In the first instance she turned to the doctor with whom she underwent her full training analysis, Robert Hobson, and asked to be taken on again. He refused her, for reasons which were probably obscure even to him, but some of which he later revealed, if unwittingly. Such a refusal can be accepted practice. What is usually done under these circumstances is to transfer the doctor in need of help to another practitioner. This Hobson did not do. Anne went for help to another doctor, one with whom some of her contemporaries felt she was in love. So did he, and he rejected her too. By the summer of 1970 Anne Darquier was barely surviving, and the two members of her profession she had turned to for help had refused her.
Anne heard of Myrtle's death in late August. There is no explanation for this two-month delay, except perhaps the state of Anne's relations with Tasmania as well as with Madrid at this time. When I saw her on Friday, 4 September, the day after her fortieth birthday, Anne was distraught; she looked as though she had been weeping uncontrollably; at one point she had to leave the room. She had no alternative but to tell me she was in trouble, and she told me little enough. She had been to see her family— I knew she hated anything to do with them—and she was very angry. Did she visit Louis? I don't know, but it was on that occasion that she told me: “There are some things and some people you can never forgive.” I remember well how disturbed I was, but it did not occur to me then that a psychiatrist should not show such feelings to a patient. Now I realise that she would never have done so had she not been almost past help.
A few days later, on 7 September, I rang the doorbell of her flat as usual—we had arranged to meet at 8 a.m.—but there was no response. Later that day she was found dead on the floor in her bathroom. P. C. Champion, the policeman called to the scene, recorded that she was “lying on her left side between the back of the W.C. facing the wall. Near her right hand there was a glass. In the bedroom and lounge, in almost every drawer, there were tablets, loose and in bottles… the flat was not very tidy. She was wearing a night-dress and a watch.”39
It was not suicide, though there are slow ways of trying to kill yourself not given that label. She may have died as the result of a fall; one friend thought she had banged her head against the bath: she “was in the habit of taking something to help her sleep, along with a glass of whisky, and there was a gash on her head.” The coroner agreed. Anne's death was labelled accidental, but the amount and the mixture of barbiturates and alcohol in her body were poisonous.40
In her apartment, after her death, there was a cheque from Louis for £5,000, never cashed, “a small inheritance from her mother”—probably Myrtle's legacy from Lexie, Anne's now that Myrtle was dead. Louis said that he saw Anne again after her visit to Spain in the late 1940s; others think not. But perhaps she had flown to Madrid to see her father when she heard of Myrtle's death? Whoever she visited at the end of August 1970, within less than two weeks she was dead.
22
Dinosaurs
THIS WAS NOT THE end. Anne died without a will, and Louis inherited her worldly goods: £16,552.6s.0d, after tax. Elsie was devastated, all the more so because she was not family; the funeral arrangements passed into the hands of strangers. She and May went to Bow Street police station to find out what had happened to Anne. Elsie wanted some small memento, but the police officer said, “You're not kin. I can't do anything.” Elsie knew what could be expected of Louis: “He'll know she's died, he'll find out, and he'll come after her money, he always does.”1 Anne was cremated at Golders Green crematorium on 15 September 1970, and her ashes were scattered over Section 1A of the Garden of Remembrance. There was no service, but many people I have met subsequently were there, and so was I. Her coffin, placed in front of the curtains, awaiting descent to incineration, was labelled “Anne Darquier de Pellepoix.”
This was the first time I saw her name written thus, and it would not have been had Teresa not been living in Oxford. The police had contacted Louis in Spain; Teresa was the nearest relative as far as the authorities were concerned. Four years earlier Louis had devoted strenuous efforts to legitimising his second daughter; he “wanted her to have his name.” He called upon all his Francoist protectors to arrange it, so that he could bestow upon Teresa as many aristocratic appurtenances as he could translate into Spanish. This he did. His detailed researches proved, he said, that he was descended from a cadet branch of the Dukes of Gascony, so he added that too.
