Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (44 page)

From
The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars

BY
NATHALIE DUNOIS

Chapter Seventeen:
La Commedia
è
Finita

 

WAS IT COINCIDENTAL
that last night, still suffering from a case of writer's block involving weeks of silence, insomnia, cartons of cigarettes, gallons of black coffee, waves of self-loathing and doubt, I turned on my geriatric television and found myself watching, through a pebbly curtain of static, a documentary made by—who else?—an American woman. It was expertly, even slickly produced, featuring lots of archival footage and interviews with surviving heroines of the French Resistance.

There was the baroness Lily de Rossignol, in whom age had not dimmed one microcarat of beauty, charm, or magisterial entitlement as she strolled through the gardens of her château in Provence. There was my great-aunt Suzanne Dunois. Though she is quite elderly now, one can still see the pretty girl with rabbity teeth whom Gabor Tsenyi fell in love with. And that is just to mention the two who play major roles in my book. There were other heroines from elsewhere in the country.

The documentary was being shown to honor the memory of the baroness de Rossignol, who had died in a one-car auto wreck, driving a vintage Rossignol, her classic Juno-Diane coupe, not long before the film was aired. What the women in the film had in common—besides personal charisma and that smoldering volcano zest that makes certain older (French) actresses so inspirationally sexy—was that they were all filmed in gardens, at dinner tables with intelligent talkative friends, or in book-lined studies. All possessed the enviable cheekbones and the unblemished skin that younger women diet for and coax with costly ointments. If only one could market the cosmetic wonders that an unimpeachable moral conscience can do for one's face!

Of course I thought of Lou Villars. What would she look like, if she had lived? She was already getting fat. Or so the last photographs show. Not that it mattered. Regardless of the prejudice against grown women who aren't sticks, no one would want to interview her. Nor would she agree to tell a TV audience what she did during the Occupation. Perhaps some famous male documentarian, a Marcel Ophüls or a Claude Lanzmann, would have tracked her down and filmed an obese troll of indeterminate gender slamming her front door in the faces of the camera crew.

What normal person wouldn't rather hear about the daring rescues, the heroic sacrifices and near escapes? What masochistic impulse made
me
want to tell
Lou's
story? Is it any wonder that this manuscript was turned down by the same editors who have profitably published the memoirs of several women in the film?

But when you start to write a person's life, it is like signing a contract. You are morally obliged to stay with it until the final chapter.

I followed Dr. G.'s advice and purchased a recording of Beethoven's Late Quartets, which I played when I worked, loud enough to drown out the stone falling down the well. I hope my readers will understand that this was not a metaphor but a medical symptom.

At first the doctor's suggestion seemed not to be working, or rather to be working in an unhelpful way. I stopped hearing the stone and did nothing for several weeks but listen to the quartets.

When I try to analyze, if only for myself, why they move me so deeply, why I thought them the most beautiful music ever composed, my powers of description fail me, and the anguish that I feel over my limitations, the mediocrity of talent and intelligence that I will never in this lifetime transcend—well, all that became impossible for me to distinguish from the music itself, from the lamentations of the violins and the cello. Never before have I heard such an urgent outpouring of emotion, the dark clouds of frantic anguish scattered by bright rain, buoyant balloons of playful hope shot down by arrows of despair. The surprises! Dear God, the surprises! And those
big dynamic beautiful chords
!

I cannot explain why I became so obsessed by a piece of music, or why it seemed like the perfect background for the life of Lou Villars, or why I felt and still feel such gratitude to the doctor (whose wish for anonymity I am legally compelled to respect) who suggested that I listen to it while I worked, because it would humble and encourage me, at once. Which it has, even as I throw myself, again and again, against the brick walls imprisoning a lycée instructor writing a biography of a female Nazi war criminal, working on it during her frustratingly brief school-vacation breaks!

I have tried not to mention it, but I can't help pointing out what strength of character has been required for me not to muddy Lou's story by bringing in the daily mortifications I experienced at the school where I teach. How could I describe the awfulness of the 1980s and the 1990s, when one couldn't say anything, or the present, when I am older and have less patience for students secretly texting each other while I am teaching them to read: a little Racine, a little Camus. Who wouldn't want to escape that for another place and time, even the tragic and violent era in which Lou Villars lived?

 

In the winter of 1944, German intelligence began hearing that the Allies were planning an invasion across the English Channel. Everyone with any information-gathering experience was pulled off their regular jobs and sent to work on the coast. You could throw a stone into any café in Normandy and hit a German or Allied spy with only the flimsiest excuse for being there.

Historians have proposed countless explanations for why the Germans were so far away when the Allies landed on the Normandy beaches they gave Native American names. The Germans had been led to believe that the landing would take place at Pas-de-Calais. Even after the invasion began, double agents reassured them that all this was a diversion to distract them from the real action, farther north.

When I say I believe that Lou Villars thought (or at least claimed) that she could have changed all that, that she knew where the Allies were really landing, that she had information that would prevent the Allied Liberation of Europe, I can imagine—no, I can
hear
—my readers saying:
Was there no horrendous historic crime that Lou Villars wasn't involved in?
Wasn't it enough to tell the Germans where the Maginot Line ended? Wasn't it sufficient to tell the leaders of Occupied Paris where to warehouse the Jews? Did she also threaten to reveal where the Allies were landing on D-Day?

But don't my readers agree that each event makes each subsequent one more likely? Once you have betrayed your country and been partly responsible for the deportation of thousands of Jews, why
not
foil the Allies' attempts to rescue Europe from people like you? If history proves anything, it proves that Lou would have been able to do it—she had the means, the motive, the opportunity. She had done it before.

