On 1 May, Maria gave birth to Nello and her second son. They named him Alberto, Carlo’s middle name, and a telegram with loving messages arrived from ‘i Parigini’ to the ‘Apparitini’. Carlo wrote a little ruefully to his mother about what appeared to him to be the calm harmony of Nello’s household, while his own seemed so chaotic. In their small apartment in the 6ième, Melina and Aghi upset Marion with their boisterousness.
News reached Carlo in Paris of the death of Antonio Gramsci. He had recently been released, ill, after eleven years in prison. A memorial was held in the Gymnase Huyghens in the 14ième, where Carlo spoke of his admiration for the ‘most noble’ and highly intelligent man, who had devoted his life to serving not himself but an ideal, and had been relegated to the margins of the Communist Party for refusing to go along with orthodox Stalinism. ‘And perhaps’, he told his listeners, ‘it is better to die with the simplicity of a Gramsci rather than to live and lose all reason for living.’ In the next issue of Quaderni, under the headline ‘A Slow Assassination’, Carlo called Gramsci’s death the greatest crime carried out by the fascists since the murder of Matteotti. He compared the ‘reserved, rational, severe’ Gramsci, ‘an enemy to rhetoric and to the facile, faithful to the working class in good times and bad’, to the ‘noisy, irrational, demagogic’ Mussolini.
All through the spring of 1937 Carlo’s leg continued to give him trouble. There was talk of him going for a cure to Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, a spa in Normandy renowned for the healing properties of its waters. He was extremely reluctant to take any time away from Paris but Amelia wrote sternly from Florence that he should delay no longer, and that she would join him there. ‘You must not’, she wrote, ‘give up going at any cost.’ Bellavia reported to Bocchini that Carlo was in a cross and irritable mood, and that he had been telling friends: ‘As for Italy, there is one absolutely necessary thing that we must do first: and that is to kill Mussolini.’ The last two words were underlined.
At last, still protesting, Carlo agreed to spend a few weeks at Bagnoles; Marion said that she would go with him. Amelia was not well, and reluctantly agreed not to join them after Nello offered to take her place. Maria, Silvia, Paola, Aldo and the one-month-old Alberto remained in Florence. Nello applied for a passport to leave Italy, and it came through immediately, but when he bumped into Piero Calamandrei in the street, and told him how quickly it had been issued, Calamandrei begged him not to make the journey, saying there was something suspicious in the speed and lack of questions. But Nello had not seen Carlo for many months and there was much the two brothers wanted to discuss. Their years apart had done nothing to lessen the intense closeness of their relationship. Before leaving, Nello met Benedetto Croce, and they drove around the city talking.
Before setting out for Normandy himself on 27 May, Carlo had a fond meeting with Lussu, just back from the Haute-Savoie and on his way to Spain. Then he took Marion away for a few days to Beaulieu-sur-Mer. Writing to Zia Gì, Marion described it as another ‘honeymoon’. It was, she said, ‘very dolce’.
The French political world of the mid-1930s was extremely unstable. There was much talk of bombs, conspiracies and assassinations, and the newspapers often carried pictures of explosive devices, projectiles and the clocks designed to detonate them. After the first election of a coalition of left-wing parties in 1934, a number of extreme right-wing organisations had found willing members among disaffected military officers, monarchists, nationalists, adventurers, anti-semites and petty criminals. One of these conspiracists was a decorated hero of the war, Eugène Deloncle; with his glaring eyes, strong chin and large, pale face, he looked a little like Mussolini. Deloncle was an engineer by training, and an ambitious, energetic and secretive mythomaniac. He had a childhood friend, as drawn to clandestinity as himself, called Aristide Corre, a womaniser and compulsive diary-writer, who acted as his faithful lieutenant. Deloncle and his followers considered Léon Blum the very epitome of Jewish radicalism. During the funeral of an academician early in 1936, a group of these extremists ambushed Blum’s car, smashed its windows, punched him and would have done a great deal more damage had policemen not arrived on the scene and taken Blum to hospital. Later, his bloodstained hat and tie were put on display as trophies in their headquarters.
