Henry Charbonneau and Henry Coston were sentenced to prison and forced labour—Charbonneau for ten years, Coston for life, though he was free by 1951, and lived on, writing in the same manner and voluminously, for another fifty years. Lucien Rebatet received a death sentence in 1946, but was pardoned and freed by 1952.
Many, like Louis, escaped altogether. Marcel Déat was given refuge in a Catholic convent in Turin. Céline took shelter in Denmark; tried, convicted and amnestied in his absence, by 1951 he had returned safely to France.35 Trials and executions continued for some years—Jean Luchaire was executed in 1946, Fernand de Brinon in 1947—but by then furies had abated. Amnesty laws began in 1947, and by 1951 retribution had ended. Very few served their full sentence.
“We need to ensure social isolation so as to make the Jewish community what it should never have ceased to be—a foreign colony,” was a Darquier hymn tune during the Vichy years.36 After 1944 Madrid became the Madagascar for this colony of French political refugees. In the coming years some of them lived well: the leader of the Belgian fascists, Léon Degrelle, who eventually married the former wife of Henry Charbonneau, spent years in considerable comfort on the Costa del Sol and in Málaga, honoured by Franco's government, his Catholicism permitting him to be photographed with a beaming Pope John Paul II on 11 December 1991. Léon and Jeanne Degrelle both knew Louis Darquier, but in Spain they avoided him as much as they could, despising his irregular private life from the lofty heights of their own unusual marital arrangements—Darquier was vulgar, impecunious, tiresome. Louis reciprocated by describing Belgians as belonging to a “sub-culture.”
At lower altitudes the lesser losers mixed together: Vichy collaborators, Milice, Paris collabos, Nazis ranging from Gestapo to camp commandants. Gradually fear of pursuit and betrayal passed and, embittered, mutually supportive, living under a wide and changing variety of assumed names, they helped each other get work. The French exiles were additionally fortunate in that after the Civil War, French was the official second language in Spain, but the wretched state of the Spanish economy meant that though there was plenty of work, it was miserably paid. This was the greatest change for Louis: once he arrived in Spain he took up work, and never abandoned it again; work became a kind of replacement addiction for him and his fellows. They toiled in language schools, libraries, publishing houses, educational institutions, government offices; they worked as interpreters and edited language dictionaries; they broadcast to France on Radio Nacional de España about the wonders of Franco's Spain. All of them hovered around the French embassy, their fortunes there varying with the politics of the incumbent ambassador. As before, they fought over women.
Eugène Schueller's beauty empire l'Oréal became “a factory to recycle the extreme right” into safety, in particular two murderers from the Cagoule.37 Jacques Corrèze, Deloncle's right-hand man, ran l'Oréal's American subsidiary until the 1990s, and Jean Filliol, Deloncle's top gun, a subsidiary in Spain. François Mitterrand's brother had married Deloncle's niece, and his sister Jo was the mistress of Jean Bouvyer, Cagoulard and senior official at Darquier's CGQ J. So Mitterrand became a considerable recycler of dubious collaborators himself; he worked for l'Oréal after the war, and was working for Schueller when he fought his first election campaign in 1946.
Another early exile ushered in by José de Lequerica was Alain Laubreaux, the theatre critic of Je Suis partout, whom the actor Jean Marais had thrashed on behalf of his lover Jean Cocteau for Laubreaux's characteristic but atrocious review of Cocteau's play La Machine à écrire (The Typewriter) in 1943. Laubreaux was a clone of Louis Darquier, as large, but slimier and fleshier of lip, a man of epic rages and an enthusiastic coureur de jupons who made the mistake of approaching Louis' mistress. He and Darquier quarrelled about everything, but over Geneviève they had “a blood row… and came to blows.”38
One French view of Britain described it as a country “where nothing is provided for women, not even men.”39 However, in 1945 Anne Darquier lived in encouraging times as the nation's governing classes turned their
attention to the population who fought its wars. The Beveridge Plan, published in 1942, followed by the Butler Education Act in 1944, ushered in the welfare state and universal education, just a year too late for Anne to benefit or for Elsie to cease pursuing Free French charities, but in good time for Anne to find the gates of Oxford University open to children such as she.
