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.
No one paid attention to Elise. But one night a member of the She-Wolf group was at the next table, eavesdropping on a pair of suspected German agents, when she overheard Elise’s story and recalled something about a female collaborator, a torturer and a spy who wore men’s clothes and had been seen in the area.
Though Lou never knew it, she was famous again. The survivors of her brutal interrogations, Suzanne Dunois among others, had spread the word about who she was and what she was doing, giving speeches to right-wing bodybuilders and asking if anyone suspected the neighbors of harboring Jews or Brits, if any submarines had been seen off the coast, if anyone had noticed an enemy parachute landing.
Hélène Michaux had arrived in Calais a year before, claiming to have fled a Nazi official who’d tried to rape her in Saumur. She was pretty, so people believed her. She’d rented a house on the beach outside the ruined city. She ran on the sand and played tennis. The women in the tennis club urged her to invite Lou to speak, as did Hélène’s comrades in She-Wolf and her other contacts in the Resistance.
Over drinks at the café, Hélène flirted with Lou and gazed at her throughout Lou’s impassioned speech. Afterward, Hélène invited Lou to her seaside villa. She told Lou that she was an heiress, but in fact the house was paid for by the Resistance and used to shelter agents en route to join de Gaulle in London. Lou was charmed by the feminine decor. Even the bathtub was pink.
Lou extended her visit for two extra days. Hesitant to bother Bonnet, she decided to stay without his permission and return with information that would make him glad he’d sent her.
The Resistance wanted to be sure about Lou before taking action. One night, as Hélène and Lou gazed out at the ocean from Hélène’s bedroom window, Hélène mentioned that some friends had seen boats landing on a beach down the coast. Hélène described the cove. Did Lou think they were smugglers? Probably, Lou told her, and kissed Hélène again.
They stayed awake making love and talking, exchanging stories from their lives—Lou’s partial truths and whatever fictions Hélène invented. When Lou left, she promised to return when she could.
Two days later, the “smugglers’ cove” was swarming with German soldiers. The British secret service was surprised that Lou hadn’t been more circumspect.
Lou made several trips to Calais, each time submitting a list of expenses to Bonnet’s office. Always she billed her employers for her hotel room, though she stayed at Hélène’s.
So we see Lou embarking on one final ill-fated romance, a new love that, as new love often does, follows an old, self-destructive pattern. Once again Lou found herself involved with someone who was using her, deceiving her—and convincing her that she was loved.
Which of us has not fallen for a heartless automaton pretending to be a human? Normally, we condemn these liars, these two-faced cheaters. We despise it when, like Arlette, they sacrifice a trusting soul on the altar of greed and ambition, or when, like Inge, they play Mata Hari, faking infatuation to further some evil agenda.
But do we feel differently when we see Lou betrayed by someone on the side of the good, Lou tricked by a heroine trying to prevent Lou from harming innocent people? To prevent Lou from interfering with the Allies’ plan to liberate Europe? Are we less upset when someone bends the rules if we agree with the person doing the bending?
Perhaps these speculations should be tabled for another time—ideally, for when The Devil Drives is discussed on one of the lively book shows so popular now on French TV.
Lou Villars was assassinated in early 1944, two months before D-Day. No one has ever taken credit or blame for her death. It seems almost certain who ordered her killing, though this information appears only in a Resistance memoir that has recently been called into question, and that for legal reasons I will not cite by author or title.
She was tried in absentia by the Raisin Noir network, a Resistance group based in Paris. It is assumed that Suzanne Dunois testified, though obviously no records were kept. An order of execution was issued, and several cells in Brittany, including the She-Wolf unit, were enlisted to arrange for the sentence to be carried out.
It has been a challenge to reconstruct the chain of events that led from Lou being a person whom the Resistance was monitoring to her being considered a serious threat, a bomb that had to be defused before she got back to Paris.
With D-Day so soon approaching, the Resistance must have had other concerns. It is possible they believed poor Elise Becker, whose story military historians would later find evidence to support. If so, the operatives might have welcomed the chance to take justice into their own hands and punish the traitor who’d not only delivered their country to the Germans but also worked for the Gestapo. If they waited until the war ended, she might escape, as many did, or she might have been tried and acquitted, as many were. There are those who deny that revenge, vigilantism, and assassination occurred on either side. But such is human nature.
My own theory, which readers will not find in any other study of the period, is that something convinced the Resistance that Lou must be neutralized at once. Knowing Lou’s nature as I do, having allowed her—invited her!—to take up residence in my psyche, I can easily imagine the scene in which Lou, whose instincts were always sharper than her intellect, sensed that her passion for Hélène wasn’t returned. Attuned by sad experience to any slackening of attention, Lou may have tried, as she often had, to rekindle her lover’s interest by inventing boastful fantasies about her own importance.
She insisted she had secret information about the Allies’ planned invasion. She told Hélène why she’d been sent to the coast, to collect the information Bonnet wanted.
We will never know if she was pretending, or if she really knew, exactly when and where the Allied invasion would occur.
