When I asked about Louis Aragon's mother in Cahors, one old woman said that Aragon must have been a Jew: “All people with the names of a town in France are Jewish. She must have been Jewish otherwise she would not have needed to hide.”
As Louis Darquier married Myrtle Jones and sailed to Australia in 1928, Louis Aragon met Elsa Triolet, the writer and sister-in-law of the Russian poet and dramatist Vladimir Mayakovsky. He married her a decade later; she died two days before Myrtle Darquier, on 16 June 1970. Aragon died in 1982.
The poem was published in Les Lettres françaises,no. 43, 17 February 1945, while Pétain and company were still in Sigmaringen.
Où est ma cinquième colonne
Seigneur Bergery m'abandonne
J'ai ni Morand ni Chardonne
J'ai vu mourir mon Bichelonne
Où sont mes sbires d'autrefois
C'est déjà la fin de la farce
Où ma garde s'est-elle éparse
Ma cour de nervis et de garces
Où sont dispersés mes comparses
Où est Darquier de Pellepoix
Qui noircira mes paperasses
Hélas Massis Hélas Maurras
Tous mes beaux encriers s'encrassent
Drieu n'a pas laissé de traces
Ajalbert a fui dans les bois
Céline est caché sous les cendres
Lesdain si doux Béraud si tendre
Laubreaux toujours prêt à se vendre
Où sont-ils Va-t-on me les rendre
Où est Darquier de Pellepoix
Quoi la combine n'est plus bonne
Paul Chack Platon Chiappe Carbone
Bony le colonel Labonne
Philippe Henriot Plus personne
Où est Bonnard ma fleur des pois
Où sont Taittinger Renaitour
ô Lagardelle ô mes amours
Quand donc reviendront les beaux jours
Et de Montoire et d'Oradour
Où est Darquier de Pellepoix
Qu'Hitler qui me juge et me voit
Réponde à ce vieillard sans voix
Jusqu'ici fidèle à sa voie
Dans les fourgons de ses convois
Qui vers la honte s'échelonnent
J'ai mis ma confiance en toi
Où sont-ils mes tireurs des toits
Mes panthères et mes putois
Tous mes Darquier de Pellepoix
Où est ma cinquième colonne
“Les Neiges de Sigmaringen” by Louis Aragon
(L'Oeuvre Poétique: Tome IV, 1942–1952. Quelques Poèmes Inédits.
Livre Club Diderot)
Where is my fifth column?
Noble Bergery has abandoned me
I am without both Morand and Chardonne
I have seen Bichelonne die
Where are my henchmen of yesteryear?
It's already the end of the farce.
Where has my guard dispersed? My court of bully boys and bitches
Where have my stooges disappeared?
Where is Darquier de Pellepoix?
Who will write my wretched papers?
Alas Massis Alas Maurras
All my lovely inkwells are clogging up
Drieu has vanished without a trace
Ajalbert has fled to the woods
Céline is hidden under the ashes
Gentle Lesdain affectionate Béraud
Laubreaux ever ready to name his price
Where are they, will they ever be returned to me?
Where is Darquier de Pellepoix?
What, is the game really up?
Paul Chack, Platon, Chiappe,Carbone,
Bony, Colonel Labonne,
Philippe Henriot have all gone
Where is Bonnard, the best of the bunch?
Where are Taittinger, Renaitour
And Lagardelle? Oh my beloved ones
When will the good old days return?
The days of Montoire and Oradour
Where is Darquier de Pellepoix?
Let Hitler be my witness and my judge
And answer this silenced old man
Who has kept his pledge
In the trucks of the convoys
Heading away to shame
I placed my trust in you Where are my rooftop snipers? My panthers and howling cats All my Darquier de Pellepoix Where is my fifth column?
Translation by David Holland © Carmen Callil
Appendix III
Louis Darquier's Baronial Inventions
TRAWLING THROUGH HUNDREDS OF old documents of the French state and the French Church was all that was required to trace Louis Darquier's real ancestors, who in the end turned out to be much the same as those of Myrtle Jones.