After Blum’s Front Populaire returned to power in April 1936, all extremist paramilitary organisations were banned. But against a backdrop of strikes, factory occupations and much talk of Bolshevism, Deloncle founded a new group of militant extremists; since its members, like the Ku Klux Klan, wore a pointed hood, they called it by the French name, La Cagoule. Cagoulards swore an oath of secrecy, considered all communists, Freemasons and Jews their bitter enemies, and undertook to take up arms in the case of a Bolshevik uprising. At their ceremonies were many displays of flags, daggers, crosses and entwined serpents. Each Cagoulard was given an alias and a number, then formed into cells of between 7 and 12 men; 3 cells became a fighting unit; 3 units a battalion; 3 battalions a regiment, and 2 regiments a brigade. In Paris, there were 6 active brigades and 1 held in reserve, in all some 2,000 men. Deloncle had no trouble finding both rich backers and eager recruits. The very young François Mitterrand had friends among these right-wing activists: his brother Robert had just got engaged to Deloncle’s sister-in-law.
Deloncle himself was alert to threats of a communist takeover. Impressive stashes of weapons – dynamite, machine guns, revolvers – were hidden in strategic spots around Paris. Other groups were formed in Clermont-Ferrand and Nice, and spies were planted in the French secret services and in the regular army. By 1937, they had recruited a small, muscular killer called Jean Filliol, the twenty-eight-year-old brawling, heavy-drinking son of a post-office worker from Bergerac, who had already murdered a Russian bank director. Sometimes Filliol and his men dressed as policemen and stirred up violence at the already inflammable political marches and demonstrations.
One of the Cagoule’s dreams was to see the Third Republic replaced by a monarchy; another was for the organisation to find its place among other extreme right-wing groups in Germany, Spain, Italy and Britain. Mosley’s Blackshirts were not faring well, but ties with Franco’s Falangists and Mussolini’s squadristi seemed promising. In 1936, Deloncle had been to Rome to meet Ciano, widely regarded as the most powerful man in Italy after his father-in-law. Ciano was now thirty-four, slippery, lazy and ambitious. For the past ten years or so, his closest friend had been a journalist called Filippo Anfuso, a smooth man-about-town and the author of several volumes of poetry and short stories. The two men had been in China together in 1932, when Ciano served as minister plenipotentiary to Shanghai and Anfuso was his first secretary. After Ciano was appointed minister for foreign affairs, he made Anfuso his chef de cabinet. Of the two, the older, more cultured, more clear-headed Anfuso was the dominant character. It was to him that Ciano entrusted all his most delicate missions.
Anfuso was Sicilian; he too had a close friend, a forty-three-year-old lieutenant colonel in the carabinieri called Santo Emanuele, who was in charge of one section of military intelligence. Emanuele, also Sicilian, was unscrupulous, quick on his feet, profoundly greedy for promotion and much liked and trusted by Bocchini, though not by his fellow carabinieri. Through Anfuso, he had performed a number tasks for Ciano, such as sneaking into the foreign embassies in Rome late at night to copy useful documents. Anfuso said of him that he possessed the zeal of a Domenican friar and the obedience of a dog.
In January 1937 a meeting took place in San Sebastian in northern Spain between the Cagoule and Franco’s men to discuss mutually advantageous deals and weapons. Another was held with Italian counter-espionage about destroying networks of antifascists in France; a captain serving with the military secret services in Turin was given the task of exploring the suppression of ‘troublesome people’.
On 3 February, Emanuele noted: ‘Rosselli affair: goal: to eliminate him.’ Anfuso and Ciano discussed what became code-named ‘l’affaire Rossignol’ – The Nightingale Affa
ir. Mussolini gave the go-ahead to deal with the French.
In Paris, the Cagoule agreed to see to the assassination, but asked for 100 semi-automatic Berettas as a gesture of good faith. The Italians demurred; the guns would be handed over, they said, once the job was done. The Cagoule also asked for more weapons for its own arsenal, and for a safe house in Italy. There was another meeting, and to this the Cagoule brought Joseph Darnand, later the head of the French fascist Milice under the Vichy government, and eager to clean out the Italian anti-fascists in France. Late in May, Emanuele went back to Paris to meet the chief spy, Bellavia, who confirmed that Carlo was going to Bagnoles. ‘Where is Bagnoles-de-l’Orne?’ Bocchini’s head of the political police, Di Stefano, cabled his man Antonini – ‘Urgentissimo’. Antonini sent back word that Carlo had originally invited him to visit him in Bagnoles, but later cancelled the invitation, saying that he was expecting his brother Nello, with whom he wanted to spend as much time as possible.
