to London, and join the Free French.

CHAPTER 2

The family drove back to a Soissons they did not recognize. German bombs had leveled some storefronts and German soldiers had pillaged others. Out the car window Robert saw half-collapsed homes and the detritus of shattered livelihoods littering the sidewalks and spilling onto the streets. The damage was not total—some houses and shops still stood—but this capriciousness made the wreckage all the more harrowing.

Approaching the Rochefoucaulds’ home, the car turned onto the familiar secluded avenue just outside Soissons; Robert saw the lines of chestnut trees and the small brick-covered path that cut through them. The car slowed and made the left, bouncing along. Groves of oak and basswood crowded the view and the car kept jostling as the path curved to the right, then the left, and back again. At last they saw the clearing.

The chateau of Villeneuve still rose from the earth, with its neoclassical design, brick façade, and white-stone trim, a stately home that the La Rochefoucauld family had purchased from the daughter of one of Napoléon’s generals in 1861. Beams of sunlight still winked from the windows of the northern wing, a welcoming light that bathed the interior, and all the chateau’s forty-seven rooms, with an incandescent glow. But at the circular driveway at the side of the home, something strange came into view.

German military vehicles.

A cadre of German soldiers seemed to have made the La Rochefoucauld house their own, judging from the armored cars and trucks parked at odd angles. But this wasn’t even the worst news: On closer inspection, the family saw that the chateau’s roof was missing.

My God, Robert thought, trying to absorb it all.

The children clustered together in the driveway, gawking. Then, unsure what else to do, the family made its way to the front door.

When they opened it, Consuelo and her children saw the same stone staircase rising from the entryway to the front hall. But passing above them were German officers, who barely acknowledged their arrival. The Nazis had indeed requisitioned Villeneuve, just as they would other homes and municipal buildings, hoping that the houses and schools and offices might serve as command posts for the French Occupation, or as forward bases for Germany’s upcoming battle with Britain. From the Germans’ apathetic looks, the family saw that the chateau was no longer theirs. “There was absolutely nothing we could do against it,” Robert later said.

Consuelo told her children not to acknowledge the officers, to show them that they were impermanent and therefore unremarkable: Robert would not sketch in any journal who these Germans were, what they looked like, or which one led them. But he and his siblings did record the broad outlines of the arrangement. The Nazis begrudgingly made room for the family. They soon redistributed themselves across one half of the house, so the La Rochefoucaulds could have the other. On the first floor, the officers chose the great room, whose floor-to-ceiling windows looked out on the magnificent manicured gardens, and the dining room, which seated twenty. The family took the salon—where they had once entertained visiting dignitaries and had debated Hitler’s rise to power—and the living room, cozy with chairs, rows of books, and, above the fireplace, the family crest, which depicted a beautiful woman with a witch’s tail—which in earlier times instructed La Rochefoucauld to live fully and enjoy all of life’s delights. The second and third floors—the bedrooms and playrooms for the children, and utility rooms for the staff of twelve—were divided similarly: Nazis on one side, the family on the other. Robert still had his own room, a grand chamber with fifteen-foot ceilings, a private bathroom, and fireplace. But he couldn’t stand the heavy clacking echo of German boots going up and down the second and third floors’ stone staircase. The noise seemed to almost taunt him.

The family and Germans did not eat together. The La Rochefoucaulds set up a new dining room in the salon. They shared the grand spiral staircase because they had to, but the family and its staff never spoke to the Germans, and the Germans only spoke to Consuelo, once they learned she was the matriarch and local head of the Red Cross.

Consuelo’s relationship with these occupying officers was, to put it mildly, difficult. In little time they settled on a nickname for her: the Terrible Countess.

It is easy to understand why. First, Consuelo had built this house. When she and Olivier were married after the Great War, a plump girl who was more confident than pretty, she looked at the ruins of what remained of the La Rochefoucauld estate and told her husband she would prefer it if the rebuilt chateau no longer faced east-west, as it had for centuries, but north-south. That way the windows could take in more sunlight. Olivier obeyed his young wife’s wishes and brick by brick a neoclassical marvel emerged, one that indeed glowed with natural light. Now, twenty years later, the Germans were sullying the chateau, German soldiers who played to type, too, always loud, always shouting Ja!, parking up to seven bulky tanks in her yard and then endlessly cleaning them, meeting in her house, meeting in a tent they set up outside her house, their decorum gauche regardless of where they went, the sort of people who literally found it appropriate to write on her walls.

Then there was the damage to the roof. And though Consuelo learned that a British bomb, and not a German one, had missed the bridge it aimed for a half mile distant during the fight for France and instead flattened the fourth floor of the chateau, she resented that the Nazis hadn’t offered to close the gaping hole above them, especially as the summer became late fall and the temperature turned cold. The Villeneuve staff had to put a tarp over the roof’s remnants, but that did little good. When it rained, water still flowed down the stairwell. Winter nights chilled everyone, brutal hours that required multiple layers of clothing. The bomb had set off a fire that momentarily spread on the second floor, which destroyed the central heating system. Now, before the children went to bed, they had to warm a brick over a wood-fired oven and then rub the brick over their sheets, which heated their beds just enough so they might fall asleep.

Finally, there was Olivier. The family found out that he had been arrested by German forces near Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, a commune in Lorraine in northeastern France, on June 27, five days after the armistice. He was now imprisoned in the sinister-sounding Oflag XVII-A, a POW camp for French officers in eastern Austria known as “little Siberia.” He was allowed to write two letters home every month, which had been censored by guards. What little Consuelo gleaned of her husband’s true experience at the camp infuriated her further.

Given all this, it wasn’t really a surprise to see Consuelo act out against the Germans. On one occasion, a Nazi officer, who was a member of the German cavalry and an aristocrat, wanted to pay his respects to Madame La Rochefoucauld, whose name traveled far in noble circles. When he arrived at Villeneuve, he walked up the steps, took off his gloves, and approached Consuelo, who waited at the entry, all stocky frame and suspicious gaze. He gripped her hand in his and kissed it, but before he could tell her it was a pleasure to stay in this grand home, she slapped him across the face. The Terrible Countess would not be wooed by any German. For a moment, no one knew how to respond. Then the officers, only half joking, told Consuelo a welcome like that put her at risk of deportation.

Robert was his mother’s son. The fact that the Nazi officers were a few rooms away only increased his talk about how much he hated them, those Boche. He was brash enough, would say these epithets just loud enough, that even Consuelo had to shush him. But Robert seemed not to care. His olive complexion reddened with indignant righteousness when he listened to Charles de Gaulle’s speeches, and even after the German high command in Paris banned the French from turning on the BBC, Robert did it in secret. He never wanted to miss the general’s daily message. Oftentimes, to evangelize, he would travel across Soissons to the estate of his cousin, Guy de Pennart, who was his age and shared, roughly, his temperament. Guy and Robert talked about how they were going to join the British and fight on. “I was convinced that we had to continue the war at all costs,” Robert later said.

He was seventeen by the fall of 1940 and had graduated from high school. He wanted to join de Gaulle but wasn’t sure how. One didn’t “enlist” in the Resistance. Even a well-connected young man like Robert didn’t know the underground routes that could get him to London. So he enrolled at an agricultural college in Paris, ostensibly to become a gentleman farmer like his father, but, more likely, he went to meet people who might help him reach de Gaulle.

These individuals, though, were not easy to find. There was little reason to be a résistant in 1940. The Germans had disbanded the army and all weapons, all the way down to hunting knives, had been handed in or taken by Nazi authorities. The “resistance” amounted to little more than underground newspapers that were often snuffed out, their editors imprisoned or sentenced to death by German judges presiding in France.

