In June 1934 Myrtle, “in a terrible physical and psychological state,” finally rejoined Louis in the élysées Hôtel. They wanted money to go and visit Anne in Oxfordshire, but now that Myrtle was back, the Darquier family conferred on every move. In Tasmania the Jones family believed Myrtle was enjoying Paris to the hilt, fitting in without effort, blossoming amidst the joys of Parisian society. That was not how the Darquiers saw it; Louis was allowed to dine en famille, but not Myrtle. “With normal people… there is no doubt that a convalescence like this would do him the most good…On the other hand when he has his baggage it is possible for them to escape—to go to other hotels—charge up credit etc…you know the programme better than anyone else!” wrote Janot to René.32
With Myrtle back, Louis' parents refused further help. He did not go to Oxford; his leg collapsed again and he had a third operation on his thigh, but not before, in the middle of July 1934, he launched the first of the many organisations he was to create, the wonderfully titled Association des Blessés et Victimes du 6 Février, the Association of the Wounded and the Victims of 6 February. It was a perfect idea for making money, for now he met “everybody and this is how I'll get a job and in no other way… because the general situation is lamentable.”33
The organisation was announced in Action française on 8 July. As noted by the police at 11 a.m. on 14 July 1934, Bastille Day, Louis collected his first twelve members in the square in front of the church of the Madeleine. There he placed a wreath at the foot of a statue of St. Geneviève dedicated to the victims of 6 February. Three weeks later, he had a job.
8
Fame
IN 1931 LOUIS LOUIS-DREYFUS had bought into the conservative Parisian evening newspaper l'Intransigeant, run by Léon Bailby,1 a highly successful proprietor of the period. Bailby managed to stay with his paper for another year, but Louis Louis-Dreyfus wanted to stand as a deputy for the Radical Party in the 1932 elections, and political differences sent Bailby off to found Le Jour, a daily morning paper which in October 1933 joined Gringoire, Candide, Je Suis partout and Action française as one of a quintet of newspapers of the extreme right.2
The office of Le Jour was in the Champs-élysées, at number 91, opposite Louis Darquier's favourite bar, Le Select, around the corner from his hotel. Bailby flirted with all the leagues, but particularly with Action Française, and was a firm supporter of Mussolini and Franco. So when Louis founded his Association des Blessés, Bailby, he reported, “backed me up totally. They took up a small subscription among their readers and asked me—O! irony! to distribute the money—But it will be very very difficult for them to drop me after the summer. I'm very close to the secretary-general of Le Jour and there's a chance there I'll pursue when Bailby gets back.”3 Bailby was a wheeler-dealer, subsidised by various questionable organisations, who mixed with all who were fashionable and dubious in Paris society. He hired Louis on the platform of the Gare du Nord in August 1934, as he was about to go off with the Duc d'Abrantes to summer in his villa on the Côte d'Azur. Louis was left with a newspaper to run as deputy to the secretary-general, with a salary of two thousand francs a month (about £850 today).
Over the next month he poured out orders to René, demanding first “Silence. As you know I have quite a lot of enemies, a large number of talkative friends, and a huge number of debtors of all kinds…I've said nothing to Jean and Janot and I don't intend to say anything to the parents. You know how terribly they gossip, a sickness no amount of entreaty can stop…It's absolutely necessary that they continue to give me what they give me at the moment.” Secondly, money: “I cannot for one second…live on my 2000 francs a month.” He must look the part. All his baggage was still in hock to the Hôtel Majestic, his bill unpaid from the previous year. “My only jacket is very frayed at the cuffs but with a clean collar and a monocle…it will pass.”4 He needed a new suit, and René was to pay Elsie for the foreseeable future, while Louis attended to matters of state and the acquiring of members for his association. He would charge:
Members 10 francs a year
Patrons 50 francs
Honorary 100 francs
Benefactors 500 francs.