The noble Darquier seigneurs came from Toulouse, and were ennobled for their role as magistrates in that city. The first aristocratic Darquier Louis claimed as his own, the great astronomer Antoine Darquier (1718–1802), died unmarried at eighty-four, a wonderful age for the time, and left everything to his twin sister and her son. Everything included his family estate at Beaumont-sur-Lèze to the south of Toulouse, in which commune is situated the modest Domaine of Pellepoix. It was sensible of Louis Darquier to use the title of de Pellepoix, because no other Darquiers except the astronomer seem ever to have done so.
The family seat of the Darquiers was in Beaumont-de-Lomagne in the Tarn-et-Garonne, many miles distant from Antoine's seat at Pellepoix. The astronomer's grandfather Ennemond Darquier of Beaumont-de-Lomagne was ennobled in the seventeenth century, and acquired the small château of Pellepoix at that time. It is possible that some ancestor of Louis' real great-great-grandfather Antoine, the baker of Tournan, could have been the grandchild or great-grandchild of a by-blow of Ennemond, but at that point we are in the realm of Adam and Eve, and all of us are aristocrats.
Antoine Darquier de Pellepoix, the astronomer, was the first cousin thrice, or even four times, removed of the Darquier baron who was Louis' second choice as a distinguished ancestor. Baron François Isidore Darquier, great-great-grandson of Ennemond, as a baron d'empire was not an aristocrat of the ancien régime. He became a commander of the Imperial Guard, fought and died in the Peninsular Wars in 1812, and was ennobled by Napoleon for his efforts. His son Joseph Isidore Darquier was born in Phalsbourg in the Moselle, far from the Lot, in 1802.He became in turn an excellent soldier, and the second Baron Darquier, and was much decorated and honoured throughout his military career. Like Antoine the astronomer he remained unmarried, and he died on 20 March 1863.
Bernard Avril, Louis Darquier's real great-great-grandfather, born in Martel in 1761, was one of seven children of a wealthy Martel merchant who destined his second son for the priesthood. When Bernard became a priest he did so in revolutionary times, and presumably adapted his habits to political circumstances. Certainly the new French republic carefully recorded his arrangements with his common-law wife, the four children they had between 1796 and 1804, and their respective marriages and descendants. Father Bernard Avril lived and died with the spinster Marie Anne Fazillot, sometimes misspelt Fagillaud, Fagilles, Fazille, Fazilhot, Fazillaud—she could not write—and their four living children were all, necessarily, illegitimate, but legally acknowledged by their father the priest. A decade later, after Father Bernard and his Marie Anne had died within a year of each other in the same house in Martel, Marie Anne bequeathed her children only a hat and coat stand worth forty francs—all she had in the world; the same inheritance their daughter Marguerite was to pass on, in her turn, to her son the tax collector.
Pierre Darquier was doubly related to Father Bernard Avril, because Eugénie's great-grandmother was Elizabeth Avril, sister to the priest. Jean Joseph Darquier, the gendarme and true husband of Marguerite Avril, died on 3 March 1841, leaving behind an affecting testament to his wife Marguerite, who was to outlive him until 1 February 1865. It is therefore possible that Marguerite of the small town of Martel in the Lot encountered Baron Joseph Isidore and had an illegitimate child by him af
ter her husband's death, but Baron Joseph Isidore spent most of his life, minutely chronicled in his military records, in French barracks nowhere near the Lot, or at war abroad. Joseph Isidore is a bachelor in every official file; there is no mention of wives or children in any documents relating to him, only to a niece in Toulouse.
In his military file in Vincennes Joseph Isidore is listed as a bachelor; thus, if he ever married, the military authorities of this distinguished soldier and baron knew nothing of it, which makes it certain that he died a bachelor. Even if he broke the habit of a lifetime and took up with Marguerite Avril after the death of her husband, Baron Joseph Isidore Darquier was not related to Louis Darquier, whose great-grandfather was Marguerite's husband the gendarme.