Even as I write this, I am painfully aware of my failure to keep a promise I made at the start of my book, a lure that may have persuaded my readers to wade deeper into the swamp of Lou's psyche. I wrote that I hoped her story might contribute something to the literature exploring the mystery of evil.
What did I imagine that contribution would be?
Am I any closer to understanding Lou than I was on page one?

Bonnet told Lou that, whenever she liked, she could take time off from the Paris office and travel along the coast. Her cover would be her former hobby, which she was urged to resume, lecturing regional athletes who'd held out through the Occupation. They were lucky that sports, along with the state, was a permitted religion. It helped the faithful get through life, as the banned faiths once did.

Ledgers show that these trips were approved by the office of Jean-Claude Bonnet, and that in the months before the Normandy invasion, Lou spoke to the athletic associations which, against all odds, had continued to meet in Calais, Caen, Cherbourg, and other coastal towns.

Too bad there is no record of the conversation during which Bonnet asked Lou if she still had contacts at the sports clubs. Neither referred to her travels with Inge. Neither addressed the important questions. It was the perfect (unspoken) conversation to have at an interview for a job for which a talent for secrecy, lying, and concealment was the major qualification. Lou's whole life until then had been preparation and practice.

 

How glad the Rouen Swimming Club was to have Lou back! They'd survived. She was alive. They'd all made it. So far.

Even as the women welcomed Lou, she watched them register Inge's absence. They didn't ask where Inge was. They were French.
C'est l'amour
.

Someone found a few beers they passed around the parish hall above the basement to which they advised Lou to go at once, if sirens sounded. Just last night there was a firefight directly above the airfield. Two British planes were shot down.

No sirens sounded during Lou's lecture. Once more, a voice spoke through her, this time about the importance of every woman being mentally and physically capable of taking care of herself. The athletes had reached that conclusion; it confirmed them to hear Lou say it. She still talked about the glory of France, so she hadn't lost her patriotic fervor despite everything that had happened to their ravaged country. The women applauded and emptied their purses to improve on the prearranged fee.

The problem was that she left with nothing to tell Bonnet. Paris already knew about the aborted air raid, and that the downed British pilots had escaped. No one had seen anything suspicious. Or no one was telling Lou. In the cafés, she saw more agents than local people. It was a party for spies.

Lou apologized to Bonnet. He said not to worry. Sooner or later she'd see or hear something interesting, as she had so often before.

One rainy morning, the postman brought Lou a letter from a woman named Hélène Michaux, inviting Lou to speak to a meeting of the Calais women's tennis club.

Bonnet said that Calais was exactly where they should be looking, in the ruins of the port the Germans had bombed in 1940, on their way into France.

 

The road north from Paris passes near the house where Lou grew up, and, if one makes a long detour, past her convent school. As Lou set out on a chilly late winter morning, let us suppose that she drove past these sentimental landmarks.

How often in the grip of some crisis do we find ourselves drawn to a beloved childhood place, as if by revisiting it we could erase the intervening disappointments and begin life anew? In one such despairing moment, I returned to my family home, walking the distance from the high school where I teach. My parents had long since retired to Portugal, to a gated community of expatriates, from where they send me an annual postcard: always the same fishing boat bobbing in a harbor, reminding me of my birthday and by extension of their (biological) role in my existence. Standing on the sidewalk across from the beauty shop above which we lived, I wept so hard and for so long that some “thoughtful” resident called the police.

There was so much I wanted to tell the handsome young gendarme who asked if he could help. But I couldn't speak. I dried my eyes on my sleeve. I imitated a sane person and calmly walked away.

Why should we suppose that Lou was anything but cheerful as she headed north? She was looking forward to giving her speech, which she rehearsed as she drove. The mission with which she'd been entrusted by Bonnet was as critical as any assignment she'd shared with Inge.

Bonnet had given her gas coupons. All her expenses were being paid. Her car, which she'd tuned up herself, was humming. She passed her old house, now deserted, and the convent school, where she paused to listen to the silence that had replaced the voices of girls at play. How far she'd exceeded the low expectations of her governess and her teachers!

There wasn't much traffic, but even so the trip took nine hours, and Lou was tired by the time she found the café where Hélène had arranged to meet. The sight of the women waving to her across the bar perked her up. There were seven, all young and attractive. Hélène was blond and extremely pretty.

Later it would be revealed that these women comprised the all-female Resistance network, code named She-Wolf, which operated throughout Brittany and Normandy and across the Channel. Led by the half-French, half-Scottish Hélène Michaux, who later settled in Great Britain and became a celebrated sculptor under her real name, Eileen Mitchell, the agents of She-Wolf were trained to kill, but only in emergencies or in self-defense.

A half dozen academic colleagues have written about this group. Each of these scholarly monographs, all with a feminist slant (what male academic would risk his career studying women, however courageous?) offers a slightly different take on the cadre's objectives, its achievements, and its uniquely nonhierarchical power structure.

The women had been informed about Lou when their contacts in Paris noted her long absences from the torture chambers and heard that she'd been sighted on the coast, asking questions. They put these facts together with the following nugget of information:

In a bar near the docks, a woman named Elise Becker used to sit alone at a table and talk to herself, or to anyone who would buy her a beer. She'd ramble about how it was her fault that the Germans breached the Maginot Line.

At that time she'd been living in the northeast with her husband, who dug ditches, poured cement, and finally left her for a prostitute younger than their daughter. He beat Elise when his government contract for additional work was canceled. Elise had complained about him, in detail, to a French woman who dressed like a man and her German girlfriend.

When the Germans invaded, Elise couldn't shake the feeling that she was to blame, despite the fact that her husband always accused her of having delusions of grandeur. She'd told the two women, the German and the French one, where the line ended. Her husband said the fortifications stopped where they stopped. A blind man could have found the gap.