So Robert and a small number of new friends, all of them more boys than men, turned to one another with refrains about how much they despised the Germans, and despised Vichy, a spa town in the south of France where Pétain and his collaborating government resided. The boys talked about how France had lost her honor. “I didn’t have much good sense,” Robert said, “but honor—that’s all my friends and I could talk about.”

Its vestiges were all around him. Villeneuve was not just a home but also a monument to the family’s history, replete with portraits and busts of significant men. The La Rochefoucauld line dated back to 900 AD and the family had shaped France for nearly as long. Robert had learned from his parents about François Alexandre Frédéric de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, a duke in Louis XVI’s court. He awoke the king during the storming of the Bastille in 1789. King Louis asked La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt if it was a revolt. “No, sire,” he answered. “It is a revolution.” And indeed it was. Then there was François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, a seventeenth-century duke who published a book of aphoristic maxims, whose style and substance influenced writers as diverse as Bernard Mandeville, Nietzsche, and Voltaire. Another La Rochefoucauld, a friend of Benjamin Franklin’s, helped found the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, which abolished slavery some seventy years before it could be done in the United States. Two La Rochefoucauld brothers, both priests, were martyred during the Reign of Terror and later beatified by Rome. One La Rochefoucauld was directeur des Beaux Arts during the Bourbon Restoration. Others appeared in the pages of Proust. Many were lionized within the military—fighting in the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, against the Prussians. The city of Paris named a street after the La Rochefoucaulds.

For Robert, the family’s legacy had followed him everywhere throughout his childhood, inescapable: He was baptized beneath a stained-glass mural of the brother priests’ martyrdom; taught in school about the aphorisms in François VI’s Maxims; raised by a father who’d received the Legion of Honor, France’s highest military commendation. Greatness was expected of him, and the expectation shadowed his days. Now, with the Germans living in the chateau, it was as if the portraits that hung on the walls darkened when Robert passed them, judging him and asking what he would do to rid the country of its occupiers and write his own chapter in the family history. To reclaim the France that his family had helped mold—that’s what mattered. “I firmly believed that … honor commanded us to continue the fight,” he said.

But Robert felt something beyond familial pressure. In his travels around Paris or on frequent stops home—he split his weeks between the city and Villeneuve—he grew genuinely angry at his defeated countrymen. He felt cheated. His life, his limitless young life, was suddenly defined by terms he did not set and did not approve of.

What galled him was that few people seemed to think as he did. He found that a lot of people in Paris and in Soissons were relieved the war was over, even if it meant the country was no longer theirs. The prewar pacifism had gelled into a postwar defeatism. Fractured France was experiencing an “intellectual and moral anesthesia,” in the words of one prefect. It was bizarre. Robert had the sense that the ubiquitous German soldiers who hopped onto the Métro or sipped coffee in a café were already part of a passé scenery for the natives.

Other people got the same sense. In a surprisingly short amount of time, the hatred of the Germans and the grudges held against them “assumed a rather abstract air” for the vast majority of French, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, because “the occupation was a daily affair.” The Germans were everywhere, after all, asking for directions or eating dinner. And even if Parisians hated them as much as Robert de La Rochefoucauld did, calling them dirty names beneath their breath, Sartre argued that “a kind of shameful, indefinable solidarity [soon] established itself between the Parisians and these troopers who were, in the end, so similar to the French soldiers …

“The concept of enemy,” Sartre continued, “is only entirely firm and clear when the enemy is separated from us by a wall of fire.”

Even at Villeneuve, Robert witnessed the ease with which the perception of the Germans could be colored in warmer hues. Robert’s younger sister, Yolaine, returned from boarding school for a holiday, and sat in the salon one afternoon listening to a German officer play the piano in the next room. He was an excellent pianist. Yolaine dared not smile as she sat there, for fear of what her mother or older brother might say if they walked past, but her serene young face showed how much she enjoyed the German’s performance. “He was playing very, very well,” she admitted years later.

It was no easy task to hate your neighbor all the time. That was the simple truth of 1940. And the Germans made their embrace all the more inviting because they’d been ordered to treat the French with dignity. Hitler didn’t want another Poland, a country he had torched whose people he had either killed or more or less enslaved. Such tactics took a lot of bureaucratic upkeep, and Germany still had Britain to defeat. So every Nazi in France was commanded to show a stiff disciplined courteousness to the natives. Robert saw this at Villeneuve, where the German officers treated the Terrible Countess with a respect she did not reciprocate. (In fact, that they never deported his mother can be read to a certain extent as an exercise in decorous patience.) One saw this treatment extended to other families as they resettled after the exodus: PUT YOUR TRUST IN THE GERMAN SOLDIER, signs read. The Nazis gave French communities beef to eat, even if it was sometimes meat that the Germans had looted during the summer. Parisians like Robert saw Nazis offering their seats to elderly madames on the Métro, and on the street watched as these officers tipped their caps to the French police. In August, one German army report on public opinion in thirteen French departments noted the “exemplary, amiable and helpful behavior of the German soldiers …”

Some French, like Robert, remained wary: That same report said German kindness had “aroused little sympathy” among certain natives; and young women in Chartres, who had heard terrible stories from the First World War, had taken to smearing their vaginas with Dijon mustard, “to sting the Germans when they rape,” one Frenchwoman noted in her diary. But on the whole, the German Occupation went over relatively seamlessly for Christian France. By October 1940, it seemed not at all strange for Marshal Pétain, the eighty-four-year-old president of France’s provisional government and hero of the Great War, to meet with Hitler in Montoire, about eighty miles southwest of Paris. There, the two agreed to formalize their alliance, shaking hands before a waiting press corps while Pétain later announced in a radio broadcast: “It is in the spirit of honor, and to maintain the unity of France … that I enter today upon the path of collaboration.”

Though Pétain refused to join the side of the Germans in their slog of a fight against the British, he did agree to the Nazis’ administrative and civil aims. The country, in short, would begin to turn Fascist. “The Armistice … is not peace, and France is held by many obligations with respect to the winner,” Pétain said. To strengthen itself, France must “extinguish” all divergent opinions.

Pétain’s collaboration speech outraged Robert even as it silenced him. He thought it was “the war’s biggest catastrophe,” but his mother quieted him. With that threat about divergent opinions, “There could be consequences,” she said. She had lost her husband and wasn’t about to lose a son to a German prison. So Robert traveled back to Paris for school, careful but resolved to live a life in opposition to what he saw around him.

CHAPTER 3

He was still a boy, only seventeen, not even of military age, but he understood better than most the darkening afternoon that foretold France’s particularly long night. Robert saw a country that was falling apart.

He saw it first in the newspapers. Many new dailies and weeklies emerged with a collaborationist viewpoint, sometimes even more extreme than what Pétain promoted. Some Paris editors considered Hitler a man who would unite all of Europe; others likened the Nazis to French Revolutionaries, using war to impose a new ideology on the continent. There were political differences among the collaborators; some were socialists, and others pacifists who saw fascism as a way to keep the peace. One paper began publishing nothing but denunciations of Communists, Freemasons, and Jews. Another editor, Robert Brasillach, of the Fascist Je Suis Partout (I Am Everywhere), praised “Germany’s spirit of eternal youth” while calling the French Republic “a syphilitic strumpet, smelling of cheap perfume and vaginal discharge.” But even august publications with long histories changed with the times: The Nouvelle Revue Française, or NRF (a literary magazine much like The New Yorker), received a new editor in December 1940, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, an acclaimed novelist and World War I veteran who had become a Fascist. Otto Abetz, the German ambassador, could not believe his good fortune. “There are three great powers in France: Communism, the big banks and the NRF,” he said. The magazine veered hard right.