These tortuous threads had to be unravelled because in the municipal library of Toulouse the genealogical expert who traced the Darquier family for me found La France moderne, Haute-Garonne et Ariège: dictionnaire généalogique des familles nobles et bourgeoises, written by Jules Villain, published in two volumes from 1911 to 1913. There is also a copy of this edition of the book in the diocesan library in Cahors. In the Toulouse library copy someone has circled the marriage of Baron Joseph Isidore Darquier to Marguerite Avril. In the academic year of 1914–15, which began a month after the outbreak of the First World War, Louis Darquier began his studies at the University of Toulouse. The faculty where he studied is only three streets away from rue Darquier, named after, and housing the home of, Antoine the astronomer at number 8, suitably adorned today with a plaque. One can but speculate that Louis Darquier took up the astronomer as his ancestor at this point, that he investigated putative aristocratic Darquiers in the library, found Villain's book and circled the fictitious marriage of his great-grandmother to the unfortunate Baron Joseph Isidore, so adding a second name to his pretensions.
The well-named Villain made a mistake, or perhaps he was paid to do so. In 1913 Pierre Darquier was made a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur for his work as mayor of Cahors, and was also elected as a councillor of the Lot. It is possible that Pierre paid Villain to publish false information about his grandmother, obliterating his policeman grandfather and replacing him with Baron Joseph Isidore, in an attempt to get rid of his ancestral priest.
A distant relative of Louis Darquier in Cahors disclosed that her grandfather, a close friend of Pierre Darquier, had given false family information to a noted Lotois genealogist of the time, for “At the end of the nineteenth century, genealogy became a disease… people did everything to discover a noble ancestor: they paid genealogists to find a noble with the same name as themselves…and they suppressed ancestry that did not suit them.” Someone in the Darquier family—Louise?—Eugénie?— was sufficiently infected with the genealogical virus to hang a print of Antoine Darquier the astronomer in the family home, and to have to hand the family crest of the noble Darquiers. It is not altogether impossible that Louise favoured such things, and paid Villain to make his mischief and obliterate her husband's true descent from his priestly ancestor. However, though the ascent of Pierre and Louise Darquier to the highest ranks of Cahors society was only recent, both of them were heard to disown Louis' assumed baronetcy of Pellepoix with vigour.
What is more likely is that it was Eugénie, the widow of Jean Darquier the tax collector—who lived long after him—who paid to falsify Villain's records. Louis Darquier's grandparents were the first to acquire bourgeois wealth: Jean was the grandson of the priest, and Eugénie his great-great niece. What was acceptable for the poor and provincial in the eighteenth century was out of the question for bourgeois French Catholics at the end of the nineteenth.
Later, in Spain, Louis added a third string to his bow with a cadet branch, Ennemond Darquier of Beaumont-de-Lomagne. This was étienne d'Arquier, Seigneur of Saint-Estève, ennobled in 1655, whose eldest son was named Louis, and whose youngest daughter was named Anne.
To complicate matters already complex, not only did Villain marry Baron Joseph Isidore Darquier to Marguerite Avril, he also gave them a son called Pierre, born on 18 October 1839 in Martel. At that time Marguerite's real husband, the gendarme, was still alive, she had a year-old baby, Henri, and had already given birth to her other three sons: Jean, Louis' grandfather; Guillaume the shoemaker; and the soldier Pierre, born in Martel in 1829, not 1839. Louis would have done well to use this real great-uncle Pierre for his aristocratic assumptions, because he actually could have provided his great-nephew with something to boast about.
This Pierre Darquier, Jean the tax collector's brother, godfather and uncle to Louis' father, was born on 18 October 1829 to Marguerite and her policeman, and his godmother was his grandmother, Marie Anne Fazillot, common-law wife of the priest. He entered the army as an ordinary soldier, but rose through the ranks to corporal, sergeant major, lieutenant and captain, and led his men in distinguished campaigns in Rome, Mexico and in the Franco-Prussian war. He was much decorated and became an officer of the Légion d'honneur, a higher grade than the chevalier achieved by his nephew and godson Pierre, and his military service was far more adventurous than that of Baron Joseph Isidore Darquier. Pierre Darquier the distinguished soldier died only six months before his godson married Louise Laytou.
