From The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars
BY NATHALIE DUNOIS
Author’s Preface: The Mystery of Evil
I FIRST HEARD the name of Louisianne Villars whispered when I was a girl, visiting my great-aunt Suzanne Dunois, the wife and later the widow of the photographer Gabor Tsenyi. I remember hearing Lou’s name and feeling a chill, as if the winter wind had blown open the door of my great-aunt’s enviable Paris apartment, an old-fashioned artist’s studio with whitewashed walls, leaded windows, and a collection of modernist chairs that guests, especially children, were forbidden to sit on.
For many years, all I knew was that Lou Villars was the woman in a man’s tuxedo in Gabor Tsenyi’s photograph “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.” Doubtless my readers are familiar with the portrait of the lesbian couple, the pretty girl in the sparkly gown sitting beside her broad-shouldered lover with pomaded hair and a man’s pinky ring on her finger. Both stare into the middle distance, with unfocused expressions, unreadable—or so I thought, until I began my labors on this book.
I’d never understood why Lou Villars’s name had so lowered the temperature in the room until I attended a 1998 show of Tsenyi’s work, at the Centre Pompidou, to which I’d traveled from Rouen, where I had been living and teaching for almost twenty years.
The wall text for “Lovers at the Chameleon Club” explained that the woman in the tuxedo was a French auto racer named Louisianne Villars, who later spied for the Germans and collaborated with the Nazis. I shivered, just as I used to in my great-aunt’s apartment. The chill lowered my defenses, and I caught a fever. A fever to understand. And so was planted the mutant seed that has grown into The Devil Drives, my message in a bottle.
Throughout this unexpectedly long and demanding project, it has been a source of profound exaltation and even deeper despair to immerse myself in the dramatic and terrible life of Lou Villars—a pioneer in the field of women’s athletics, a woman who insisted on her right to live like a man, an international celebrity who knew everyone worth knowing, but who, because of the crimes of her later years, as well as her violent death, has completely vanished from the memory of the living. It has been a duty and a privilege to resurrect the spirit of a woman buried by a society determined that stories like hers go untold.
Even in the 1960s and 1970s, when young Frenchwomen like myself were exhuming every dead woman who ever picked up a paintbrush or conducted a science experiment or crossed a desert, everyone—even the female athletes entering the doors that Lou Villars kicked open for them decades before—even those women chose to let Lou remain forgotten in her unquiet, unmarked grave, possibly even a landfill.
The story of the writing of this book is a tale of unanswered doorbells and letters, of phone connections gone dead, of records mysteriously vanished from libraries and archives. And what other explanation can there be for these roadblocks and silences than our nation’s sensitivity about its World War II record—its willful erasure of the shameful truth about our historic past?
How different this book would be if I’d had just one hour to sit down with Lou Villars and ask her, woman to woman, face-to-face: Who were you? What made you do what you did?
What I wouldn’t give to speak with the people who knew her, to ask the living and the dead how one woman could have done so much harm: Gabor Tsenyi, whose art immortalized her; his patron, the baroness Lily de Rossignol, who hired Lou to race her family’s cars; Eva “Yvonne” Nagy, who ran the famous Chameleon Club, where Lou got her start; Lionel Maine, the woman-hating blowhard American cult writer whom my feminist sisters have unsuccessfully tried to exorcise from the canon; the German auto racer Inge Wallser, who broke Lou’s heart; Jean-Claude Bonnet, the infamous collaborator who destroyed so many innocent lives during the Occupation. Or for that matter my great-aunt, whose contact with Lou ranged from the friendly to the sadistic.
Having been denied that chance, having gotten no response to my requests for interviews, having encountered, time and again, the concerted efforts to remove Lou Villars from history and, one could say, from the planet, I have had to embroider a bit, fill in gaps, invent dialogue, make an occasional imaginative leap or informed guess about what my subject would have thought and felt.
