by Valpy, Fiona
It seems that, in a new language and in a city where I am naturally an outsider, I find it easier to be myself. Perhaps, here in Paris, I can begin to become the person I want to be, enjoying the liberation that a new start brings.
Then another thought occurs to me: perhaps that is exactly what Claire felt too, all those years ago.
1940
The atelier closed early on Christmas Eve once the final few clients had been received in the salon, coming to collect last-minute commissions which were needed for the soirées and events of the festive season.
Mademoiselle Vannier even managed a tight-lipped smile as she handed out the wage packets to the seamstresses. ‘Monsieur Delavigne has asked me to tell you that he is pleased with your work. It has been one of our most successful seasons yet, so he has, most generously, asked me to give each of you a small additional consideration in recognition of your efforts and your loyalty.’
The girls exchanged sidelong glances. It was common knowledge that one of the vendeuses had left the salon only a week ago, taking with her her team of assistants and her little black book with the measurements and contact details of all of her clients. Rumour had it that she had been poached by one of the other couture houses, and one of the seamstresses had even dared to murmur that a certain ‘Coco’, who had cultivated particular links with the German occupiers, was known to be on the lookout for staff now that her business was doing so especially well.
The seamstresses chattered excitedly as they hung up their white coats and pulled on scarves and gloves. Claire glanced at them enviously as she thrust her pay packet into the pocket of her skirt; most of them had homes to go to and families to share tonight’s Réveillon de Noël dinner with, no matter how frugal a feast it might prove to be this year, staying up to see in Christmas Day together. She, on the other hand, had only her three companions in the upstairs apartment and an unappetising menu of vegetable soup – which tasted mostly of turnips – and some dry bread to look forward to.
In her chilly room upstairs, she took the money from her pay packet, carefully counting out what she would need for the coming week and stowing the rest away safely in the tin that she kept under her mattress. The pile of banknotes – her life savings and her passport to the life she longed for – was growing slowly but steadily.
Then, from the drawer next to her bed, she took a small package wrapped in brown paper, and went down the corridor to tap on the door of Mireille’s bedroom. There was no answer, though, and when she knocked again a little harder the door swung open to reveal only the neatly made bed where Mireille’s sewing things lay in a small pile, hastily discarded.
Claire glanced around. Mireille’s outdoor coat, which usually hung on the back of the door, was missing. She must have gone straight out again to meet whoever it was she usually met and to do whatever it was she usually did. Even on Christmas Eve. So it was clearly far more important to her than spending time with her friends. Claire sighed and hesitated, then placed the brown paper package on Mireille’s pillow and turned to go, carefully pulling the door closed behind her.
Her two other flatmates arrived then, laughing and gossiping. When they caught sight of Claire they stopped. ‘Why so despondent? Has Mireille deserted you? Don’t tell us you’re all alone for le Réveillon?’ They glanced at one another and nodded. ‘Come on, Claire, we can’t leave you here. Join us! We’re going out to find some fun. Put your dancing shoes on and come along! You’ll never meet anyone, sitting mouldering up here in the attic.’
And so it was that Claire, after just a moment’s hesitation, pulled the tin out from beneath her mattress again, prised open the lid, drew out some of her carefully saved wages and found herself being swept along the pavement of the Rue de Rivoli in a tide of merrymakers, who scarcely noticed the red, white and black flags that stirred against the starlit sky in the bitter wind that blustered and eddied down the broad boulevard.
Mireille hurried through the narrow streets of the Marais and paused in front of a shop window, as she’d been trained to do, making sure no one was following her. The white sign attached to the door stood out starkly against the lowered blackout blinds: Under New Management, it declared, By Order Of The Administration. These notices were appearing more and more frequently in shop doors and windows, especially in this quartier of the city. They were businesses which had formerly been owned by Jewish shopkeepers. But now their owners had gone – whole families turned out from their homes and sent to deportation camps elsewhere in the city’s suburbs before being transported onwards to God-only-knew-where. The businesses had been appropriated by the authorities and ‘reallocated’, usually to collaborators or to those who had earned the approval of the administration by denouncing their neighbours, or betraying their former employers who used to be the owners of shops like this one.
Ducking her head to lean into the northerly wind, Mireille turned down a small side street and tapped on the door of the safe house. Three quick, quiet taps. Then a pause and two more. The door opened a few inches and she slipped inside.
Monsieur and Madame Arnaud – she had no idea whether that was their real name – had been some of the original members of the network that she’d been put in touch with by the dyer, and this wasn’t the first time she’d been sent to their house to drop off or pick up a ‘friend’ who needed a safe place for a night or two, or to be accompanied across the city and delivered safely into the hands of the next passeur in the network. She was aware that there were other groups operating in the city, helping those in need to pass beneath the noses of the occupying army and be spirited away to safety. Once, in a last-minute change of plans, she’d been asked to accompany a young man to catch a train from the Gare Saint-Lazare, so she knew some people must be getting out via Brittany. But more often her rendezvous point would be at Issy or Billancourt, or out towards Versailles, and the distinctive twang of a south-west accent on the lips of the next link in the chain would reassure her that her latest ‘friend’ was being passed into good hands in order to make the long and arduous journey to freedom across the Pyrenees. She often wondered whether their route would take them anywhere near her home.