At the same time, Robert also noticed the Germans begin to bombard the radio and newsreels with propaganda. Hitler was portrayed as the strong man, a more beneficent Napoléon even, with the people he ruled laughing over their improved lives. Robert found it disgusting, in no small part because he had witnessed this warped reality before, in Austria in 1938 at boarding school. He had even met Hitler there.

It was in the Bavarian Alps, hiking with a priest and some boys from the Marist boarding school he attended outside Salzburg. The priests had introduced their pupils to the German youth organizations Hitler favored and, at the time, Robert loved them, because they promoted hiking at the expense of algebra. He didn’t know much about the German chancellor then, aside from the fact that everyone talked about him, but he knew it was a big deal for the priest to take the boys to Berghof, Hitler’s Alpine retreat, perched high above the market town of Berchtesgaden. When they reached it they saw a gently sloping hill on which sat a massive compound: a main residence as large as a French chateau and, to the right, a smaller guest house. The estate was the first home Hitler called his own and where he spent “the finest hours of my life,” he once said. “It was there that all my great projects were conceived and ripened.”

The students stood lightly panting before it when a convoy of black cars wended down the long driveway and turned out onto the road. The path cut right in front of the boys, and one sedan stopped in front of them. Out stepped Adolf Hitler. The priest, stunned, began explaining that he and his group had just come to look—but Hitler was in a playful mood, not suspicious in the least, and began questioning the boys, many of whom were Austrian, about their backgrounds. When Hitler got to Robert, the priest said that this boy was French. Robert tried to make an impression, and began speaking to Hitler in the German he’d acquired living in Austria. But the phrases emerged with an unmistakable accent, and when Robert finished, Hitler just patted him on the cheek. “Franzose,” he responded. (“Frenchman.”) And then he moved on.

In a moment, the führer was back in the car and out of view. The encounter was as brief as it was shocking: The boys had seen, had even been touched by, the most famous man in Europe, the shaper of history himself. They looked at each other, and Robert couldn’t help but feel giddy.

The bliss wouldn’t last, however. Austria was quickly losing whatever independence it had, and when Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg said in a radio address in February that he could make no more concessions to the Nazis, a frenzied, yelling mob of twenty thousand Fascists invaded the city of Graz, ripped out the loudspeakers that had broadcast Schuschnigg’s address, then pulled down the Austrian flag and replaced it with a swastika banner. A month later Hitler invaded, and within days the Anschluss was complete.

Robert saw a demonstration in Salzburg a few days later, where everyone shouted, “Heil Hitler! Long live Hitler!” He felt the threat of violence begin to cloud the interactions of everyday life. The Nazis occupied the buildings next to the Marist school and one day Robert looked in a window and suddenly a man stormed from the building, insulting and threatening him, simply for peering inside. Robert began to second-guess a führer who would champion these bullies. By the end of the school year, he was happy to leave Austria for good.

Now, at the beginning of the Occupation, he saw a similar malice embedded within the French newsreels: Everyone smiling too hard and striving to look the same. With each passing day, the Frenchmen he encountered seemed to follow in the Austrians’ footsteps, embracing a fascism they were either too scared or ignorant of to oppose. One exhibition defaming Freemasonry attracted 900,000 Parisians, nearly half the city’s population. Another, called “European France,” with Hitler as the pan-national leader, drew 635,000. Meanwhile, the German Institute’s language courses flourished to the point that they had to turn away applicants. For 90 percent of France, La Rochefoucauld later mused, Pétain and Hitler’s alliance represented the second coming of Joan of Arc. The historical record would show that collaborators, those who subscribed to newspapers committed to the cause and joined special interest groups, were never actually a majority, but Robert could be forgiven for thinking this because all around him people declared themselves friends of Hitler. The founder of the cosmetics firm L’Oréal turned out to be a collaborator. So was the director of Paris’ Opéra-Comique, the curator of the Rodin Museum, even the rector of the Catholic University of Paris. By the end of 1940, in fact, the country’s assembly of cardinals and archbishops demanded in a letter that laity give a “complete and sincere loyalty … to the established order.” One Catholic priest finished Sunday Mass with a loud “Heil Hitler.”

It was all so disorienting. Robert felt like he no longer recognized La France. He was eighteen and impetuous and London and de Gaulle called to him—but couldn’t he do something here, now? He wanted to show the Germans that they could control his country, his faith, his house, but they could not control him.

One day he met in secret with his cousin, Guy, and they launched a plan to steal a train loaded with ammunition that stopped in Soissons. Maybe they would blow it up, maybe they would just abscond with it. The point was: The Germans would know they didn’t rule everything. Guy and Robert talked about how wonderful it would be, and ultimately Robert approached a man of their fathers’ generation, whom Robert blindly suspected of being in the fledgling Resistance, and asked for help.

The man stared hard at Robert. He told him that he and his cousin could not carry out their mission. Even if they stole this train, what would they do with it? And how would it defeat the Germans? And did they realize that their act risked more lives than their own? German reprisals for “terrorism” sometimes demanded dozens of executions.

Already, an amateur rebellion had cost the community lives. A Resistance group in Soissons called La Vérité Française had affiliated itself with one in Paris that formed in the Musée de l’Homme. It was a brave but naive group, unaware of the double agents within its ranks as it published underground newspapers and organized escape routes for French prisoners of war. The German secret police raided the Musée and Vérité groups. One museum résistant was deported, three sentenced to prison and seven to death. In Soissons, two members of Vérité Française were beheaded, six shot, and six more died in concentration camps. The Nazi agents who organized the Soissons raid worked in an elegant gray-stone building—across the street from the cathedral where the La Rochefoucaulds occasionally attended Mass.

So their plan was foolish, the man said, and Robert and his cousin were lucky to be stopped before the brutal secret police or, for that matter, the army officers billeting in Robert’s house could get to them.

The scolding shamed La Rochefoucauld, and stilled his intent. But the situation in France continued to worsen. The French government was responsible for the upkeep of the German army in France, which cost a stunning 400 million francs a day, after the Nazis rigged the math and overvalued the German mark by 60 percent. Soon, it was enough money to actually buy France from the French, one German economist noted. Oil grew scarce. Robert began biking everywhere. The German-backed government in Vichy imposed rations, and Robert soon saw long lines of people at seemingly every bakery and grocery store he passed. The Germans set a shifting curfew for Paris, as early as 9 p.m. or as late as midnight, depending on the Nazis’ whims. This would have annoyed any college-aged man, but the German capriciousness carried a sinister edge, too: After dark, Parisians heard the echo of the patrolling secret police’s boots and might wake the next day to find a neighbor or acquaintance missing and everyone too frightened to ask questions. In 1941, the terror spilled out into the open. Small cliques of Communist résistants in Nantes and Bordeaux assassinated two high-ranking Nazi officers, and, in response, Hitler ordered the execution of ninety-eight people, some of them teenagers, who had at most nominal ties to Communism. One by one they were sent to the firing squad, some of them singing the French national anthem. As news of the executions spread—ninety-eight people dead—a police report noted: “The German authorities have sown consternation everywhere.”