Within weeks, pursued for payment of their bill by the Hôtel élysées, Louis and Myrtle had moved into the more salubrious Hôtel California in the rue de Berri. Using all the services of Le Jour, Louis started recruiting:
ASSOCIATION DU 6 FEVRIER 1934
91 Champs-élysées Paris
Sir,
The Association of 6 February 1934 has been constituted with the aim of forming a group of the Frenchmen wounded in the course of the patriotic manifestation of 6 February 1934 into a single Front, without distinction of party, league, opinions or beliefs.
His programme was lengthy, but only its first point was relevant:
1. To obtain from the powers that be, with the shortest possible delay, indemnities, reparations and due sanctions for the wounded of 6 February, and also for the families of the dead.
So passed the summer of 1934. In Germany, Hitler became Führer and banned all political parties except his own; in France, re-suited at René's expense, Louis began to attend functions: “I made a speech in front of almost a hundred guests with much success, may I say with modesty.”5
Louis' next opportunity arose in November, when two young men wounded on 6 February died from their injuries. One was a sixteen-yearold apprentice butcher, Lucien Garniel. In the centre of Paris, everyone from the Street turned out for his funeral, waving their flags and pennants: Croix-de-feu, veterans' associations, Jeunesses Patriotes, Solidarité Française, Action Française, over two thousand men displaying their passion for uniforms—coloured shirts, berets and boots, coats with insignias, medals, badges, armbands. Deputies and Paris city councillors and leaders of the leagues were there. Chiappe, Maurras and Taittinger attended, with Louis holding high his own flag and pennant. The procession stretched from rue la Boétie and continued down the boulevard Haussmann up to place Lafayette in the 9th arrondissement. There the hearse lay, surrounded by Louis and his men, the councillors from the Hôtel de Ville and the family of the dead boy. The leagues filed past, each laying a wreath on the coffin, only the occasional cry to be heard— “Maurras! ” and “Front National! ”
As deputy secretary-general of Le Jour Louis had now met anyone who was anyone; every newspaper, particularly those of the right, covered the funerals. Bailby organised lecture courses at Le Jour on public speaking—François Mitterrand trained there at the time—and very soon Darquier took up public performance. Five days after Lucien Garniel's funeral the government of Gaston Doumergue fell, and the conservative Pierre-étienne Flandin took over, but not for long.6 Louis' association announced the next funeral, which took place in December, this time a Catholic funeral at Saint-Pierre de Neuilly, the local church of Louise Darquier and of the dead boy, Jean Mopin, an engineering student from Neuilly. For the Catholic hierarchy the dead of 6 February had “paid for the fatherland's salvation with their lives.”7 An even more distinguished gathering attended this funeral, including Xavier Vallat, who was to become the first Commissioner for Jewish Affairs in the Vichy government.
Louis used Catholics and nationalists of every hue. In addition to his commitment to AF, he had already placed “his pen and his courage at the service of Croix-de-feu, Volontaires Nationaux [its youth movement] and the Front National.” The young François Mitterrand8 was an activist in Croix-de-feu's youth movement. Crying “France aux Français”— “France for the French,” the catchphrase of édouard Drumont and his followers—on 2 February 1935 Mitterrand demonstrated against the “envahissement des métèques”—the invasion of foreigners, in this case foreign medical students. Within two months of Louis founding his association, the men of 6 February 1934 had become a legend, heroes of the fatherland, “la fleur de la race,” unarmed and patriotic citizens fighting for “national regeneration” who had been slaughtered by the police under orders of the government of the Third Republic. All
the most important national leagues joined Louis' association, and day after day Action française published the many letters Louis wrote to the paper; usually they appeared on the front page.
It was by no means unusual for a man like Louis Darquier to join both Action Française and its rivals, which it appears he had managed to do by the beginning of 1935. As Louis was leaving hospital in May 1934, setting aside their differences, Jeunesses Patriotes, Solidarité Française and about eighteen other conservative veterans' associations and smaller leagues had united to form the Front National—the name used today by Jean-Marie le Pen. While Action Française worked closely with the Front National, la Roque did not permit Croix-de-feu to join it. Croix-de-feu had now become the largest and most important opponent of the republic, eyed jealously by Taittinger and Maurras.