She was even luckier to be a young girl with ambitions as Clement Attlee's Labour government was swept to power on 26 July 1945. Three months earlier, in May, Churchill had presided over the final defeat of Germany and the end of the war in Europe. Labour promised people like Elsie—though a Tory voter all her life—social security, full employment, decent health, housing and education; running water and electricity came to Great Tew village itself.
Despite the decisive achievements of the Red Army and the huge contribution of American arms and money, it was Britain which had fought against Germany from the beginning to the end. Now it was bankrupt, hungry—rationing was worse than ever, and continued until 1954— and shedding its Empire right and left. But although every Briton was tired to death of austerity, it was not the class to which Elsie and Anne belonged which suffered from nationalisation, fierce taxation and the loss of Empire during the post-war years.
These were years of hope for Anne. Her other piece of luck was to have been given, through Elsie and Maud—“enormous characters, both of them”—that Ealing Comedy British sense of humour exported everywhere in the Anglo-Saxon world after the war, but very much in evidence in Great Tew during it. However much Elsie kept Anne apart from hoi polloi, Anne learned to laugh during her childhood, and she absorbed in remembered detail the mysteries of the British class system. It was only to Elsie that Anne could unleash any rage. With everyone else she was gentle and controlled, but with Elsie she could flare up if she was upset. Elsie “had a job to calm her down,” but she could do it.40
From her father, if such attributes can be innate, Anne inherited remarkable single-mindedness. Since the age of fourteen she had taught herself, and when she was not working in the pub, friends remember that she “studied all the time”: “She didn't mix with the other kids, she stayed in the pub most evenings, and didn't roister about the village as the others did.”41 Her devotion to medicine and the hours she spent over her books were always a mystery to the inhabitants of Great Tew.
At East Ham Grammar, Anne's teachers had taken the girls on sightseeing tours of Oxford. Anne determined on a medical degree from Oxford University. Nothing else would do. She may have looked fragile, but her perseverance was startling. One account, from a medical contemporary, tells of her getting the Chipping Norton bus to Oxford to knock on the door of every educational establishment, asking, “Will you teach me chemistry and physics?” Those who knew her well were aware that Anne, outwardly shy and withdrawn, had a will of iron when it came to her ambition to become a doctor.
As Britain began its social revolution, everything changed for Anne too. Twelve months after Louis escaped to Spain, in October 1945, the French ambassador in London approached de Gaulle's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on behalf of the French benevolent societies, who could not continue to support Anne indefinitely: “a member of his family [must] take charge of the infant,” or she would be sent to a charitable institution in France.
At this point the French Ministry of Justice was anxious to find Louis Darquier too. Investigators were sent to interview his brother Jean, who told them that though he would take Anne if “the worst came to the worst,” “his professional obligations, in addition to those of his wife, would oblige them to neglect the education of this child who does not speak French.”42 He recommended that they approach the Jones family, by way of Myrtle, who was currently in London. Jean gave them her address: 35 Sussex Square, in Bayswater, near Hyde Park; they should write to her poste restante, Jermyn Street, Piccadilly.
And so Anne came up to London to meet her mother. A
fter Myrtle pushed Louis out of the door in September 1944 she got away, according to her Tasmanian family, with her maid, leaving behind her beautiful clothes—possibly true—and a lifetime's collection of valued possessions. If the latter ever existed, neither the police who raided rue Laugier, nor the grim rooms of the Hôtels Fortuny or Terminus, showed any sign of them. It was February 1946 when Jean Darquier reported Myrtle's whereabouts. Her British passport would have enabled her to escape to London well before 1946, but she did not contact Anne or Elsie, perhaps one reason being that she was living under the name of Cynthia de Pelle Poix, another being that she had lost out to Elsie in their tug-of-war over Anne years before. Myrtle had always presented herself to her family in Tasmania as a darling of Parisian society. At 35 Sussex Square there were many other residents, and no sign of a maid; it was, most likely, a boardinghouse.