“The great recipe for success is to work, and to work always,” was a noted saying of the great man of Cahors, Léon Gambetta. Unless his work was with words, writing them, bellowing them, translating them, crowding them onto his bulletins and newspapers, Louis Darquier was allergic to work for most of his life. Reading one erroneous genealogical tome is light work; he did not bother to trace his real ancestors, worthy or otherwise, but instead purloined the baron, the astronomer and the seigneur.
Acknowledgements
The research for this book has taken me many years. I began knowing almost nothing and by the time I had finished I had travelled the world and had learned, perhaps, more than I cared to know. In that way, working on this project has been exactly like starting the book publishing company I founded in the 1970s, Virago Press. I began on my own, but within a year or two I was surrounded by remarkable young people who took on the project with a passion equal to mine. This time, again, many have helped me, but there is one person without whom this book could not have been written, a young French researcher, Sylvie Deroche.
In a sense I am something of a child of the French, as well as the British Empire—one pair of my grandparents emigrated to Australia from the Lebanon in the 1881. I was brought up hearing French spoken. I remember my parents wearing the cross of Lorraine during the Second World War. Although my childhood was quintessentially Australian, nothing French seemed foreign to me. That said, the complexities of this period of French history, and access to so many institutions, libraries and government departments, could not have been so easily achieved without French assistance. This Sylvie Deroche provided. But more than that, during our years on the trail, she mounted guard, and sustained me with almost daily support, amusement, and information. We became Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson—on occasion alternating roles. In our pursuit—sometimes together, often apart—we spent days and weeks in European archives; we interviewed hundreds of citizens and subjects of France, Spain and Belgium. My heartfelt gratitude goes first to her.
A younger generation of the Darquier family talked to me at length and over many years. I am especially grateful for the patience and tolerance extended to me by Anne's half sister in Spain. The cooperation of René's children, two of whom talked to and corresponded with me (I was unable to meet the third), was equally indispensable. I am deeply grateful to them for the information they gave me, the errors they corrected, for reading the final manuscript with forbearance and understanding, and for their kindness throughout.
May Brice, with whom Anne Darquier spent so many of her younger years, had one son, Alistair Rapley, Anne's godson. As the great-nephew also of Elsie and Maud Lightfoot, he provided me with invaluable information and with tireless support. Alistair Rapley opened up his family files to me and o
ften accompanied me on research and interview trips to Great Tew and Oxfordshire. In London, many of Anne's friends, doctors and otherwise—those who studied with her and those who worked with her and some of her pupils and patients—allowed me to talk to them about Anne time and again. Amongst those doctors my greatest debt is to Griffith Edwards and Mary Coghlan, who continued to help me as the years rolled by, and who read and commented on my final manuscript.
I had other exceptional pieces of good fortune. In Cahors, a woman overheard me asking about the Darquier family when I was in the Archives Diocésaines. This was Paulette Aupoix. She approached me, told me she was distantly related to the Darquiers and gave me family letters and photographs going back to the eighteenth century. I am greatly in debt to her and to Simone Reste, who had worked for Louise Darquier over many years. Both these women of the Lot aided me in more ways than I can enumerate. I am indebted to Jacques Marques of Cahors for expert genealogical research and to the enthusiastic research assistance of Pierre Wolf. I benefited in particular from an exchange of ideas and from the information supplied by Laurent Joly, French historian of Vichy France and author of a biography of Xavier Vallat and a study of Darquier de Pellepoix and French anti-Semitism.
In Australia, when I went to the house where Myrtle was born, the beautiful Freshwater Point which slopes down to the Tamar River, a Jones relation followed me down to the riverbank and told me I was asking about his family. Myrtle was an inveterate letter writer, and kept in touch with her Tasmanian family throughout her life. Myrtle's remaining sisters held many of the secrets about Myrtle and Louis' life in Tasmania and in Europe, in the correspondence she kept up with them and all her family there. This correspondence was not made available to me. Anyone who lives in these decades of tabloid journalism will be sympathetic to the position of Anne's elderly Tasmanian relatives, and I am. I am grateful therefore to the younger generation of Joneses, who knew little or noth ing about their great-aunt's story, for what information they felt they could give me.
Bad Faith Page 56