The urge to fight rose again in Robert and his college friends. Pétain seemed to be speaking directly to young men like Robert when he warned in a broadcast: “Frenchmen … I appeal to you in a broken voice: Do not allow any more harm to be done to France.” But that proved difficult as 1941 became 1942, and the Occupation entered its third year. Travel to certain areas was allowed only by permit, thirteen thousand Jews were rounded up in Paris and sent to Auschwitz, and the United States entered the war. The Germans, to feed their fighting machine, gave the French even less to eat, forcing mothers to wait all morning for butter and urban families to beg their rural cousins for overripened vegetables. Robert now heard of sabotages of German equipment and materiel carried out by people very much like himself. He no doubt heard of the people who feared the growing Resistance as well, who wanted to keep the peace whatever the cost, who called résistants “bandits” or even “terrorists,” adopting the language of the occupier. In 1942, denunciations were common. Radio Paris had a show, Répétez-le (Repeat It), in which listeners named their neighbors, business associates, or sometimes family members as enemies of the state. The Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the feared agency colloquially known as the Gestapo, read at least three million denunciatory letters during the war, many of them signed by Frenchmen.

This self-policing—which can be read as an attempt to curry favor with the Germans or to divert attention from oneself or simply to spite a disliked neighbor—oppressed the populace more than the SD could have. As the historian Henry Charles Lea said of the culture of denunciation: “No more ingenious device has been invented to subjugate a whole population, to paralyze its intellect and to reduce it to blind obedience.” Even children understood the terror behind the collective censorship. As Robert de La Rochefoucauld’s younger sister, Yolaine, who was thirteen years old in 1942, put it: “I remember silence, silence, silence.”

Robert, though, couldn’t live like that. “Every time I met with friends,” Robert would later say, “we always endlessly talked about how to kick the Germans out, how to resolve the situation, how to fight.” By the summer of that year, Robert was about to turn nineteen. The German officers had moved on, as quickly as they’d come, leaving the chateau without explanation for another destination. This only emboldened La Rochefoucauld, who still listened to Charles de Gaulle and cheered when he said things like, “It is completely normal and completely justified that Germans should be killed by French men and French women. If the Germans did not wish to be killed by our hands, they should have stayed home and not waged war on us.”

One day a Soissons postman knocked on the door of the chateau and asked to see Robert’s mother, Consuelo. The conversation they had greatly upset her. When he left, she immediately sought out Robert.

She told him that she’d just met with a mail carrier who set aside letters addressed to the secret police. This postman took the letters home with him and steamed open the envelopes to see who in the correspondence was being denounced. If the carrier didn’t know the accused, he burned the letter. But if he did, well, and here Consuelo produced a piece of paper with writing scrawled across it. If the postman did know the accused, Consuelo said, he warned the family. She passed the letter to her son. It had been sent anonymously, but in it the writer denounced Robert as being a supporter of de Gaulle’s, against collaboration, and above all a terrorist.

Anger and fear shot through him. Who might have done this? Why? But to fixate on that obscured the larger point: Robert was no longer safe in Soissons. If someone out there had been angry enough to see him arrested, might not a second person also feel this way? Might not another letter appear and, in the hands of a less courageous postal worker, be sent right along to the Nazis? Robert and his mother discussed it at length, but both knew instinctively.

He had to leave.

CHAPTER 4

He went first to Paris, in search of someone who could at long last get him to de Gaulle and his Free French forces. After asking around, Robert met with a man who worked in the Resistance, and Robert told him about his hope to head to London, join de Gaulle, and fight the Nazis. Could the Parisian help?

The man paused for a moment. “Come back in fifteen days,” he said, “and I’ll tell you what I can do.”

Two weeks later, Robert and the résistant met again. The Germans patrolled the coast between France and England, so a Frenchman’s best bet to reach the UK was to head south, to Spain, which had stayed out of the war and was a neutral country. If La Rochefoucauld could get there and then to the British embassy in, say, Madrid, he might find a way to London.

Robert was grateful, even joyous, but he had a question. Before he could cross into another country, he’d have to cross France’s demarcation line, separating the occupied from unoccupied zones. How was he to do that under his own name? The Parisian said he could help arrange a travel permit and false papers for La Rochefoucauld. But this in turn only raised more questions. If lots of Frenchmen got to London by way of Spain—if that passage was a résistant’s best bet—wouldn’t the Germans know that, too?

Probably, the man said. Everything in war is a risk. But the Parisian had a friend in Vichy with a government posting who secretly worked for the Resistance. If the Parisian placed a call, the Vichy friend could help guide Robert to a lesser-known southern route. Robert asked the man to phone his friend.

The Parisian and Robert also discussed false IDs. Maybe Robert needed two aliases. With two names it would be even harder to trace him as he traveled south. Of course, if the Germans found out about either, Robert would almost certainly be imprisoned. La Rochefoucauld seemed to accept this risk because French military files show him settling on two names: Robert Jean Renaud and René Lallier. The first was a take on his given name: Robert Jean-Marie. The second he just thought up, “a nom de guerre I’d found who knows where,” he later wrote. Both had the mnemonic advantage of carrying some of his real name’s initials.

He used René Lallier for the journey south to Vichy. The photo in his false identity card depicted La Rochefoucauld in a three-piece suit, with his wavy black hair parted to the right in a pompadour, the corner of his lips curling into a smile, as if he couldn’t keep from laughing at the deception. At the demarcation line, the Nazi auxiliaries in the gray uniforms who checked papers, and whom the French called “the gray mice,” studied La Rochefoucauld’s ID, the name René Lallier in big block type, the black-and-white photo beneath. The date of birth was given as August 28, 1925, almost two years after La Rochefoucauld’s real birthday. The residence was listed in the Oise department, which was to the immediate west of La Rochefoucauld’s actual home in the Aisne. The gray mouse pored over the form, and then handed it back to La Rochefoucauld. He could proceed.

He took the train to Vichy, but when he got off, a wave of panic swelled within him. He wondered if it had been idiotic to come here, to the epicenter of German collaboration. Everyone seemed to eye him suspiciously; even cars and buildings looked “hostile,” he later wrote. He tried to push down the fear rising up his throat and appear casual, as if he belonged. But that was a difficult act. In the end, “I made an effort to be seen as little as possible,” he wrote, walking in the shadows of the streets, avoiding eye contact. He settled into a hotel that his Paris friend had arranged for him. The plan was to meet the man from the Vichy government in the lobby, but now that he was in his room, the whole affair seemed absurd: To meet with an actual Vichy official? In a Vichy hotel? Was this madness? “I was wary of everything and everyone,” he wrote.

Still, at the appointed time, he found the strength to walk to the lobby. He saw the government official the Parisian had described. The two greeted each other; Robert tried to ignore any gooseflesh pimpling his neck. They sat down, the official opening the conversation lightly, with banal questions and asides. He was trying to feel Robert out, which began to put him at ease—the official was “extremely nice,” La Rochefoucauld later said. The two could only playact for so long, though. The Vichy man told La Rochefoucauld that a group was about to leave for Perpignan, a city in southeastern France near the border with Spain. The official had a friend there, someone Robert would meet and who would help him cross over.

The official gave La Rochefoucauld an address for the man in Perpignan—and then stopped Robert before he could write it down. He said La Rochefoucauld had to commit the address to memory. “I began to soak up this code of conduct,” Robert later wrote, “which was so necessary to what I was undertaking but previously not really in my nature.” The Vichy man said once Robert arrived, the Perpignan friend would in turn put him in contact with smugglers who moved other clandestine agents or downed British pilots into Spain. How La Rochefoucauld got to the safety of, say, a British embassy would be at the discretion of the smugglers. The Vichy official and La Rochefoucauld then wished each other well and Robert watched him leave the lobby.