It was not where the Germans thought! She’d obtained copies of secret maps. No, she hadn’t brought them along! Did Hélène think she was stupid? She’d committed them to memory and would report back to her bosses. She cared too much about Hélène’s safety to tell her what she’d learned.
Had Lou somehow intuited the truth about Hélène? In which case were Lou’s extravagant claims an ingenious method of sealing her own doom, an elaborate form of suicide, of ending a life that had become too hopeless and sad?
Whether or not Lou sensed that Hélène was eager to contact her Resistance comrades, she couldn’t help noticing that her friend seemed impatient for her to leave. Mulish with hurt and resentment, Lou rambled on about how, acting on classified information, she could still win the war for the Germans.
If only she’d kept her mouth shut! But it was already too late.
By the time Lou had driven a short distance from Hélène’s house, calls had been made. Lou’s route home, which clever Hélène thought to ask, had been mapped and transmitted.
It thrilled Lou to imagine that Hélène’s curiosity about what roads she was planning to take was a sign that her lover wanted to keep her in mind, to imagine her on her journey, to know where she would be, and when. To keep her close at all times.
Hélène had said that she wante
d to visualize Lou, every step of the way. She wanted to see her in her mind, as if they were still together.
And Hélène did think of Lou constantly, from then on, and for days. She saw her on the road, as we do, driving faster than she should have because a storm was brewing. Lou slowed down when it began to rain and she felt the road slip under her threadbare tires. Hélène pictured her driving through every drenched village and past the dark canals into which willows dipped their mustard-colored fronds.
Had the weather been balmier, might she have driven quickly enough to be out of the area before the sharpshooters had time to assemble? Would she have gone a different way? Or did she stick to her plan because it was the route she was traveling in Hélène’s imagination.
I can say with some assurance that I know more than anyone alive about the career of Lou Villars. Yet despite everything I have learned in my research, despite my personal views about crime and punishment, justice and retribution, despite my knowledge of the carnage for which Lou was to blame, why does some part of me still hope that Lou enjoyed that final drive?
She had reason to be cheerful. She was in love. She was hoping this new romance might last. She liked her work, and more important, she was carrying out the Führer’s will. When the Germans won and a new order was established, when the Reich gave France back to the French, she would be decorated with the honors she’d once expected to share with Inge.
Lou drove between rows of sycamore trees. A fine aerosol of rain moistened the earth and thickened the iridescent pinfeathers of early spring grass. What a long distance she had traveled since that trip with Papa to the convent! How far she had driven—a woman, alone, supporting herself, living and dressing the way she wished. She had so much to be proud of! Her best drives might still be ahead of her. There was no telling what might happen.
Lou was buoyant as she drove the winding stretch between Le Tronchet and Châteauneuf, a route that is still marked green—for its scenic beauty—on the Michelin road map. There was no reason to hurry. Soon she would be back in Paris, coping with the stresses of her job.
Not far from Abbeville, Lou stopped for a flock of sheep. Warm steam rose off their fragrant wool as they bleated and jostled one another. Normally impatient, Lou watched the sheep with affection, happy to see them so fat. Good French people would be eating lamb stew, French children drinking milk. She thought of a story Armand had told—how long ago that seemed!—about a driver hitting a flock of sheep and losing a race and dying.
Just as the last sheep crossed the road, Lou heard Armand’s voice. Drive like you’re driving the wounded over a muddy battleground pitted by bullets and shells. Each wasted instant, each idle second means that a soldier will die.
Lou stomped on the gas and took off.
Is it a sign of how drastically my work on this book has unhinged me that I seem to see her looking reproachfully at me, in her rearview mirror?
Half an hour beyond Rouen, two hay wagons were stuck, crisscrossed, blocking the road. Cursing, Lou swung out of the driver’s seat and approached the carts. Their owners were nowhere in evidence. Perhaps they’d gone to get help.
Three sharpshooters stepped out of the woods and strafed Lou with bullets. Her killers kept shooting long after her riddled body lay still. Glossy pools of thick blood beaded the wet, black highway. Luckily for Lou’s killers, the rain had gotten heavier, washing away the evidence even as it was created. They dragged her bleeding corpse over to her car, heaved her into the backseat, and moved the wagons off the road. Two of the assassins drove Lou’s sedan to a secluded spot where they burned her beloved Rossignol with her body inside. No one would be the wiser. A war was going on.
It took Jean-Claude Bonnet a week to notice that Lou hadn’t returned. A perfunctory investigation uncovered no evidence. It was conceivable that some harm might have befallen her, but it was equally likely that she had deserted and was waiting for the end of the war in some obscure town, under an assumed name. It hardly seemed worth the trouble to take local hostages and threaten to shoot them unless someone came forward with information about a cross-dressing lesbian torturer-spy whom the Nazis never acknowledged as having worked for them in the first place.
The Allies were about to invade. No one had time to think about Lou. No one missed her. No one mourned her. No one, until now.