Tonight, especially, she felt a pang of longing for her family, picturing them in the mill house on the river beneath this same star-frosted sky. Her mother would be in the kitchen, preparing a special Christmas Eve supper from whatever supplies she had managed to gather together. Perhaps her sister, Eliane, would be sitting there too, in the warmth of the old iron range, bouncing baby Blanche on her knee. Her father and brother would step through the door, back from delivering the last few sacks of flour to the local shops and bakeries, and her father would scoop up Blanche and swing her round, making her chortle and clap her chubby hands together.
Mireille swallowed the lump of homesickness that had hardened in her throat at this image. How she missed them all. She would have given anything to be there in the kitchen, sharing a frugal meal richly seasoned with love. And afterwards, lying in her bed in the room that she and Eliane shared, they would exchange whispered secrets. How she longed to have someone to confide in.
But that was a luxury that she couldn’t afford. She forced herself to set aside her thoughts of home and focus instead on her instructions for tonight’s task.
Under cover of the Christmas Eve revelries, which would hopefully be providing a welcome distraction to those soldiers unfortunate enough to have been assigned guard duties over the festive period, Madame Arnaud explained that Mireille was to accompany a man to the Pont de Sèvres, where they would be met by Christiane, a passeuse with whom Mireille had worked before, and she would take him to the next safe house along the route.
‘But you will need to work fast tonight, Mireille,’ Madame Arnaud cautioned. ‘The Métro will be crowded, with few trains running, and you must rendezvous with Christiane in time to get yourself back home before the curfew. Even at Christmas, it would not be wise to be picked up by the Germans.’
Mireille nodded. S
he understood the risks all too well. She had been warned that if she was picked up and questioned, she should try not to divulge any information for the first twenty-four hours to give the others in the network time to cover their tracks and disperse. But she was also aware of some of the torture methods that the Nazis employed to try to get that information out of any suspected members of the Resistance and an unspoken fear was lodged deep within her. If it came to it, would she have the strength to endure such treatment?
None of that bore thinking about right now, though; she needed to concentrate fully on the task in hand. Even the slightest fear or distraction might give them away or mean that she forgot to keep up her guard at some crucial moment. One never knew what would be encountered en route to get her ‘friend’ safely to his destination.
‘Level of French?’ she asked Madame Arnaud, referring to the stranger for whom she was about to risk her life.
Madame Arnaud shook her head. ‘Almost none, and an accent so terrible it would give him away in an instant. One further complication – he’s injured his foot. So you’ll need to give him some support if you have to walk any distance.’
A bad landing during a parachute jump, perhaps, Mireille thought. This wouldn’t be the first foreign airman she had helped to escape. Or maybe this man had just had a long, terrifying journey fleeing in fear of his life because of his religion. Or his politics. Or simply because of some petty feud with a neighbour which had led to a bitter denunciation. Who knew? She didn’t ask, because if she happened to be caught then the less she knew, the better.
The man appeared from a room towards the back of the house, dressed in a thick overcoat. He was limping and Monsieur Arnaud, who followed him, reached out a helping hand to support the man’s elbow as he came down the two steps from the hallway to the entrance where Mireille stood waiting. The man’s skin had a greyish tinge and, although he tried to hide it, she saw that he winced in pain as he stepped down on to his injured foot. Monsieur Arnaud handed him a homburg hat. And Mireille couldn’t help noticing that the hat was grey and that it had a green band, just like the one worn by the man who had dropped off the newspaper on what had felt like her first proper assignment, that day when she’d first met Monsieur Leroux.
‘Come,’ she whispered in English. ‘We must be going.’
The man nodded and then turned to Madame Arnaud, clasping both her hands in his. ‘Merci, madam, a thousand thanks, you are so very gentille . . .’ He stumbled over the words, and the flattened vowels of his English accent made both women wince.
One thing was certain: she would have to do the talking if they were stopped and asked for their papers. She’d been briefed on his false identity and she knew he’d have an ID card tucked into the pocket of his coat, procured from who-knows-where, to match her story.
As they walked arm in arm through the Marais, looking like a young couple out for a few drinks to celebrate le Réveillon, she tried to make it look natural, as if he were supporting her rather than the other way around. She planned her route. She would need to try to use the Métro as far as possible to minimise his walking. At the same time, she knew she would need to avoid the busier stations like the one at the Place de la Bastille, which would be mobbed and would be more likely to have guards on duty checking papers.
She guided the man through the streets, making the occasional encouraging remark to him although she had no idea how much of what she said he could understand. But as they approached the Saint-Paul Métro station, she was horrified to see two German guards standing outside the entrance. They had stopped a man and were shouting at him to hand over his papers as he fumbled in his attaché case trying to find them.
Thinking fast, Mireille steered her ‘friend’ on to the Rue de Rivoli. It would be better to mingle with the pleasure-seeking crowds and move on to another stop on the Métro. They were jostled and pushed by a sea of merrymakers and the man gasped as someone stumbled into him, the pain making his leg almost give way.