The meeting apparently made him feel better because Robert later described the trip to Perpignan as “very pleasant,” free of the paranoia of Vichy. At the given address in Perpignan, a man in his thirties answered La Rochefoucauld’s knock on the door, greeting Robert formally and aware of his plans. The Perpignan man was, like the one from Vichy, also a civil servant secretly awaiting the fall of Pétain’s government, and insisted La Rochefoucauld make himself comfortable. It could be a while before the next trip across the border, he said. So Robert stayed that night, and then seven more: The man and his smuggler friends planned to take a few clandestine fighters at a time and were rounding them up, he said. On the eighth night the Perpignan man told Robert that the smugglers would traffic two British pilots desperate to make it to Spain. Robert would travel with these Englishmen across the border.

One day soon thereafter Robert and the man from Perpignan set out to meet the Brits and the smugglers who would guide them across. The Occupation and scarcity of oil in France—the Nazis demanded more of it from the French than Germany produced annually—had forced many of the French by 1942 to abandon their vehicles and live as if it were the nineteenth century. “Distances,” one observer wrote, were suddenly “measured in paces—of man or horse.” The people who kept a vehicle often retrofitted the engine so that a pump placed near the rear of the car, resembling the cylinder jutting up above a steam-engine train, could convert coal or wood chips into fuel in lieu of oil. That was what the man from Perpignan had: A rickety bus with what was known as a gasified tank grafted onto it, its cylinder rising high above the rest of the bus’s body. He and La Rochefoucauld traveled along the small roads snaking through the outskirts of the Pyrenees mountains, stopping at a modest village a dozen miles from Perpignan. They parked the bus and the man, pointing to the heavy forest around them, said they would walk from here. They set off through the woods and the sloping mountainside until they saw it, about three miles into their hike: the makeshift camp of a dozen mountain men. They were large, hairy, and not particularly clean, but after introductions they promised they knew the routes to Spain better than anyone. Before trafficking Resistance fighters, they’d moved a lot of alcohol and cigarettes across the border. La Rochefoucauld snorted his approval.

The French and sympathetic Spaniards had their preferred escape routes, and the British government even sanctioned one, through an offshoot of MI6, called the VIC line. But many border crossings shared a common starting point in Perpignan, in part because the city lay at the foot of the Pyrenees that divided France from Spain. A crossing through the range there, though arduous, wasn’t as demanding as in the high mountains, more than two hundred miles to the west. The problem, of course, was that the Nazis knew this too, and Spain was “honeycombed with German agents,” one official wrote. So if the Pyrenees themselves didn’t endanger lives, a résistant’s run to freedom might.

The British pilots arrived, noticeably older than La Rochefoucauld and not speaking a word of French. Robert’s childhood with English nannies suddenly came in handy. He said hello, and soon found that they were career soldiers, a pilot and a radioman, who’d been shot down over central France during a mission, but parachuted out and escaped the German patrols. They had hiked for days to get here. La Rochefoucauld translated all this and the group decided to let the exhausted English rest. They would set out the next night.

In the end, seven left for Spain: La Rochefoucauld, the Brits, and four guides—two advance scouts and two pacing the refugees. They took paths only the smugglers knew, guided by their intuition and a faint moon. The narrow passages and ever-steepening incline meant the men walked single file. “The hike was particularly difficult,” La Rochefoucauld later wrote. Vineyards gave way to terraced vineyards until the vegetation disappeared, the mountain rising higher before them, loose rubble and stone at their feet. As the night deepened, Robert could see little of the person in front of him. The people who scaled these mountains often misjudged distances, stubbing their toes on the boulders or twisting their ankles on uneven earth or, when the night was at its darkest, flailing their arms when they expected a jut in the mountain’s face that was nothing more than open air. This last was the most terrifying. Germans posted observation decks on the crests of certain peaks, which discouraged strongly lit torches and slowed or, conversely, sometimes quickened the pace, depending on whether and when the guides believed the Germans to be peering through their telescopes. The peaks at this part of the Pyrenees were roughly four thousand feet, and the descent was as limb- and life-threatening as the climb. The passage exhausted everyone. “Every two hours, we took a quarter of an hour’s rest,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. At dawn the group closed in on a stretch of the range that straddled the two countries, but didn’t want to risk a crossing during the day. So they hid out and waited for nightfall. When they resumed their hike, the going proved “just as hard, and increasingly dangerous,” Robert later recalled. The group nearly stumbled into view of a German post, etched into the night’s skyline. They detoured quietly around it, but then, having rejoined the route, saw another Nazi lookout, rising amid the shadows. So once more they redirected themselves, trying to be safe but also trying to take advantage of the darkness; they needed to cross into Spain before dawn. These were tense moments, moving quickly and silently and almost blindly, and all while listening for footsteps behind them. Eventually they made it to the Perthus Pass, a mountainous area right on the border. Nazi patrols were known to roam the grounds at all hours here. The group’s advance scouts went ahead and came back in the last small minutes before daylight. “The road is clear!” they said. With a rush of adrenaline and fear, everyone scurried across, into Spain.

Robert and the airmen laughed, euphoric. They were hundreds of miles south, but so much closer to London.

The guides said they needed to head back; smugglers out after dawn risked imprisonment. Everyone shook hands. The guides pointed to the road. “This will take you to a town,” one of them said.

Robert and the Brits set out, with a plan to get to the village, clean up somewhere, and take a train to Madrid without raising suspicion. Once there, they would cautiously make their way to the British embassy.

Though they had slept little and eaten sparingly, they walked at a good pace, full of life. They reached a thriving market town that morning; it was likely Figueres, the first municipality of any note across the Spanish border. They immediately discovered that it was crawling with police and customs agents. They were three men who had just climbed through the Pyrenees over two sleepless nights—“We looked more like highway robbers than peaceful citizens,” La Rochefoucauld wrote—and before they could find a hiding spot or a public washroom, two Spanish agents approached them on the street. The Spaniards were kind and one of them spoke French. Given their appearance and the toll the trek had taken on them, they felt that any story they might concoct wouldn’t sync with reality. So La Rochefoucauld tried an honest tack, to appeal to the officers’ intelligence. He said he had escaped from France with these British pilots, who had been shot down and fled to the border. The Spanish agents’ faces didn’t harden; they seemed to appreciate the honesty. But the lead officer told the men they had no choice but “to take you with us to the station.” In the days ahead, with Spanish bureaucracy in wartime Europe being what it was, La Rochefoucauld and the Brits went from one law-enforcement agency to another, and ended up at Campdevànol in Girona, twenty-five miles south of Figueres.

Robert Jean Renaud, La Rochefoucauld’s twenty-two-year-old French-Canadian alias, was booked in the Girona prison on December 17, 1942. The Girona authorities found Renaud’s case beyond their jurisdiction and on December 23, they transferred him and, according to La Rochefoucauld, the British pilots to a place even less accommodating: the prisoner of war camp in Miranda de Ebro.

Built in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, the concentration camp near the Ebro River in the homely flatness of northern Spain first housed Republican soldiers and political dissidents who defied Franco’s fascism. Its watchtowers, barbed-wire fences, and barracks in parallel lines across 103 acres of Castilian soil were designed with the help of Paul Winzer, a Nazi member of both the SS and Gestapo, then working in Madrid. Franco’s men understood cruelty as well as any budding Nazi. They shipped the Republican prisoners to Miranda in cattle cars, starved them, humiliated them, exposed them to weather conditions and savage guards and all the diseases that thrive in overly populated spaces. The twenty-two barracks, made to hold two thousand men, held 18,406 prisoners at one point in 1938. All told, an estimated ten thousand people died there during the Spanish Civil War.