Throughout his life Louis kept a favourite photograph of eight men in raincoats and jackboots. It is most likely that they were wearing the blue trench coat, blue shirt, jodhpurs and Basque beret of Jeunesses Patriotes.9 Dressing up was only one of the attractions of Taittinger's group: while Action Française refused to participate in parliamentary politics, by 1935 Jeunesses Patriotes had amongst its members seventy-six deputies and many Paris councillors. Taittinger and his cohorts took Louis up politically, for, as Louis wrote to René, “it is very difficult at the moment to do anything without me.”10
One veteran of Jeunesses Patriotes—although a year younger than Louis Darquier—was Charles Trochu,11 who was also close to Action Française, and who for the last three years had been chosen by Jeunesses Patriotes as a candidate for the city council of Paris. A businessman in the import and export of cod, he had much in common with Louis: like him he had enlisted in the army at the age of seventeen, and had been wounded and decorated. He was fond of organisations, a member of many, and was a boastful and inventive man, much given to the sort of ancestral claims Louis himself favoured. Trochu, who had fought on the place de la Concorde during the riots of 6 February, described Jews as “the scum from the Orient.” In January 1935 he was appointed secretary-general of the Front National.
As dignitaries of his association, Louis acquired militant members of the leagues, a general, and, as his first members, widows of the fallen. The president of the Paris city council accepted the honorary presidency, and Louis was invited to speak in public. His first public performance took place on 28 January 1935 at an Action Française student meeting, in the company of Charles Trochu, Maurice Pujo and Admiral Schwerer of Action Française, and others. Louis distinguished himself. As he read out the names of the dead of 6 February, “thousands of men stood up, and at each name, with one voice, they responded ‘Died for France! ’ ” Ovations and prolonged bravos greeted the speech that followed: “We are French. Certain people, mostly métèques or Jews of the lowest kind, want to prevent us from raising our heads in our own country. Our roots in this country go back for thousands of years. We will not be tyrannised by such people.” Action française praised to the skies his “sober and direct eloquence, his natural way of speaking, the energy of his approach, the sincerity of his words.”
Louis wrote copiously in Le Jour about the widows and children of his association: “The loss of her husband has ruined her; she lives in a cold little apartment, where the only light is that of the gaze of her child. But she does not give in.” The hyperbole of his prose, then and later, gives some insight into the quality of Darquier's missing novels.12
Brushing aside accusations that he had filched the association's membership funds, when the first anniversary of the great day came round on 6 February 1935, Louis instituted an annual day of commemoration with the support and approval of the Paris council, Action Française and the Front National. To obtain government permission for this he spent an hour and a half with the prime minister of France, Pierre-étienne Flandin, outlining his plans. A compromise was agreed upon—the widows would be allowed to pay their respects on the place de la Concorde, but not the leagues. A memorial service followed at Notre Dame on the morning of 6 February, attended by Flandin himself, despite considerable parliamentary objections.
After these encouraging events, Trochu invited Louis to stand as a Front National candidate for the Paris council elections to be held in May. At the end of April his candidature was announced for the Ternes quarter in the 17th arrondissement, on the northwestern edge of Paris, adjacent to Neuilly and his family home. He was thirty-seven years old. He hoped to represent the district stretching from the avenue de la Grande Armée, leading off the Arc de Triomphe and l'étoile, to the boulevards de Courcelles and de Clichy, crisscrossed by the broad thoroughfares of the avenue Wagram and avenue des Ternes. This was the chic side of the 17ème.
Earlier that year Elsie had moved from the bungalow to a gloomy semidetached house nearby, the ill-named “Sunny Bank” in Kidlington High Street. Elsie always moved house or village in pursuit of Anne's education, and she first sent Anne to Kidlington Infants' and Junior School, in nearby School Road. The school had been set up in the nineteenth century as a Church of England establishment to educate the children of “the Labouring, Manufacturing and other poorer classes in the Parish.” When Anne went there, in addition to the descendants of those commoners, the pupils included children of unemployed men from depressed areas outside the county who had been recruited by Morris Motors in Oxford.