I realize that this method is frowned upon in strict biographical circles. But by the conclusion of my research, and thanks to my education in literary and political theory, I have come to believe—and I hope my readers will agree—that I have partly answered the question of what drives, so to speak, a person like Lou Villars. Not that there ever was another person like Lou Villars. Without claiming too much for my little book, I will only say that I have tried to make my humble contribution to the literature on the mystery of evil.
How could someone, how could anyone, do what Lou Villars did? How did she sleep at night? Why would a French patriot who worshiped Joan of Arc tell the German army where the Maginot Line ended? And why, during the Occupation, would she work for the Gestapo?
Before I realized that my career would involve teaching the French classics to first-formers and correcting papers, I dreamed of becoming a philosopher, of spending my time contemplating (and perhaps solving) the great philosophical riddles. Though this has not been my destiny, I now find myself faced with a moral quandary worthy, in my opinion, of serious consideration:
Lou Villars did evil, unforgiveable things. So what does it say about the biographer, me, that researching and writing her life has given new meaning and purpose to my own less dramatic, less reprehensible existence?
Chapter One: The Childhood and Early Education of Lou Villars
SOON AFTER I began my research, I consulted several neurologists to ask if a relatively mild childhood head injury could affect a person’s entire future. The doctors agreed to see me when I explained that I was a writer, a profession for which, in my experience, physicians feel an absurd respect. At first they seemed happy to chat, perhaps because, before this book took its toll, I was still young and reasonably attractive.
I’d begun to wonder if Lou had been permanently affected by a fall from a swing on which she had been playing with her older brother, Robert. I owe my knowledge of this incident to the late Dr. Frederic Pontuis, the Villars family physician, who kept a log of his house calls, and whose grandson Gilles was kind enough to share with me his grandfather’s account of an emergency visit to the Villars home to tend the injured girl.
Later Lou would trace certain themes that ran through her life—her veneration for Joan of Arc, the insomnia, the spying—to this early mishap.
The neurologists I interviewed had never heard of Lou Villars, or pretended not to. And though her story was interesting, it took a while to tell, and I could see them getting restless by the time I got to the part about her racing career, her court case, and the Berlin Olympics. Inevitably they reminded me that they had patients to see.
Without hard scientific data to back up my theories, I will simply write what happened and trust my intelligent readers to draw their own conclusions.
It was a Sunday afternoon. Lou was ten years old. She and her brother Robert had gone out to play after lunch.
Henri Villars, Lou’s father, had been a lieutenant colonel in the French army, a position from which he was removed (with a pension for life) for reasons that have gone unrecorded, perhaps due to the intercession of his fiancée’s influential family. After his retirement from the military and his subsequent marriage to Clothilde Dupont, the daughter of local landowners, the couple, together with Henri’s mother, moved to a country house, two hours northwest of Paris, where they lived, comfortably but not extravagantly, on Colonel Villars’s pension and the annuity from Madame Villars’s inheritance.
Their first son, Robert, was born in 1907, followed four years later by the arrival of a daughter, Louisianne, a name chosen by her patriotic father for its association with the French colony stolen by the Americans. Lou’s birth disappointed Henri, who had hoped for a second son, especi
ally because his older boy was already showing signs of a mental instability that today would likely be diagnosed as one of the more disabling and volatile forms of childhood autism.
Lou Villars always claimed that her struggle to dress in boys’ clothes began as soon as she knew what clothes were. A governess was hired, the appropriately named Miss Frost, possibly the source of Lou’s lifelong dislike of the British. From the start, Miss Frost made it clear that dressing Lou was not part of her job. That fell to the maids, who enjoyed a fight, even with a child.
On the Sunday Lou was injured, her parents, her grandmother, her governess, and her Uncle César were drinking coffee after lunch on the veranda while Lou and Robert played in the garden, on the swings. As Robert pushed Lou with all his might, the swing rose higher and higher. Another girl would have screamed from fear that it would fly all the way out and flip around, like Robert’s yo-yo, which Lou planned to steal some night, leaving a doll in its place. Maybe Robert suspected this and was trying to kill her first. On the morning of Lou’s most recent birthday, the gardener caught Robert sprinkling Lou’s cake with the poison they used to kill pigeons.