The husband of one of Anne's patients paid for her funeral, but Teresa made the arrangements, and so she buried her half sister with the name she never used, Anne Darquier de Pellepoix, and it was the strange addition of “de Pellepoix” which struck me at the time, and caught my eye again when I saw Louis shaking hands with Reinhard Heydrich in Marcel Ophuls' film Le Chagrin et la pitié a year or so later.
Teresa was seven months pregnant at the time of Anne's death; all she ever knew of her half sister was what she saw when she visited her flat to clear up her affairs. Robert Hobson drove her to the crematorium, and according to Teresa complained about Anne all the way there: she “thought he was awful.” Hobson's state of mind is understandable, as he had been called by the police to identify the body, and was the only witness at the inquest on 11 September. “I have known her as a friend and fellow doctor for about thirteen years,” he told the court. “Recently we have been working together on various cases. She had been suffering from depressed periods for some months. She was informed of her mother's death two weeks before she died.”2
Hobson and Anne's friends had been profoundly shocked by the state of Anne's flat. She had always been neat and tidy, but when she died it was a mess: clothes, dirty glasses, papers and pills all over the place, the flat of someone who had gone to pieces. She had probably had no sleep for weeks, for the drugs she mixed with alcohol were for severe and intractable insomnia.
Louis lived on. He buried Myrtle in the British Cemetery in Madrid, but wasted no more time or money on her after that. Her grave is a bare patch of earth in a charming cemetery full of the miscellanea of expatriate life. For Myrtle there is no tomb, no tombstone, nothing. You find her by consulting the cemetery register, where she is listed under almost all her names—Jones, Myrtle Morrison, Baronese d'Arquier de Pellapois (sic), Australian—lying in the block of earth number VIII, JI, and that is all. All around her are ornate and loving tombs; she is quite overshadowed by Jewish graves with Hebrew names and inscriptions in Yiddish and Spanish—Moses, Franckel, Mansberger, and many named Levy—put up by the descendants of these Jews who fled from Hitler and actually did escape over the Pyrénées. Stranger still, none of the Jones family who visited Madrid after Myrtle's death asked to see her unmarked patch of earth, or ordered even the smallest cross for their baroness sister.
Myrtle Jones married under a false name, then married again, probably bigamously. She spent her life with a man whose clamorous existence required her to abandon her daughter, but the Jones family heroically accepted her explanations and did what they could to fill the breach. She married a man who hated Jews, communists and Freemasons, though her father Harry Jones was a Mason, and her brother Vernon was Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Tasmania. Yet Louis was fond of the Jones family, and they thought the world of him. In some ways, their aspirations were similar. This is demonstrated by remarks made when Vernon Jones was appointed headmaster of Launceston Church Grammar School. There were those in Tasmania who were “shocked and upset” because they “wanted the son of a gentleman for headmaster and he did not fit into that category.”3
The upward climb of the Jones family and their insistence upon respectability is as marked as the worm of incorrigibility which continues through the family to this day. Olive Jones married an accountant, Tom Room, who, appointed mayor of Launceston in 1975, raised her to the position of lady mayoress. In 1989, after the longest criminal trial in Tasmanian legal history, Myrtle's nephew, Olive's flamboyant son Colin Room, an accountant and investment adviser—“handsome, sophisticated” with “an easy charm,�
� “born into the Launceston Establishment”— was convicted on 193 charges of forgery and stealing nearly A$2 million from his clients. Colin Room equalled his aunt as a fabulist: “He used aliases” (five in all), explaining, “I invented those things to assist my clients.”4
To Myrtle's siblings, her life was a tremendous success. “In their eyes, Myrtle is a much-loved sister who travelled overseas, married an Englishman, then a Frenchman and then had a child. She had an interesting life, met some wonderful people, had a handsome husband who absolutely adored her, who could possibly be interested in that?”5
Louis said he was upset by Anne's death, though one of Myrtle's pallbearers commented, “Nobody, it seems, survives Darquier.” But when Myrtle died, “his mood changed completely, he became sad, taciturn.”6 He was almost as domestically incapable as Myrtle, and he and the flat became equally decrepit. In 1972 he made another tentative attempt through an intermediary at the Red Cross to return to France, to visit “his sick brother,” asking for sympathetic consideration because of the loss of a wife and daughter in such a short period of time. He received no reply.