Anne's education was standard fare for English girls who were expected to have few ambitions: the three “R”s, cooking, gardening and needlework. There was corporal punishment for boys, but only one light stroke on the hand for girls. Schools were always to be a problem for Anne and Elsie: they had so many aspirations, and they had so much to hide. In January 1935, while Louis was using his salary to produce leaflets and banners for his association, and was having a fourth operation on his leg, Myrtle, prostrate over the death of her younger brother Colin and his family—all killed when the Miss Hobart crashed into the sea on a flight from Launceston to Melbourne—was forced to extract a further £12 for Nurse from René.13 Myrtle's tone in her begging letters, like that of Louis, had now become peremptory.
In the five years between 1930 and 1935, René had given Louis 150,000 francs—worth about £60,000 today. Now Louis needed a further ten thousand francs to finance his candidacy for the Front National. On 1 April, on the stationery of the Hôtel California, he scrawled a note to René, accepting his debt: “I acknowledge very willingly that in the course of the last years you have lent me at different times a sum of about a hundred and fifty thousand francs, which I promise to repay you in instalments as and when and in proportion to the amelioration of my situation.” He signed with his baronial name in full, very grandly, twice. René did not appreciate this approach. Four weeks later, on 29 April, by which time he must have been desperate for the money, Louis presented his brother with a more official version, stamped “République Française,” in which he agreed to repay René's 150,000-franc loan at his “first demand,” adding: “p.s. The acknowledgements of former debts up till now are annulled.” The next day Trochu guaranteed a similar note for the necessary extra ten thousand francs.
None of these miserably typed documents was satisfactory, so René placed the matter in the hands of an unfortunate director of the Banque Cotonnière in Paris, a M. Habault, who spent an unhappy week of it. René insisted that Myrtle sign the authorised loan for 150,000 francs, and that Louis repay the extra ten thousand by the end of the year—or as soon as he received his state reimbursement for his wounded leg. “I have received a visit from [Louis] this morning,” Habault wrote to René on 1 May. “Certain modifications have been brought in…Your brother repeated once again that his wife will refuse to sign this acknowledgement …” Trochu made himself unavailable, Myrtle refused to sign, but Louis extracted the further ten thousands francs anyway, Habault complaining that the unsigned note was “typed by a machine which makes the guarantee non-existent.”14
In 1936 relations between Louis and René seem to have deteriorated
further. During the six years Elsie had spent fighting the Darquiers for payment, René had been the last resort for all of them, but by May it seems he was attempting to pass the financial responsibility for Anne and Elsie back to his brother, and that he told Louis and Elsie so. Myrtle surfaced again, but in disordered form, feebly scrawling one last attempt to make her case to the Darquier family who found her so intolerable. Her handwriting is enlarged and wandering, much of it undecipherable. She dated her letter 1926, but it was written in 1936, on 22 May, from the Hôtel Windsor étoile in the Ternes. Whatever René had said to Louis and Elsie had offended Myrtle:
Louis wrote many of his begging letters from his favourite bar in Paris, Le Select.
in my own family I have never even thought of daring to speak [about?] how my brother's children were cared for—it is a religion for us not to interfere. The Mother is always sacred. Somehow I have always trusted you René and was more than surprized by your letter. Our baby is not as yours, she is internadiorial [sic; international?].
I suppose I will have to seperate [sic] from Louis and years ago you told me that one day I would have to go.
But it really was “below the belt” to write against me—after all René, I am the Mother … My family paid for her to be born into the world and have borne a lot of the expense since—certainly all her clothes? etc. It is not sporting of you to write against my back about her—Louis can have many children—I have this one and every day my thoughts are not away from her for five minutes.15
This seems to have been Myrtle's last letter to René Darquier, and it is the only one she signed in full flourish—“Sandra Lyndsay Darquier de Pellepoix.” Her last words as she slips into obscurity for most of the following decade were: “… sleeping, waking my first and last thoughts are for Louis and my Baby.”
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