Robert smelled of licorice. It had something to do with his illness. At night he shrieked like an owl. It wasn’t a scream of pain or fear, so Lou was never frightened.
As she rose higher above the lawn, Lou thought it would be nice to fall and die, or else find out that her dream was real, that she could fly by flapping her arms like a bird. She was secretly building up her muscles by lifting the weights with which Robert exercised, under his nurse’s supervision. She would kick Robert lightly as she flew over his head, then soar through the air until she touched down in a field where a crowd had gathered to applaud her landing.
The roar of the crowd turned out to be Robert’s grunt as he gave the swing a powerful shove. Lou turned to watch him run away. Turning was a mistake. She fell, and slowly, slowly, the earth rose up to meet her. She expected darkness, but the world went black, flashed once, and stayed bright.
In the white magnesium glare she saw a woman, slightly bucktoothed but beautiful, cute as a baby rabbit. Her face was bruised, her head thrown back, she seemed to be howling in pain. The howling woman was no one she knew. But Lou recognized her from somewhere, possibly from the future. She watched an owl swoop down a stone arcade. Then she saw a crowded stadium, then a room with many small tables, and a ladies’ maid with a man’s full beard setting out tablecloths.
When she opened her eyes again she was lying on the grass. Blood pooled in the creases of her palms. French blood, Papa would say.
She limped to the veranda and hid behind a hedge. Spying was always exciting, even though there was never anything to see, not counting the time she saw Uncle César back Miss Frost into a corner and dry his hands on her breasts. Lou thought breasts were disgusting, particularly Miss Frost’s large, pillowy ones, so ill suited to her cold, ungenerous personality.
Mama and Papa, Grandma, Uncle César, and Miss Frost were sipping the last drops of demitasse under the pergola dripping with wisteria. Cake crumbs dusted the cloth. Robert wasn’t allowed to eat cake. The doctors believed that sugar triggered his attacks.
During lunch, Grandma had remarked that her friend had just returned from the Olympics. A tiny American girl had taken the bronze medal in swimming.
Lou’s parents had ladled up their sorrel soup. No one cared about sports except when the French teams won. Was there really a tiny American girl? Grandma made up stories. Maybe it was her way of saying that it was all right if the only thing Lou liked was playing rough games with her brother. It was sweet of Grandma, who was always gentle and kind, and who was sorry that Lou’s parents despised her because she couldn’t embroider or play the piano, and wanted to dress in trousers.
Now Lou edged closer to the patio, where the adults were discussing money, a conversation that excluded Miss Frost, who, as she often told Lou, was paid almost nothing. Raised in China, Miss Frost liked to talk about the brave British children whose eardrums were pierced with chopsticks during the Boxer Rebellion. Miss Frost read her The Arabian Nights and said the stories were evil, read her Water Babies and Flower Fairies and said those stories were good. It was through Miss Frost’s eyes that Lou toured the trenches of the Ardennes, choked with the swollen corpses of boys who’d drowned in rivers of poison mustard. Miss Frost’s little brother had been killed on the fields of Flanders. Miss Frost cried a great deal. She told Lou that no one had ever loved her, and no one ever would.
Was it not unprofessional to complain like this to a child? In all my years at the Lycée, I have never once broken down in the presence of a student, though certainly there have been moments when the stresses of my personal life compromised my ability to maintain a professional demeanor.
It took the grown-ups forever to notice Lou at the edge of the veranda. Lou was starting to feel sleepy. Her mother saw the blood on her dress before she saw the blood on her hands, her knees, and finally her face. As always, Lou had to brace herself against Mama’s disappointment.
She could have said that Robert pushed her. But she would never betray her brother, not even under torture.
Grandma led Lou away, bandaged her wounds, and applied a tingly ointment that stopped her lip from bleeding. The doctor ordered Lou to remain awake for forty-eight hours. Her grandmother offered to stay up.