‘Hold on to me tightly,’ Mireille muttered in his ear, wrapping an arm around his waist. With any luck he would just look like another party-goer who had drunk too much Ricard, whose girlfriend was trying to get him home to bed. They staggered along like that for some way, past the Hôtel de Ville where yet more Nazis were checking papers. By now the man was sweating with the pain from his injured foot and Mireille was struggling to help him stay upright. They would just have to risk it at Châtelet, even though it was one of the busiest stations on the line. Les Halles, the wholesale market which ran close to the Métro station, was known as a hotspot for black market activity, although this usually meant that the Germans were more likely to be shopping there than checking papers. She sent up a silent prayer to anyone who might be listening that, on Christmas Eve, the soldiers would be more interested in laying their hands on a little extra steak or a few oysters than on stopping an exhausted couple who were wending their weary way home, so obviously the worse for wear.
They slipped, unnoticed, past a group of noisy soldiers who were too busy whistling and cat-calling at a group of girls dressed up for a night out on the town to pay attention to anything else. When shouting broke out and a whistle blew shrilly, Mireille almost froze in panic, but she forced herself to keep on moving, leading the man towards the staircase which led down to the platforms. Allowing herself one quick backward glance she saw that, thankfully, the target of the police’s attention was a pickpocket. In the confusion, she imagined that she heard someone calling her name, but in that crowd it could have been aimed at anyone and so she kept going, conscious of the man’s gasps of pain at each downward step.
In the dim light on the platform, his face looked greyer than ever and she was worried that he might be about to pass out. If he did, it would make them the centre of everyone’s attention and that was the last thing they wanted. She glanced up at him anxiously and he smiled at her. She smiled back, reassured. They would make it. She could see he was a fighter, this man, determined to keep going. He would do whatever it took to escape. The worst was over now. She calculated the journey . . . They just had to get on to the next train to come along, and then change to line nine, as long as the station at Rond-Point was open tonight, which would take them all the way to the Pont de Sèvres . . .
At last, a train rattled into the station and a flood of passengers got off. With grim determination, Mireille elbowed her way on, pulling the man behind her and then pushing him on to one of the double banquettes. As the doors closed and the train pulled away from the platform, the man next to her closed his eyes and rested against her, breathing a quiet sigh of relief.
Above ground, in the crowds that milled around the bars and restaurants of Les Halles, Claire stood stock still for a moment. Was that really Mireille she had just seen, entwined in that man’s arms as the stairway to the Métro swallowed them up? So intent on her secret lover that she hadn’t even noticed when Claire called to her as they’d lurched past just a few feet in front of her. So that was her game, was it? Some friend, who couldn’t even be bothered to confide in her. Let alone include her in their outings and maybe ask him to introduce her to a friend of his . . . Well, you certainly learn who your real friends are, she thought.
And with that she turned away and followed the two other girls into the bar, where soldiers in grey uniforms lounged at small tables, on the lookout for pretty French girls to spend their money on and help them forget how far away from home they were on Christmas Eve.
Harriet
One of the things on the top of my to-do list since my arrival in Paris has been to visit the Palais Galliera, the city’s very own museum dedicated to fashion. I’ve seen pictures of it, but nothing has prepared me for the jaw-dropping beauty of the place. It’s a gem of a palace, a perfect wedding-cake building conjuring Italian style with its white stone columns and balustrades. I enter through the ornately carved gatehouse leading off a leafy street in one of Paris’s most elegant districts, and feel as if I’ve stepped out of the
city and into a rural idyll. Trees fringe the neatly manicured parkland and, just beyond their autumnal branches, the Eiffel Tower points towards the blue of the sky. Statues dot the grounds, and the verdigris figure of a girl, the centrepiece of a fountain in front of the palace, is surrounded by ribbon-like beds of flowers, carefully planted in a mosaic of yellow and gold.
My heart beats with anticipation as I climb the broad white steps to the colonnaded entrance.
To my even greater delight, they are running an exhibition of styles from the Fifties. So I feel as if I’ve been transported back so close to the war years that I can almost reach out and touch the work of Claire and Mireille, reminding myself that the dresses, suits and coats they sewed were the immediate precursors to the garments I’m looking at now. I wander through the main gallery, drinking in the elegance of that golden age of haute couture. Christian Dior’s ‘New Look’ dominates – the nipped-in waists and flowing skirts that were fashion’s response to the restrictions of the war years – but as well there are classic Chanel suits and stunning, deceptively simple-looking, Balenciaga gowns encrusted with rock crystal embroidery. These are pieces that represent both the start and end of an era – the last, short-lived blooming of French couture when the war ended, which was rapidly overtaken by the fashion houses’ new trend for ‘ready-to-wear’ fashion.
I linger in the museum’s galleries, entranced by the displays. As well as the exhibition of Fifties couture, there are rooms filled with fashion history, from garments worn by Marie Antoinette and the Empress Josephine, to the black gown which Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It is all, quite simply, breathtaking.