Good-bye, poor Lou. Farewell cursed and lonely soul, sinning and sinned against. If there is a merciful God, perhaps your afterlife will be less painful than your tormented sojourn on earth.
Lou’s bones lie unclaimed in an unmarked grave not far from where a superhighway scars the countryside. It is possible that her remains were moved to a landfill when the new road was constructed.
The Slaughterhouse, A Coda
I can easily imagine a publisher summoning me to his office to suggest that I cut most, if not all, of the preceding chapter. The only cut I would agree to (and which I have preemptively made) has been to remove the superfluous details of how I learned that Lou’s last lover, Eileen Mitchell, was alive and well, an artist still working in her Sussex cottage.
I wrote Eileen Mitchell a friendly letter. My English, I should say, is excellent. But I received no reply. By that point I was used to my inquiries going unanswered.
Eileen had to be at least eighty. I had no time to lose.
The trip cost more than I could afford. I decided to use Uncle Emile’s money. I could always claim it as a business expense in the event my book made a profit.
It was my first time in the Chunnel. As we hurtled under the water, my jaw began to throb, a common reaction, I’ve heard. I rented a car and, though I am not a confident driver—especially on the wrong side of the road!—I found my way, without incident, to the famous sculptor’s “cottage.” Perhaps I picked up, by osmosis, some of Lou’s self-assurance behind the wheel.
A young black woman greeted me, wearing a paint-speckled shirt and jeans, and a bright green, red, and yellow ribbon tying back her dreads. She was pretty but not very friendly, even slightly hostile.
I had forgotten to plan what I would say when I arrived. I suppose I intended to tell the truth. I’m writing a book about Lou Villars. Could I interview Miss Mitchell about her memories of Lou?
Would this girl even know who Lou was?
“May I help you?” she said. Clearly, she was in charge. Eileen’s young lover, I thought. Or was she her caretaker? My contacts had been uncertain about the state of Eileen’s health. I explained that I was writing a book about women who had worked undercover for the Allies in France.
The young woman seemed to be on the point of saying something, then shrugged and motioned for me to follow her toward a barn behind the rather grand main house, definitely not a “cottage.” I asked if the barn was Eileen’s studio.
I had seen a snapshot, taken years before, of the sculptor posed with her work, enormous bronze castings of forest and jungle creatures, powerful statues that were photographed and used in the fund-raising campaigns of several international wildlife preservation foundations.
My guide shrugged again and kept walking.
It was indeed Eileen’s studio. Her art was what I saw first. The barn looked like a slaughterhouse, crammed full of monumental sculptures in various mediums, all depicting the battered corpses of horses and cows. Some were whole, some hacked to pieces. There were stacks of equine heads, bovine offal, ropelike coils of oxtails.
“Isn’t it lovely?” the young woman said.
Lovely was hardly the word that came to mind. But what word would have been better? I had suddenly lost all my English.
“Formidable,” I said.
The young woman pointed at something. It took me a while to see Eileen sitting in the midst of the studio, on a low wooden stool. She didn’t turn or rise to greet us, though she must have heard us come in. Was she thinking about her work? I was sorry to have disturbed her.
I said I could come back later, in an hour or two. My guide waved me on. She told me to walk around
Eileen and stand very close, in front.
Eileen looked up but didn’t appear to see me. Fragile as a songbird, she wore a lab technician’s white coat. Her shell pink scalp was visible beneath her thin, uncombed hair. Her ruddy face was deeply creased. A ray of sun shining through a gap in the roof beams backlit a fringe of fur around her chin. Was this the beauty who had stolen Lou’s heart—and arranged her execution?
Her blue eyes were milky as beach glass. Sad and sweetly apologetic, her gaze had turned inward, away from a world reduced to a source of confusion, embarrassment, and regret. Her smile was wobbly, uncertain. Did she recognize me from somewhere? The young woman said I was writing a book. Eileen nodded and smiled again.
What had I wanted to ask her? What was Lou really like? Did she talk about her life? What secrets did she tell you? Did she explain why she did what she did? Was any of your “love” real? That was the question Lou would have asked. Was I channeling my subject?
I knew that this was the end of my book. That my search for the causes of evil would end in this studio, confronted by the husk of a woman who had spent the end of her life making animal body parts.
I reached out and took Eileen’s hands in mine. She seemed willing to allow this. I could feel her bones, her veins, her trembling fingers. And it gave me some comfort—encouragement, one might say—to know that I was holding the hands that had held the hands that Lou Villars had dipped so often in blood.
Lycée Jeanne d’Arc
Rouen, 2010
Paris
July 12, 2011
To the editors of Libération,
I can imagine you smiling as you pass around this letter and ask your colleagues at the newspaper, How often does this happen? How often does a little old lady write us to complain that a recent book review wasn’t harsh enough? But given the passions still excited by the history of our nation’s collaboration during World War II, perhaps I won’t be the only reader to object to your June 10 review of The Devil Drives: The Life of Lou Villars, by Nathalie Dunois.
Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 Page 43