It was during this critical time that Lou first heard the story of Joan of Arc: how Saint Michael gave the shepherd girl her first suit of armor, hammered and polished by the tears Christ shed for France—a miracle that persuaded the generals to put her in charge of the army. Lou’s grandmother did voices; Lou especially liked the sheep bleating perfect French, begging Jeanne to kill them for meat to feed her soldiers. Grandma told her how Jeanne was given the gift of tears, a gift she never used until, in prison, she was forced to wear a dress that her falling tears turned into armor; how the fire refused to burn her until a sorcerer summoned the devils who stoked the flames of hell, at which point Jeanne’s heart turned into a dove that flew out of her mouth and pecked out the eyes of the British judges.
Each time her grandmother finished, Lou made her begin again. She loved hearing the saint call out for Jesus. It was thrilling and hilarious to hear the blinded judges groping in the dark, yelling, Help! Help! in English. The longer she and Grandma went without sleep, the harder they cried when the saint was killed. Staying awake seemed like a gift until, as so often happens with gifts, it became a burden.
Soon after Lou’s fall from the swing, she was sent to school in the north. Her papa bought a red Hispano-Suiza sedan and learned to drive for the trip.
Grandma sobbed as Lou and her father drove off. But everyone else was brave. As Henri and Lou headed into the hot September wind, the sunflowers turned to watch. Rows of plane trees rushed at them, then changed their minds at the last moment. Papa pointed into the distance, and a cathedral flew past, its spire pointed heavenward, poking God so he wouldn’t forget the tiny town huddled beneath it.
“Our beautiful country,” her father said. “Our precious wounded homeland.”
Lou didn’t ask what the wound was. She didn’t want to spoil Papa’s good mood.
One can only speculate about whether Lou’s career choice was a response to Henri Villars having been such a terrible driver. Luckily there were only a few cars on the road. Henri ran over a cat and once nearly hit a child whose mother snatched it up just in time. All the way to Brittany, Lou imagined her father suffering a fatal, no, a near-fatal heart attack that would require her to take the wheel and drive him to a doctor.
To Lou, the Convent of Saint Bridget seemed like a fairy-tale castle populated by princesses disguised in brown robes, as British nuns. Lou tensed when she heard their accents, but their encouraging voices were nothing like the jabs of speech with which Miss Frost inflicted information. But why was Papa, who loved everything French, sending her to an English school?
Sister Francis introduced herself as the
sports instructor, then waited for them to recover from the shock of how tall she was. Ducking beneath the low stone arches, the nun led them through the cloisters and onto the playing fields. Lou saw girls dancing around a pole, holding ribbons that never got tangled. Older girls with curved sticks chased a wooden ball across a grassy lawn. Lou might as well have been watching them take lessons in levitation. The girls wore shirts and leather neckties under their V-necked sweaters.
When Sister Francis asked if Lou played sports, Lou nodded, then shot her father a warning look. He would never contradict her and anyway seemed distracted, resigning himself to God’s decision to send him two strange children. Though it was also possible that he was thinking about his car.
When he left they kissed cheeks, and then, surprising the nuns and themselves, shook hands like two friendly fellows. Lou told him to drive carefully.
“I always do,” Henri said.
Though Henri and Clothilde Villars failed Lou in every way in which parents can fail their children, we must give them credit for transcending their prejudices and sending Lou to a place where they thought she might be happy.
Life at school was better than it had been at home. Lou knew how little to ask for and more or less what was expected. Miss Frost had told her that convent girls slept naked on the stone floor, and that the night nuns wore one shoe to make it sound as if they were approaching half as fast as they were, so the bad girls had only half the time to stop whispering before the nuns kicked them and pulled their hair. For a few nights Lou waited in fear, but nothing like that happened. In any case she hadn’t been whispering. She had no one to whisper to.
Lou smiled and nodded even when she had no idea what was being said. She did what her teachers told her. Obedience was a deliverance, a privilege, and a relief. The uniforms were much better than the lace frocks the maids at home insisted on, the maids who had so revoltingly told her how babies were made in the process of explaining why she couldn’t dress like her brother. Sometimes Lou missed Robert. She missed his scent of licorice, the roll of fat around his belly, the funny way he tilted his head, as if he were listening to voices: the voices that told him to kill her.
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