It was after this meeting at Sussex Square that Anne described Myrtle as a “total write-off ” from drink and drugs. Myrtle's state of alcoholic stupor might well have been due to Louis' disappearance, for she did not know his whereabouts until early 1947. 43 The Darquiers in Paris knew where he was, of course, but it seems that time had in no way altered their view of Myrtle.
Anne's meeting with her mother was her greatest shock, and one she buried immediately, a manner of dealing with loss which never changed. Anne looked “amazingly like her mother”44—she had Myrtle's blue eyes—but she identified with her father, not with the theatrical but by this time raddled charmer whom she met at Sussex Square in 1946. Anne was fifteen then; she would say later that she met her mother only a few times in her life, and always, after this meeting, she could barely manage to mention her name.
There were, however, happier distractions. In early 1946 Maud and Elsie's niece May came back from the war to live at the Falkland Arms; she was engaged now, marriage preparations were in the air and Anne was to be bridesmaid. Then Louise Darquier invited Anne to Paris.
René Darquier had already left for Argentina. In June 1945 the resistance newspaper Franc-tireur attacked him for profiting from Louis' position—headlines such as “Darquier Frères & Cie” meant he had to go. Henry Lévy's grandson remembers: “After the Second World War he [René] wanted my father to give him a job again in the company. This matter came up in family discussions. But with a brother like Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, my father thought it was not possible that he hadn't benefited in some way or another. So my father said no, he could not take him back.”45
For Louise, many of the friends who had showered her with flowers before 1944 now avoided her, and to bring the daughter of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix to Paris in 1946 was no simple matter. Louise was summoned to the British embassy in Paris. She cried all night before her interview, but when she met the consul—she thought she met Duff Cooper, the incumbent of the time, but doubtless it was a minor official—she wept all over him too: “Monsieur, if you had a grandchild in a foreign country… whom you had never seen, what would you do in my place?”46
When Anne arrived in Paris in 1946 her French was only up to Elsie's standard, but otherwise Louise was pleased with her: “She was different, but she did not disappoint. She smiled so nicely.” On her return to Great Tew Anne's friends found her “quite different, very sophisticated.” And she came back a Catholic: she was baptised, she had been to Mass. The country people were astonished by her altered accent and her attendance at “Marss”—Anne insisted on pronouncing the word in this Evelyn Waugh-esque way: “Her head was turned a bit.” She said not a word about Myrtle, but her friend Beryl was told that Anne's parents had sent her to Britain to keep her out of “war-torn France.” Everything else she continued to keep “very close to her chest.”47
Anne took her new religion very seriously. Though there were two big Catholic churches at Banbury and Chipping Norton, and a little one at Hook Norton, nearby at Enstone was the famous Jesuit college Heythrop Hall, with its ancient library and philosopher priests. Anne met a different class of person once she came back from Paris. She had learned about ballet and theatre, and she began to mix with families whom the villagers of Great Tew called “the upper classes” at Little Tew. Under their wing she was taken to Mass at Heythrop Hall. She was confirmed, and chose the name of Anne Marie; at Mass on Sundays there she met Polish and French servicemen—there were plenty of Catholics around Great Tew in those days.48 She learned about music—her favourite composers were French, Delibes and Ravel—and she listened to the piano at the houses of her new friends.
