by Paul Kix
He approached the Gotzes’ stately apartment, and when he rang the bell, he left the eyeglasses Bouy had given him perched on his nose. Geoffroy answered, and despite Robert’s eyewear, the gaunt cheeks, the beard, and the feral look, Gotz recognized him immediately. Robert?
Gotz asked what Robert was doing, a trill of shock in his voice, as he invited him inside and hugged him. Before Robert could say much, Geoffroy pushed him into the living room, where Madame Gotz, the cousin of La Rochefoucauld’s mother, sat in an armchair, working her needlepoint. She raised her eyes and stared.
“Robert!” she said, and raced to hug him.
“For me, it was a marvelous moment,” La Rochefoucauld wrote, reunited after a year and a half with family in a quiet and warm house that the Gotzes, as the evening progressed, refused to let him leave, in spite of the risk he posed to their safety.
They had so many questions, so he started at the beginning: the denunciatory letter, the flight to Spain, his first imprisonment, training in England, parachuting into the Yonne, his Groupe Roche missions, and then a second and far worse detention, leading to his escape from his own execution and, ultimately, his arrival here. The Gotzes listened “in the utmost silence,” La Rochefoucauld wrote, and when he finished, Geoffroy Gotz said, quietly and humbly, “Well, we’re very lucky that you’re here tonight.”
They had a full meal and lively conversation, including talk of how Robert’s father had returned home from his POW camp due to a German-approved rule that allowed the release of aging French officers with more than four children. Then La Rochefoucauld returned to the room where he’d slept as a student. It felt odd to be there. Nothing about the room had changed, and yet everything had. Four years had passed and though he was not yet twenty-one, he was in no way the young man he had been at seventeen. The room seemed a remnant—it was a remnant—of another age, another life. He mourned what he’d lost even as he felt safe enough to fall asleep.
It was very late the next morning when his aunt woke him. She brought in a large breakfast, larger than he expected and likely more than the Gotzes could part with, given the rationing. But Madame Gotz insisted on La Rochefoucauld eating what was before him. She told him that Geoffroy had gone to call Robert’s parents; as a precaution he hadn’t phoned from the apartment but walked to a public booth at a post office.
Geoffroy returned with good news. La Rochefoucauld’s parents would come to see him the next day. Robert was so happy he paced and grew restless and found he needed something to occupy his afternoon. He decided to call a friend: Princess Salomé Murat, then a stunning eighteen-year-old whose great-grandfather, Joachim Murat, had fought alongside Napoléon and married the emperor’s sister, Caroline, before Bonaparte named Joachim the king of Naples in 1808. Salomé Murat lived now with her family on rue de Constantine, in the seventh arrondissement, a few blocks from Invalides, where Napoléon was buried. She invited La Rochefoucauld for a drink.
“The entire Murat family welcomed me beautifully,” La Rochefoucauld wrote, bringing him sweets and spirits, “vying with each other to be the kindest to me.” They insisted he dine with them, so that he might tell his story and share what little food they had.
In his afternoon and evening with the Murats, the conversation kept returning to the mood in the country. People no longer resigned themselves to the Occupation; they fought against it. That month, in fact, Pierre Pucheu, Vichy’s former minister of the Interior, who had fled France after the North African landings, was arrested in Casablanca. The Free French state of Morocco tried him for treason, found him guilty, and sentenced him to death. General de Gaulle refused to pardon Pucheu, saying, “I owe it to France.” Pucheu became the first Vichy politician to be executed under de Gaulle’s provisional rule. Also that month, de Gaulle’s National Council of the Resistance, composed of various bands of sabotage-minded men and women, drafted a charter that called on trade unions and political parties to “declare their wish to set the motherland free by collaborating closely with the military operations that the French army and the Allied forces will undertake on the continent.” The hoped-for Allied landings in France were a constant topic that night. “We could feel victory coming,” La Rochefoucauld later said.
But that’s not to say Frenchmen idly waited for it. In the first fifteen days of March, the German military command in France reported nearly seventy trains disabled on the tracks by explosives and nearly fifty derailments. With most of France’s nationalized rail shops out of commission, these trains could not be repaired. And with the country’s transportation network largely out of service, several industrial plants had closed, causing total production for the Nazi war effort to decline by 30 percent. Heinrich von Stülpnagel, the Germans’ high military commander in France, announced that the Reich faced “a very grave crisis.” Even the prefect of police in Paris said that the Gaullist and Communist résistants would soon contribute to a “national insurrection and the German defeat.” That night at dinner, La Rochefoucauld and the Murats discussed how the mandatory work order, or Service du travail obligatoire (STO), which now sent some men as old as sixty to Germany, worked completely against the Vichy politicians who had established it. Many people escaped, “returned to France and either joined the Resistance or went into hiding,” as La Rochefoucauld wrote of the conversation.