With Franco’s victory in 1939 and the outbreak of World War II, the camp was converted into a prison for refugees fleeing Hitler’s Europe. Its political allegiances shifted and baffled both the Allied and Axis powers. One would think a Nazi supporter as fierce as Franco would listen to the Germans and allow them sway within the camp, considering an SS man built the place. But Spanish officials informed the Nazis that because they’d overseen the prison since 1937, they didn’t need any outside guidance. No German helped to direct it during World War II. And because of Franco’s friendliness toward Great Britain and the diplomatic dexterity of British ambassador Samuel Hoare, to whom the general listened, British prisoners at Miranda served shorter stints than nationals from any other European country.

But that didn’t endear the remaining Allied prisoners to the Miranda staff. It routinely complied with the German embassy in Madrid, which issued exit visas and repatriation documents for its “subjects,” the Czechs, Poles, and French who had fled the German occupation of their home countries.

In short, it was a bad time to be a Frenchman entering Miranda—which is why French-Canadian seemed such an inspired nationality for La Rochefoucauld’s nom de guerre Robert Jean Renaud. To say he was a Canadian freed La Rochefoucauld from a forced return to Vichy France, or from the more barbaric treatment the Miranda staff imposed on certain French nationals: the beatings and the exhausting, morally degrading forced labor.

None of this meant, however, that Robert’s stay in Miranda was enjoyable. After his and the Brits’ booking, the guards shoved all three in the same cell, which other political prisoners described as “cattle stalls” or “windowless huts.” It was little better outside their unit. Miranda was well beyond its capacity of 2,000 prisoners, holding 3,500 by the end of 1942. Everyone risked whippings or smaller humiliations from taunting guards. In January 1943, some prisoners began a hunger strike.

Every day the two British pilots wrote letters to their embassy in Madrid, begging for release. While they awaited a response, food was scarce and the three subsisted on little more than the morning’s slice of bread and conversation. The winter wind whipped through the airy barracks and inmates froze in their thin uniforms. Medical care was inconsistent, and when doctors did perform rounds they often asked that hot irons be pressed onto inmates’ dirty clothes, to kill off the lice. Scabies and diarrheic diseases, which prisoners called “mirandite,” were rampant. Rats attacked the camp dogs in broad daylight. To visit the latrines at night “necessitated a good deal of courage,” the British spy and Miranda survivor George Langelaan wrote, because there the same great rats “fought and squealed furiously, regardless and unafraid of men.” Sleep came fleetingly. The guards on night patrol sporadically shouted Alerta!, either to make sure other guards were awake or to torture dozing inmates. In the morning, everyone stood outside for roll call and on Sundays they marched by the commandant and his officers who were clustered around a Nationalist flag on a miniature grandstand. The Miranda staff, dressed in their Sunday best of white belts, white epaulets, and white gloves, formed a band, and the prisoners walked behind it in time to music. This amused the elderly officers in their large silk sashes. Inevitably, one of the band members fell out of step or grew confused by the complicated formations, and the prisoners snickered under their breath at the band.

Every week, two large trucks from the British embassy arrived, dropping off cigarettes and other provisions and picking up whichever Brits the Spanish authorities had agreed to release. Ambassador Hoare had a keen interest in freeing pilots; the Allies increased their air missions over France in 1942 and ’43, dangerous missions in which the Germans often shot the planes down. If the pilots survived the crash and ended up in Miranda, getting them back to London and back in the air took less time than training new men.

In late February 1943, after roughly three months in prison, the British pilots with La Rochefoucauld heard that a man from His Majesty’s Government awaited them in the visitors’ room. The three inmates smiled. Quickly, the British men gathered themselves and made for their meeting, with Robert calling after them, Don’t forget me, and begging them to mention that he wanted to meet de Gaulle and join the Free French. A short while later, the pilots returned to the cell, smirking, and Robert soon found out why.

He was called to meet with the British representative. This was likely a military attaché, Major Haslam, who made frequent trips to the camp in 1943. Once La Rochefoucauld reached the visitors’ room, the Brit profusely thanked him “for all you’ve done to help my countrymen.” Robert was dumbfounded: What had he done? He’d served as the pilots’ interpreter, little more. But the representative went on and Robert figured the pilots had “grossly embellished my role.” He tried to set the man straight, explaining that though he was happy to know the pilots, and even befriend them, his passage through Spain had no purpose other than getting to de Gaulle and joining the Free French.

The Brit stared at him, not upset that he had been misled, but seemingly working something out in his mind. At last, he said he would do his best to grant La Rochefoucauld’s wish. “I thanked him with all my heart,” La Rochefoucauld wrote, “and once back in the cell, fell into the arms of the pilots.” A few days later, he got on a truck with the airmen and departed for Madrid and the British embassy.

They arrived at night, the Spanish capital so brilliantly lit it shocked them; it had been months since they’d seen such iridescence. At the embassy they ate a “top-notch dinner,” La Rochefoucauld wrote, “then we were brought to our rooms, the dimensions and comfort of which seemed incredible.” An embassy staffer told them they would meet with Ambassador Hoare himself in the morning.

After a proper English breakfast, each man had his meeting. Hoare was aging and short, with the look of upper-class British severity about him: his gray hair trimmed and parted crisply to the right, his dress fastidious, and his manners formal. Hoare was ambitious and competitive; his taut frame reflected the tournament-level tennis he still played. He had been part of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet, the secretary of the Home Office, and one of the key advisors to Chamberlain when he appeased Hitler in the Munich Agreement in 1938. Churchill dismissed Hoare when he became prime minister in 1940, offering Hoare the ambassadorship in Madrid that many in London saw as the old man’s proper banishment. Hoare seemed to wear this rejection in his delicate facial features and his searching, almost wounded eyes. Still, his mission in Madrid had been to keep the pro-German Franco out of the war, and he had done his job with aplomb. Spain remained neutral, even after the Allies’ North African landings in November 1942, and Franco continued to allow the release of British troops and Resistance fighters from Miranda.

Because of his ease with the French language, Hoare had been the man in Chamberlain’s cabinet to sit next to French Prime Minister Léon Blum at a state luncheon, the two talking literature, and now in Madrid he opened the conversation with La Rochefoucauld in similarly “perfect French,” the fledgling résistant later wrote. “He was indeed aware of my plans to join up with the Free French forces in London but, without rushing, without ever opposing my determination, he revealed to me a sort of counter project.” During the First World War, Hoare had headed the British Secret Intelligence Service in Petrograd, Russia—he may have even originated a plot to kill Rasputin—and still relished the dark arts of espionage. What would you say, Hoare asked Robert, to enlisting in a branch of the British special services that carried out missions in France?

La Rochefoucauld wasn’t sure what that implied, and so Hoare continued, revealing his proposition slowly.

“The British agents have competence and courage that are beyond reproach,” Hoare said. But their French, even if passable, was heavily accented. German agents found them out. So Great Britain had formed a new secret service, the likes of which the world had never before seen, training foreign nationals in London and then parachuting them back into their home countries where they fought the Nazis with—well, Hoare stressed that he could not disclose too much. But if the Frenchman agreed to join this new secret service, and if he passed its very demanding training procedures, all would be revealed.

The mystery intrigued Robert. It also tore at him. He had listened to de Gaulle for close to two years and lived by the general’s defiant statements to battle on. It had seemed at times that only de Gaulle spoke sanely about France and its future. But though he’d wished to be a soldier in the general’s army, what Robert really wanted, now that he thought about it, was simply to fight the Nazis. If the British could train and arm him as well if not better than de Gaulle—if the Brits had the staff and the money and the weapons—why not join the British? If Robert wanted to liberate France, did it really matter in whose name he did it?

Hoare could see the young man considering his options and asked, “How old are you?”