At the end of 1946 Elsie and Anne returned to Kidlington and Anne signed up with Wolsey Hall correspondence college in Oxford, appointed by the War Office in 1942 to provide courses for the forces. Either knocking at doors, or her pub servicemen, led her towards it. In April 1947 Aunty Violet died of cancer, nursed at the Falkland Arms and buried in the churchyard of St. Michael and All Angels at Great Tew. By the summer of that year Anne had passed her Higher School Certificate with the London External Exam Board. Mystery surrounds Anne's entrance to Oxford; she did not have the Latin matriculation qualification necessary for enrolment, and she does not seem to have taken the usual entrance examination later in 1947. Perhaps she sat it and failed, for she did not get to Oxford until 1949. But she was lucky, again. Anne was exactly the sort of person the post-war British government wanted to help. An Oxford contemporary said, “She lied to get into Oxford, got there under false pretences… things were more casual then. People just believed you.”49
As Anne turned eighteen in September 1948, May Brice married her Sussex farmer, Gilbert Rapley, at St. Michael and All Angels. In the wedding photographs Anne, usually thought of as charming but “not quite pretty,” is pretty in a long floral dress, with flowers in her hair. These are the happiest photos: she smiles with the gaiety that marked her as much as her charm. She had not yet met her father, but she had been back to Paris, this time to stay with Jean and Janot in the rue Jouffroy. Typically, she had now perfected her French. After this visit Anne changed her medical aspirations: she was adamant that she would enter her uncle's branch of medicine and become a neurosurgeon, but the person she talked about most was her aunt Janot, not only a woman doctor as Anne longed to be, but also one whose recent thesis had been concerned with the medical care of employees in the workplace.
The Oxford entrance examination was Anne's only remaining problem. Her luck continued; she now had the money to pay for a university education. For Australia, the World War ended in August 1945, after the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As soon as the first ships could sail bearing letters, Lexie Jones took charge of her granddaughter, always called “Anne-France” by Myrtle's family. From Tasmania, Lexie put her children to work on Anne's behalf. For years the middle sister Olive, for whom Louis Darquier was “sun, moon and stars,” had been posting parcels to Myrtle and Hazel, and now she added Anne to her list. Hazel Jones, the competent one, “half in love with Louis,”50 had worked all over the world, and was often in England. She dealt with Elsie on behalf of the Jones family; there was no love lost in this relationship either. Tasmania felt that Nanny Lightfoot was mercenary, and overprotective of Anne. The Jones family in Tasmania blamed Elsie for Anne's hatred of her parents, whilst Elsie, Maud and Arthur thought the worst of all of them, and often said so.
Anne had other offers of help too. By early 1947 the Darquier family and Myrtle knew where Louis was, and Anne was again in touch with “Dear Daddy” from afar. Nothing of this had changed from her visit to Paris the year before, for Louise's attitude towards Louis' activities was always a mixture of private misery and public pride. Anne learned no truths about her father in Paris. With Elsie's encouragement, Anne's childhood melancholy—and fury—were still focused on Myrtle. Apart from instructing Anne in Catholicism, Louise had wanted to teach her granddaughter to sew, so she in turn could teach her own children. Anne refused, and said to Louise: “Bonne-Maman, I will never have children.”51
Anne still believed she had an aristocratic
father with money and hopes. One account has it that Louis offered to pay for her medical education on the proviso that she came to live in Madrid. As Louis was penniless at this time and, unknown to the Jones family, or to Anne or Myrtle, had a new baby to support, this may well have been a lie invented by Myrtle to ease her way into Anne's heart. This she failed to do. That her medical education was paid for by Myrtle's mother, at Myrtle's request, made no difference to Anne. She found Myrtle intolerable; Oxford entrance was her Holy Grail; 1946 marks Elsie's final victory over Myrtle, and the end of Myrtle's relationship with her daughter. It is clear from the fantasies about children which peppered her conversation that Myrtle never recovered; but then, neither did Anne.
And so in 1947 Myrtle, who had once told René “I love Louis and cannot imagine life without him,”52 left London and joined Louis in Spain. He dismissed his foufou—she was only a simple girl from the southwest, half his age and too “provincial.” For Louis, Geneviève could not compete with Myrtle, whom he always called his “Grande Dame.” Teresa, six months old, was despatched as Anne had been. In France, Louis had very occasionally admitted that Anne was his daughter, though he could not remember the year she was born; but with Teresa he was different: she had 100 percent French blood. Teresa's mother wanted to put her up for adoption, but Louis would not have it; she was farmed out to live with poor families, for payment, until Louis needed her to take care of him in old age. (Teresa's memory of her childhood is identical to that of Anne: abandonment, banishment and anguish, mixed with poverty and no running water.)
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