One of the people to escape Germany was his older brother, Henri. At the outset of the STO he’d fled to Lorraine in northeastern France and worked under an alias in the mines that his mother’s family, the Wendels, owned. On his off days he biked some 185 miles back to the family chateau in Villeneuve. His younger siblings would see him approaching, his face blackened by soot, which showed either his anxiousness to return (he hadn’t even bathed first) or, conversely, how thoroughly he’d planned the trip home (the soot was a good cover from any inquiring police officer). But Henri, like his younger brother, could only flee for so long. He would join the Free French’s Second Armored Division in 1944, and fight in Lorraine, not far from the mines in which he’d once worked.
Robert, even in this elegant home, and despite all he’d endured, felt the urge to fight again too.
The family rendezvous occurred the next day at L’hôtel Wendel, the neoclassical hotel that his mother’s family built in the 1860s behind the Paris Opéra, in the quite fashionable ninth arrondissement, not far from rue de La Rochefoucauld, the street named after the paternal side of his family. Olivier and Consuelo invited many members of the clan and planned to hold, in a private banquet room, an impromptu party. To be safe, the couple had not told their guests what the bash was for. Robert’s younger sister Yolaine, then fifteen, just heard that they were all going to Paris. The La Rochefoucaulds found their seats at the banquet’s large dining table, gathered there for reasons no one explained, and began talking as if all this were normal.
Around that point, Robert walked in. Yolaine immediately noticed his beard and mustache. It had been nearly two years since she’d seen him, the brother who used to protect her in the siblings’ backyard brawls. He went around the table, greeting and kissing everyone, and Yolaine eagerly awaited her turn. The beard gave him a maturity, but something, some grave quality in his gaunt face, also announced he was no longer a boy.
Robert smiled and laughed as he moved through the room, accepting the comments about his changed appearance and thinking how surreal it was to see his entire family, not even a week after his would-be execution. The surprise party overwhelmed him. And to hug his father again, thin but indomitable—he could later only write that he felt “such emotion” that day.
But as he swapped stories with his family, he thought about the war. At one point he told his parents that he couldn’t stay long in Paris. He planned to contact his handlers in London. As long as the Germans remained, the fight against them had to continue. His mother seemed to have expected as much from him and, ever practical, had even drawn up an itinerary. Robert would see a doctor first, she said, so he might be cured of whatever d
iseases or infections he’d contracted. She then recommended he phone a cousin, Gabriel de Mortemart, who lived in Saint-Vrain, a somewhat rural suburb outside the city, where the Nazi presence was minimal. The message for Robert was clear: Rest up, and then battle on.
When someone said a German had entered the hotel, Robert looked at the suddenly somber faces around him and left the room.
It was the last time Yolaine saw him during the war.
The doctor told Robert he had scabies. He wrote down a prescription and recommended Robert do nothing strenuous for some time. Robert then followed his mother’s other command and called his cousin. Gabriel de Mortemart agreed to take him in the following week, and La Rochefoucauld spent the next few days shuttling between the elegant salons of the Murats, the Gotzes, and Robert’s grandmother’s on avenue de la Motte-Picquet, where his parents came to see him.
It wasn’t safe to move about like this. The French-run Milice, the nationwide militia headed by Joseph Darnand, a World War I hero who had pledged loyalty to Hitler, and who staffed his group with thirty thousand borderline reprobates, had begun collaborating with the SD in January 1944. Week by week arrest totals climbed, and in March alone, the Milice or their German counterparts detained ten thousand Frenchmen; the year before, it had taken the Nazis three months to reach the same figure. Everyone knew someone who had disappeared—Robert wasn’t even the only La Rochefoucauld to be detained. His distant uncle Bernard and aunt Yvonne were members of the Parisian Resistance group Prosper; in 1943 the Germans flipped some of its fighters under torture and brought down the whole organization. Bernard de La Rochefoucauld was sent to the Flossenbürg concentration camp, where he died. Yvonne—who also worked for SOE—survived the war only after enduring the experiments of the Nazi doctors at Ravensburg—eight injections of poison in her right eye, which blinded it; more injections in an ear, which deafened it; typhus shot into her blood to make serum. She was then thrown into a block of cells in which inmates were not fed. One of Yvonne’s last memories of the camp was feebly fighting off an equally weakened inmate, who was so hungry she tried to eat Yvonne.