“Twenty-one,” La Rochefoucauld answered, which was not only a lie—he was nineteen—but revealed which way he was leaning. He wanted Hoare to think he was older and more experienced.

At last, Robert said he was honored by the offer, and he might like to join the new British agency. He wanted, however, when he arrived in London, to first ask de Gaulle what he thought. It was a presumptuous request, but Hoare nonetheless said such a thing could be arranged.

The next week, La Rochefoucauld flew to England.

CHAPTER 5

When he landed, military police shuttled him to southwest London, to an ornately Gothic building at Fitzhugh Grove euphemistically known as the London Reception Center, whose real name, the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building, still didn’t describe what actually happened there: namely, the harsh interrogation of incoming foreign nationals by MI6 officers. The hope was to flush out German spies who, once identified, were either quarantined in windowless concrete cells or flipped into double agents—sending them back into the field with a supposed allegiance to the Nazis but a true fealty to Great Britain.

La Rochefoucauld’s interrogation opened with him giving the Brits a fake name—which may very well be why Robert Jean Renaud appeared in the Royal Victoria Patriotic files in March 1943. He also said he was twenty-one. He would come to regret these statements as the interrogation stretched from one day to two, and then beyond. Though he eventually admitted to the officers his real identity, that only prolonged the questioning, because now the agents wanted to know why he had lied in the first place. And the answer seemed to be: because he was a nineteen-year-old who still acted like a boy, creating mischief amid authority figures. In some sense, deceiving the British was the same as climbing a lycée’s homeroom curtains. It was a fun thing to do.

The British officers in the Patriotic Building would later claim they didn’t rely on torture but used numerous “techniques” to get people to talk: forcing them to stand for hours and recount in mind-numbing detail how they had arrived or to sit in a painfully hardbacked chair and do the same; or filling up refugees with English tea and forbidding them to leave, seeing if their stories changed as their bladders cried for relief; or questioning applicants from sunup to sundown, or from sundown to sunup; or tag-teaming a refugee and playing good cop, bad cop. Robert remembered emerging from marathon sessions and talking to the “twenty or so fugitives there, in a situation similar to mine, who had come from various European countries.” The people he saw were some of the thirty thousand or so who ultimately filtered through the Patriotic Building during the war: men and women who in other lands were politicians or military personnel or just flat-out adventurers, washing ashore in England, sleeping in barracks, and awaiting their next interrogation slumped over on small benches, remnants of the building’s former life as a school for orphans.

La Rochefoucauld was there for eight days. In the end, an interrogating officer who spoke French knew of Robert’s family and its lineage, and soon he and the officer were chatting about the La Rochefoucaulds like old friends. Because the British espionage services brimmed with upper-class Englishmen, the spies identified with a Frenchman from the “right” sort of family, and it soon became evident that this nobleman was not a German agent. Robert was free to go.

A man waited for him as he left the grounds. He had a boy’s way of smiling, turning up his lips without revealing his teeth, an attempt to give his slender build a tough veneer. His name was Eric Piquet-Wicks, and he helped oversee a branch of the new secret service that Ambassador Hoare had mentioned to La Rochefoucauld. His features had an almost ethereal fineness to them, but his personality was much hardier, all seafaring wanderlust. He was aging gracefully, the thin creases around his eyes and cheeks granting him the gravitas his smile did not. He wore a suit well.

Piquet-Wicks and La Rochefoucauld walked around the neighborhood, Robert taking in the spring air, free of the paranoid thoughts of the last months, while Piquet-Wicks discussed his own life and how Robert might be able to help him.

Piquet-Wicks’s mother was French. The name that many Brits pronounced Pick-it Wicks was in fact Pi-kay Wicks, after his mother, Alice Mercier-Piquet, of the port city of Calais. He was born in Colchester and split his formative education between England and France, earning his college degree, in Spanish, at a university in Barcelona and making him trilingual when he graduated in the middle of the 1930s. He found work, of all places, in the Philippines, on the island of Cebù, where he became the French consular agent. From there he moved to the Paris office of a multinational firm called Borax, which extracted mineral deposits from sites around the world. In Paris, Piquet-Wicks was the managing director of Borax Français, but he longed to be a spy.

After Britain declared war on Germany, Piquet-Wicks received a commission with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, an infantry regiment. He was stationed in Northern Ireland and woefully bored. He seems to have approached MI5, Britain’s security service, which oversaw domestic threats, to inquire about how he could best serve the agency, because it had a report on him. The agency described him as an “adventurer” who had once used his military permit at the Alexandra Hotel in Hyde Park as the means to gain whiskey; he’d told the barman it wouldn’t be long before he worked for MI5. The report also said that before the war Piquet-Wicks had had pro-Nazi leanings, but that wasn’t the reason the agency stayed away from hiring him. “We considered him unsuitable for employment on Intelligence duties, in view of his indiscreet behavior,” the report stated.

MI6, the famed spy agency, then began asking about Piquet-Wicks in July 1940, the idea being that he was an intelligent if unstable man whose dexterity with languages—he also knew some Portuguese and Italian—might still benefit Britain. But again a concern over indiscretion surfaced, and MI6 kept its distance, with one agent even saying Piquet-Wicks didn’t have “enough guts to be an adventurer.”

He may have stayed in Northern Ireland, living in a former brewery where “it was difficult to feel embarked in a war of … consequence,” he later wrote, were it not for a new security service that was in need of qualified agents.

Piquet-Wicks’s new life began one day in April 1941 at 3 a.m., pulling night duty in Belfast as a punishment for marching too far ahead of his company in drills. The phone rang. He didn’t think to answer it, but the ringing wouldn’t stop and so he picked up.

“Have you a Second Lieutenant Piquet-Wicks?” a man said. Piquet-Wicks thought this had to be someone in the mess pulling his leg.

“I am the poor bastard,” he said.

The shocked splutterings on the other end made Piquet-Wicks realize this was someone official. Startled, he hung up.

The phone rang again.

“Inniskilling,” Piquet-Wicks said, trying another tactic.

“Have you a Second Lieutenant Piquet-Wicks with the battalion?” the same voice said, but angrier.

“Yes, sir.”

“Where is he? A few minutes ago I had someone on this line. I thought—”

Piquet-Wicks broke in, saying this was the night duty officer speaking. “The officer you are calling is undoubtedly asleep,” he said. “Shall I wake him for you, sir?”

“Of course not, at this hour,” said the caller, who was a colonel from the Northern Ireland district. “Take note that he should report to the War Office … at 1500 hours on Friday the fourth.”

The War Office was in London, and the fourth was the next day.

In the morning, Piquet-Wicks went to his superior, to see what to make of the message. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to continue your disciplinary training as night duty officer,” the superior said, his eyes twinkling. “However, good luck and good-bye.”

If Piquet-Wicks were to make it to London, he would have to catch the next boat, which departed before he could properly gather all his things, or comprehend why he needed to rush to the capital.

When he arrived at the given room inside the War Office, he met with a general, who said the British were establishing a new department—unlike MI5 and MI6, and unlike anything seen before. “I was to be seconded to a secret organization,” Piquet-Wicks later wrote, “to become involved in events whose existence I had never suspected.”

On his walk now with La Rochefoucauld, almost two years later, Piquet-Wicks implied he would like Robert to work under him, as an agent in his branch of this secret organization, which he had built up almost single-handedly. More details and the particulars of missions would be disclosed if and when La Rochefoucauld made it through training.

“Here is my address,” Piquet-Wicks said.