Marcel Ophuls' documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié was released into cinemas in March 1971. Its genius was not in any condemnation of French collaboration during the Vichy years, but in its realistic portrait of what that collaboration had actually consisted of. Still a remarkable documentary, its account of the German Occupation and French collaboration—or otherwise—in one French provincial town broke a taboo. Some of the stories it revealed were shameful, some heroic, but for the first time, men who had belonged to Louis' world of the ultra-right—most of them at that time languishing in Madrid or Buenos Aires—were not excluded. Le Chagrin et la pitié reminded the French people of what had actually happened. It said, “This is what we did, this is what we were.” It broke box office records in France, but was not permitted to be shown on television until 1981.
This was unimportant, because the film began an intense national debate in France about its “Dark Years,” which thereafter never ceased. In Britain I saw it by chance on the BBC in 1972, with English subtitles. Louis Darquier could have seen the same broadcast, because in that year he came to stay with Teresa and her family in Rayner's Lane, Harrow. No longer a French citizen, he could only come on a special Spanish passport, for one visit only. British officials came to the house to interrogate him, but at the age of seventy-five he was evidently considered harmless.
Louis was not happy in England, “stuck in a little suburban house in Harrow where he knew no one and had nothing.” He was not interested in grandchildren, who would anyway have only 50 percent French blood. He returned to his tower block in Madrid, and in 1976, using £3,000 of Anne's money, bought the apartment outright, the first home he had ever owned.7
Louis was beginning to outlive everyone. Jean, his favourite brother, was the next to go. Interviewed in the 1960s, Jean remained as unrepentant as Louis, complaining about the “Jewish occupation” of St.-Tropez. There he died in 1975, and was brought to Cahors to be buried in the family tomb. An old friend attempted to have him buried with some honour, and was rebuffed. Jean, he was told, was “un salaud et un collabo,” a shit and a collaborator.8
Franco also died in 1975, and within a year the structure of Louis' life collapsed. The one country in which his vision of the world had flourished so thoroughly for so long changed abruptly and entirely. Franco's Spain was swiftly dismantled: by 1977 the country was a democracy, with an elected parliament, a legal Communist Party, and all those liberal attributes of life that were anathema to Louis Darquier. He was still doing some work for the Ministry of Tourism, but he was nearly eighty and in such a bad way that when he was threatened with a public ward, Teresa and her husband returned to look after him. This was the first time in her life she actually lived for any length of time with her father.
The signs of life Louis had made after his amnesty were probably a mistake. In France, news that he was living openly in Spain provoked protests from LICA (now LICRA) and Jewish institutions. “Someone, a French voice, phoned to abuse me,” Louis recounted later. “ ‘Bastard. We're coming to get you. ’ I was afraid. Not only for me. For my family. I immediately called upon my military friends to ask for their special protection. They immediately gave it.”9
The first book published in France which detailed the actions and responsibilities of Darquier, Bousquet, Galien, Antignac and hundreds of others inside and outside the CGQ J, Le Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives, by Joseph Billig, was published in three volumes in France between 1955 and 1960, but almost no one took any notice of it. The truths it exposed about Bousquet were ignored for over twenty years. But historians read it, and Louis' name appeared occasionally in many books and newspapers over the years. Because of this he developed a new tic, another bugbear, garnered from the voracious reading of French books and media—all the Madrid exiles avidly followed French affairs.