And yet, for all the danger, pacing the streets of Paris that spring was an oddly civilizing and even sensuous affair. The Paris Opéra, next door to the Wendel hotel, staged six ballets and works by Gluck, Wagner, Verdi, Guonod, Berlioz, and Richard Strauss. Meanwhile, the Opéra Comique presented two operas by Puccini (Tosca and La Bohème), two by Bizet (Carmen and Les pêcheurs de perles), two by Massenet (Manon and Werther), and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande. Then there were the forty-four theaters that put on plays and musicals, the comedy clubs, nightclubs, cinemas, and restaurants. In March, a Parisian boxing exhibition celebrated the fiftieth birthday of the former French champ Georges Carpentier, a onetime opponent of Jack Dempsey’s. The German heavyweight Max Schmeling sat ringside.
It must have baffled La Rochefoucauld, moving about in the disguise of his glasses and beard. Despite the despair of the Occupation, or perhaps because of it, nightlife in the capital thrived—even with the 10 p.m. curfew. How strange to be in a place where the threat of absolute menace lay just beneath the promise of airy entertainment. It was best not to dwell on it, so La Rochefoucauld went from party to party.
The scene was different at Saint-Vrain when Robert arrived the following week. His cousin Gabriel de Mortemart’s country estate was “charming” but remote, about forty-five minutes outside Paris. Gabriel himself welcomed La Rochefoucauld but remained publicly distant around him. He’d explained to his young children that he was taking in a temporary laborer, whom they all called, simply, “monsieur.” Privately, Mortemart insisted Robert spend most of his time eating and sleeping, but La Rochefoucauld kept up the cover by trimming a few hedges. In those celebratory days in Paris, he had contacted a member of the Resistance who had in turn reached the R/F administrators in London. After roughly a week in Saint-Vrain, La Rochefoucauld received word to return to the capital, for reasons unstated. He thanked the Mortemarts for their hospitality and headed out.
It wouldn’t be easy to get back to London. “The first three months of 1944 were disastrous from the point of view of supplying SOE agents and circuits in Europe in general, and France in particular,” one historian later noted. The weather was bad, and few planes could fly to France. The fighters waiting for them there felt abandoned.
Some people began moving by sea, which SOE years earlier conceived as the main means of getting clandestine agents into occupied France. But the surprising, if relative, success of moonlit airplane drops had eclipsed the seafaring option and its logistical nightmare of getting fast boats to safe beaches. Not that such travel via the English Channel was ignored. The Allies attempted around 120 missions on the north and west coasts of France alone during the war.
La Rochefoucauld later wrote that the plan was to sneak him back to London via submarine, but top-secret British records, disclosed decades later, did not show any submarine embarkations from the French coastline in April 1944. There were, however, three missions to pick up French clandestine agents that month by motor gunboat, a vessel of equal daring whose small size and high speeds made it difficult for the Germans to gun down. The fog of war was at its densest here, but the facts of one embarkation align themselves generally with La Rochefoucauld’s view of events, published decades later.
“The procedure I was to follow was similar to that of my passage into Spain,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. Contact a member of a Resistance group in Paris, who would in turn put him in touch with another résistant along the coast, this time at a place called Beg-an-Fry, near Guimaëc, northeast of Morlaix, in the Brittany region of northwestern France, according to British records. The problem was that this part of the country abutted the “prohibited” area, which comprised the coastal towns and cities hard against the so-called Atlantic Wall—a structure the Germans constructed to defend occupied France from an Allied onslaught. The wall itself was a three-thousand-mile collection of minefields, fortified artillery emplacements, concrete barriers, bunkers, and barbed-wire fences. Travel through the area was strictly prohibited. But that didn’t mean it didn’t happen.
La Rochefoucauld took a train from Paris to a small town just inland from the western coast. He then biked roughly eleven miles to a village redoubt where he says he met a Resistance fighter named Jean-Jacques. After a brief introduction, the two set out again, still on bikes, down country roads and dirt paths, making stops at inns where everyday Frenchmen much like André Bouy whispered what they knew of the Germans’ positions.