He was “surprisingly close to each prospective agent,” he later admitted, and La Rochefoucauld sensed the humanity behind the spy’s implacable eyes. Like virtually every French agent whose life was to be guided and ultimately transformed by Eric Piquet-Wicks, Robert liked the man with the goofy smile immensely. So he thought it best to level with him. He said he had to seek out de Gaulle and ask the general’s advice on joining a British agency out to save France.

Robert didn’t know how closely Piquet-Wicks worked with the Free French forces. He was taken aback when Piquet-Wicks not only agreed to the sensibility of the meeting but offered him directions to Carlton Gardens, de Gaulle’s headquarters in London.

“If you get to meet him,” Piquet-Wicks said, “ask him what you need to ask him, then come meet me.” The display of camaraderie eased La Rochefoucauld’s mind and pushed him ever closer to joining the British.

No. 4 Carlton Gardens sat amid two blocks of impeccable terraced apartments, their white-stone façades overlooking St. James Park, the oldest of London’s eight Royal Parks. Built on the order of King George IV in the early 1800s and designed by architect John Nash, the rows of four-story buildings collectively called Carlton House Terrace had been home to many a proper Londoner over the years—earls and lords and even Louis-Napoléon in 1839. The German embassy occupied 7–9 Carlton Gardens until the outbreak of World War II. In 1941, during an air raid, a bomb fell on No. 2 Carlton House Terrace, leaving its roof open and exposed for the rest of the fighting. No. 4 Carlton Gardens housed de Gaulle’s Free French forces, and one didn’t need to look for the address to know who worked there. A French soldier in full military fatigues, rifle at his side and a helmet on his head, stood guard outside the entrance, itself marked by the Cross of Lorraine, which the Knights Templar had once carried during the Crusades but which was now the symbol of the Free French movement.

Robert kept his appointment, arranged by the Brits, with an aide of de Gaulle’s. La Rochefoucauld mentioned his family name, “which may have possibly facilitated things,” he wrote, and because de Gaulle’s daily schedule allowed for fugitive Frenchmen who wanted to see him, Robert was told he would meet with the general that afternoon. He gulped.

The interior was all dark wood and high Gothic ceilings—an airy space with lots of natural light but poor insulation. In the winter, the Free French, across four floors, each nearly three thousand square feet, shivered in their huge rooms.

When the hour came, the secretary asked La Rochefoucauld if he was ready, and they climbed an ornate stairwell to a landing where doors led first to the offices of De Gaulle’s aide-de-camp, and then past those to the general’s own quarters. La Rochefoucauld’s heart thrummed in his chest.

Then the door opened and there he was. The man whose voice over the last few years Robert had heard scores of times, The soul of Free France, La Rochefoucauld thought. He sat behind his desk, peering over his glasses, with a look that asked, Now what might this one want? His presence filled the room. Everyone in London called him Le Grand Charles, due only in part to his towering height. Robert took in the office, uncluttered and organized, befitting a general, with a map of the world pinned to the wall behind de Gaulle and one of France hanging to his right. Out of his large French windows, the general had a view of St. James Park.

He rose to greet La Rochefoucauld, unbending his immense frame and straightening to his full six feet five inches, a half-foot taller than the nineteen-year-old. He had an odd body, “a head like a pineapple and hips like a woman’s,” as Alexander Cadogan, Britain’s permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, once put it. His trimmed half mustache, a hairy square on his upper lip, was not a good look for a man with such a long face. The severed patch of facial hair only drew attention to his high forehead, and rather than shave the mustache, de Gaulle had taken to wearing military caps in many photographs and official portraits. He was aware of his ungainliness. “We people are never quite at ease,” he once told a colleague. “I mean—giants. The chairs are always too small, the tables too low, the impression one makes too strong.” Perhaps because of this, the general had welcomed solitude in London, taken on few friends, and worked in Carlton Gardens most days from 9 a.m. until evening, which allowed him to see people like La Rochefoucauld but returned him home only in time to talk with his wife and perhaps kiss his two daughters good night.

Visitors did not mistake his remoteness for timidity though. He came from a bourgeois family and his Jesuit education and elite military training at Saint-Cyr had instilled in him a kind of moral absolutism. Because he alone had cried out to continue the fight among his military brethren, because he alone had established an exile government of sorts in London, he alone spoke for the true France, he felt, and he alone could return it to grandeur.

“You are not France,” Churchill had once barked at him during a wartime negotiation. “I do not recognize you as France.”

To which the general replied: “Why are you [negotiating] with me if I am not France?”

Indeed, part of the reason no one else could claim to speak for France was because no one else had the bully pulpit of the BBC. By 1943 his name had become a political position, Gaullism, in the same way that his former mentor, Pétain, now stood for collaboration (Pétainism). And where he had once bluffed about his prowess—his initial Council of Defense consisted of himself and one other man—by 1943 the Free French fought alongside Allied troops throughout the world, and acolytes like La Rochefoucauld fled France almost daily to meet de Gaulle.

Still, he had a habit of treating impressionable Resistance fighters with such incuriosity or outright derision that they came away heartbroken. One described his rudeness as being like that of an “authoritarian prelate.” Another man, a courageous Resistance leader, said upon leaving a meeting with the general: “I have … witnessed ingratitude in my life, but never on this scale.” Walking now across the room and shaking La Rochefoucauld’s hand, de Gaulle’s greeting was characteristically “simple” but also “cordial,” La Rochefoucauld would later write, proving what Alain Peyrefette, a spokesman, once said of his boss: “To each his own de Gaulle. He was different with each new person he met.”

La Rochefoucauld explained how he’d gotten to London, and “de Gaulle first complimented me on wanting to join the Free French forces,” Robert wrote. La Rochefoucauld then said that the British had intervened and asked him to join its clandestine service; he wasn’t yet clear on the details, but that’s why he had come to see de Gaulle. He had only wanted to work under the general, but now he wondered: Should he join this secret British organization?

De Gaulle had a complicated and contentious relationship with the Brits. He demanded autonomy and yet relied on Britain financially to train and equip his troops. He needed to be diplomatic with London to achieve his ends but, to appeal to Frenchmen as the true voice of France, needed to undercut his diplomacy, too. “He had to be rude to the British to prove to French eyes that he was not a British puppet,” Churchill wrote. “He certainly carried out this policy with perseverance.” Churchill loved and loathed him. The romantic in Churchill saw a rebel and great adventurer in de Gaulle, “the man of destiny.” But the general’s incorrigible rudeness and unending demands on behalf of a sovereign nation that was, in truth, occupied by the Nazis, drove Churchill mad. Over the course of the war the prime minister went from wondering if de Gaulle had “gone off his head,” to calling him a “monster,” to saying he should be kept “in chains.” Franklin Roosevelt didn’t like him any better. The United States president gave de Gaulle all of three hours’ notice before the Allies’ massive 1942 landings in French-controlled Algeria and Morocco.

De Gaulle didn’t get along well with the British intelligence services, either. His Free French staff initially believed Piquet-Wicks and other Brits were poaching would-be French agents. Some Free French staffers thought of the British as a “rival organization,” Piquet-Wicks wrote. But in time certain spies in London saw the benefit of working with de Gaulle—nearly every Frenchman who came to the city wanted to meet him—and so Piquet-Wicks’s division began sharing information, and then missions, with the intelligence bureau of the Free French. Loyalties blurred, and many secret agents Piquet-Wicks oversaw considered themselves to be working first for de Gaulle, and the operatives’ success in France drew more people to London, which in turn strengthened the general, militarily as well as politically.

Now, weighing La Rochefoucauld’s question of joining the British, de Gaulle peered again at the young man, until he reached a conclusion that Robert would remember for the rest of his life: “It’s still for France,” de Gaulle said, “even if it’s allied with the Devil. Go!”

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