On 8 May 1967 an article appeared in l'Express about the Vel' d'Hiv' round-up, and Louis' part in it, with no mention of Bousquet or his deputy Leguay.10 In 1972 a second article appeared, more detailed, more condemnatory: Vallat was mentioned with Darquier, but still no Bousquet, no Leguay. L'Express, the first French U.S.-style newsmagazine, was founded in 1953 by Françoise Giroud and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber; in Madrid Louis would hiss with rage about l'Express's coverage of his wartime activities. He said he had prevented the deportation of ServanSchreiber's mother: “I saved her life.”11
His attempts to return to France were always reported in French newspapers; sometimes they called him “Antoine,” but whenever his name was mentioned his crimes were referred to, and the adjectives used about him were always worse than derogatory. In Madrid, he would furiously deny that he had anything to do with the round-up of Jews or their deaths in Auschwitz, and “got very angry when he was accused of things he said he hadn't done…very angry indeed.” He hadn't gassed anyone— he said this always—his signature could not be found on any documents. He also said, again and again, that the Jews were sent to labour camps; no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz; the ovens were used to get rid of lice.12
In 1972, after its second description of his wartime activities, Louis gave an interview to the Madrid correspondent of Le Monde: “Pure invention… absolute lies. It is not true that I took part in the expulsion of foreign Jews from France …”13 Despised or ignored, over thirty years of this had made him an even angrier man. “I WAS NOT A NAZI!” he would yell, “I WAS A NATIONAL SOCIALIST!”
“He loved France, he didn't think France condemned him for what he had done, he thought it was the fault of the people in power in France, not his France.”14 He saw himself as wronged, ignoring, to take only one instance, his conversation with the UGIF leader he sent to his death, Raymond-Raoul Lambert, to whom in 1942 he had vented his frustration about Laval and Bousquet's refusal to allow him to participate in the deportations, or his speech in the 1930s which concluded with the words: “The Jewish question must be solved urgently. Either the Jews must be expelled, or they must be massacred.”15
Louis was particularly scornful when his “Australian career” was referred to. He would spot any regurgitated lie which appeared in newspaper articles about his past, and use it to dismiss everything written about him as vicious inventions; he seems to have forgotten that he had fabricated these lies himself.
Worst of all, he, the man who had wanted to expel every Jew from France, was repeatedly refused permission to return there himself. And so, in the wake of Franco's death and the disappearance of all he believed in, Louis Darquier decided to tell the world, by way of the investigative journalist Philippe Ganier-Raymond,16 in l'Express magazine, that he still existed, that he had done nothing wrong, and what he had done, he did not regret.
The interview he gave, published in 1978, triggered l'affaire Darquier, a tempest of outrage in France, a national scandal. Afterwards Ganier-Raymond was much attacked over the ethics of the interview. There are variou
s versions as to how he managed it, but many people still alive to tell the truth of it.
Ganier-Raymond covered Franco's death in Madrid. In the same year, 1975, he published a book about French anti-Semitism during the Occupation, a selection of writings of the time; the book opened with one of Louis Darquier's anti-Semitic tracts, and included others. In Madrid Ganier-Raymond found Darquier's name in the phone book, and “couldn't believe his eyes.” He rang Louis, who answered the phone; Ganier-Raymond abused him thoroughly, and hung up—it must have been after this call that Louis demanded, and got, protection from his “military friends.”17 When he got back to Paris, Ganier-Raymond called Serge Klarsfeld, the French attorney who, with his German wife Beate, has brought so many Nazi war criminals to justice. Klarsfeld was discouraging: “In your place, I would do nothing at all, France shouldn't be rushed into something like this.”18 Before l'affaire Darquier it was German war criminals who were pursued, never the French.
Ganier-Raymond was one of those investigative journalists who smoke two cigarettes at once; bohemian, disordered, politically passionate, he was obsessed with the French holocaust. The next time he went to Madrid, three years later, on a story for Paris-Match, he asked a fellow Frenchman, Jean Michel Bamberger, to arrange an interview with Louis Darquier. Bamberger was a freelance journalist familiar with right-wing circles in Madrid; everyone thought he worked for French intelligence. At first Louis said no; then Bamberger used one of his contacts and, on the basis that he was to be interviewed by a French historian—Ganier-Raymond had already published five books—Louis agreed. Bamberger admitted that it was a contact of Jeanne Degrelle who acted as intermediary; Ganier-Raymond said it was a former member of the Waffen SS: there were dozens of such men in Madrid.19
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