With that information, the duo reached a hideout in the woods about a half mile from the ocean, where they found a collection of men. With them was a small rubber boat, which, when the coast was clear of Germans, they planned to set down in the sea and paddle to a motor gunboat, which would then take them to England. The plan was to communicate with the bigger boat by light signals: If their electric-lamp greeting was returned by a quick burst from the sea, the operation was on. If the men on land saw no such light, the mission would have to wait until the following evening.
The first night, a moonless night, the men moved to the coast at a designated time—at some point in the small hours—and sent out a quick signal. But they received no response. They resigned themselves to another day in the woods, sleeping when they could and otherwise scanning the horizon.
The next night, April 15, the men once more put out their light and this time—yes!—saw a return signal. Already the skiff was in the water, the fighters “paddling like madmen toward the open sea,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. The ocean was calm that night and now they saw a follow-up signal, which oriented the men toward the boat that would take them to England. They had timed it just right: They heard no German shouts, saw no German boats. A few minutes later, they were aboard His Majesty’s vessel.
There were, in fact, two boats out that night to collect men, according to British records: Motor Gun Boat 502 and Motor Gun Boat 718. The evening’s mission called
for placing six SOE agents on French soil, which the boats had done in the moments before they sent out signals to take in La Rochefoucauld and the other men. Now with Robert and the other fighters aboard—British records indicated roughly twenty people, SOE agents and Royal Air Force airmen between them—the vessels turned north toward England and freedom.
“There was a brusque change in ambiance,” La Rochefoucauld wrote. The captain and crew greeted the men warmly and in a moment a sailor had procured large tumblers into which he mixed tea and whiskey. “We joyfully raised our glasses to the health of England and her sovereigns, convinced that, a few hours later, we could tread upon British soil,” La Rochefoucauld wrote.
Then the boats came under heavy German fire. The cramped contours of the boat, the claustrophobia it induced, led to something like asphyxiation as the hail of enemy gunfire focused its aim. “I’d never been so scared in my life,” Robert said, “to the point that I eventually convinced myself that I wouldn’t come back from the expedition alive.” Ultimately, the English outran the German boats—so fast that the Brits never actually opened fire—and the exchange ceased. But not, alas, without damage. On one of the boats, the crew suffered a casualty, a young sailor.
The vessels motored on, mourning their loss but otherwise judging the mission a success. And when they reached land again, three weeks after La Rochefoucauld had dared to escape, he had at last arrived in England.
CHAPTER 14
The first thing they did was quarantine them. The British interrogated La Rochefoucauld and the other French agents—to see if they’d become German spies—but it was a pro forma exercise and soon they “gave us a royal welcome,” Robert said, where “whiskey flowed like water . . . and I saw a few of the instructors I knew.” They reveled in his story: the sabotages, imprisonment, escape. One officer in particular would have loved to hear it, but Eric Piquet-Wicks, the man with the goofy smile who’d recruited La Rochefoucauld to SOE a year and a half earlier, no longer worked in London. The stress of building the R/F network, the horrifying reports of agents who were tortured and killed, men and women whom he’d recruited and viewed as kin, seemed to affect him even more than his diagnosis of TB. His health worsened with the booze he drank, and he was removed from active service, in such a poor state that he relinquished his commission in September 1943. Piquet-Wicks wanted badly to return to SOE, and by the spring of ’44, he had, but as a junior assistant working out of the British embassy in Madrid, where staff thought the climate might help him convalesce. In London he had developed a reputation as a more or less functioning alcoholic, drinking for reasons that were not discussed, and in Madrid doctors ordered him to work fewer hours, sleep well, and resist the soft nights’ seductions. Piquet-Wicks promised he would. And yet reports soon surfaced of him staying out until 6 a.m. or taking his car a few streets from the embassy and driving it in reverse, “the worse for drink,” noted one memo. At work, he couldn’t encipher telegrams and he complained that traveling to Barcelona and back was too much for him. People in the office, who still found him charming, and liked him as much as the French agents he’d once recruited, kept excusing his behavior. But “it seemed quite evident,” one visiting supervisor wrote, “that [Piquet-Wicks’s] presence . . . far from assisting the general work, resulted on all sides in a considerable loss of time.” He lasted in Spain six months before returning to England without a posting. Not every casualty, it seems, is listed.