According to the secret diary kept by Deloncle’s lieutenant, Aristide Corre, which only came to light many years later, every detail was gone over many times. There were eight conspirators. One was the twenty-year-old son of fanatical monarchists, Jean-Marie Bouvyer, who had already been keeping watch on Carlo, and who was a skilled shot. Then there was Louis Huguet, a former boxer, who had earlier been sent to ring on the Rossellis’ door to see if their apartment offered possibilities for assassination; Corre’s mistress, Hélène d’Alton; Filliol and his girlfriend Alice Lamy; a jack-of-all-trades called Fernand Jakubiez, who sometimes acted as Deloncle’s personal driver; Jacques Fauran, a schoolfriend of Bouvyer’s who owned an open two-seater red Oldsmobile; and twenty-five-year-old François Baillet, a burly sometime pastry chef from Burgundy, good at street-fighting. The six men – all long-term members of the extreme far-right – and the two women, about whom little is known, were to travel by different means and rendezvous in Normandy. They took with them two cars, one of them the red Oldsmobile.
Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, the only spa town in north-west France, had become popular during the late 1880s, when fashionable belle-époque Parisians came to take the waters for their rheumatic conditions and to stay in the elegant hotels around its little lake, with its fountains, marble pavilions and decorative swans and ducks. A casino had been built, and villas with striped facades and bow windows, their terraces covered in hydrangeas and dahlias. During the thermal season there were concerts and horse-racing on a track nearby. The area was densely wooded and in its green forests Lancelot was said to have sung his ballads to Queen Guinevere. Bagnoles had fallen on quiet times during the First World War, but in the 1920s and 1930s its fortunes revived. Carlo and Marion arrived on the evening of 27 May, after a drive of almost 300 kilometres in their rickety black Ford, veteran of the Spanish Civil War. They had booked adjoining rooms with balconies, numbers 60 and 61, in the Hotel Cordier, an imposing six-storey mansion with a large glass-fronted veranda overlooking the forest, a few minutes’ walk from the spa.
They soon fell into a pleasant routine. Carlo took the cure in the mornings and worked in the afternoons. Around 5 o’clock, they explored the countryside; Marion was charmed by its orchards and fields full of cows. Carlo was writing an article attacking France and Britain for sitting by while Germany, Spain and Italy acted. ‘This is dangerous from every point of view,’ he warned, with poignant accuracy; ‘Possibly even mortally so.’
He was, as ever, restless and Marion wrote to Zia Gì that the ‘maritino’, the little husband, was starting to get bored. On their afternoon drives, she said, they often stopped to eat the local delicacy, meringues and honey. Carlo was no longer wearing a bandage on his leg and she was wondering whether she really needed to return to Paris on 9 June, to celebrate Mirtillino’s birthday, since it was so restful here. They bought a loaf of the sweet pain de mie and posted it to the children. On 6 June, Carlo wrote to them that he was just off to collect Nello from the station and that he was spending his days eating meringues and being hosed down and massaged with brushes.
Carlo and Marion at Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, May 1937
The reunion between the two brothers was extremely happy; before they had even left the station they had resumed their life-long intimate conversation. Photographs show the three of them, Marion in a high-necked muslin dress, the two men in sober dark jackets and ties, sitting in deckchairs, smiling. Carlo wears a trilby. They look remarkably alike, two bespectacled, round-faced, solid men with genial expressions. They told each other, teasingly, that they had both managed to put on yet more weight since their last meeting.
The brothers together at last in Normandy
In the evenings, Carlo and Marion rang the flat in Paris and talked to Bruna, the nanny they had left in charge. Carlo’s letters to the children were comic and teasing. On 7 June, the children wrote back. ‘Do you realise that I am about to be 10?’ asked Mirtillino. Melina reported that she could now write with ink. Andrea sent ‘a train full of kisses’. Mirtillino, who had always been rather shy and withdrawn, was now at the prestigious Lycée Montaigne and becoming more gregarious. Carlo and Nello sent him a telegram: ‘35 kisses and 47 happy birthdays. Uncle Nello and Daddy’. Amelia wrote to say that Nello’s new baby was putting on weight, that Florence was unbearably hot, and that she had just been to a Pirandello play and had been much struck by its message that anyone not interested solely in material things was doomed to solitude.
On 4 June, the prefect of Florence had reported to the Ministry of the Interior in Rome that Nello was ‘currently staying in the Hotel Cordier, in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne’. This fact was already well known to the Cagoule. By now, the ex-boxer Louis Huguet had taken a room in the same hotel, while the marksman Jean-Marie Bouvyer was keeping watch from the nearby Hotel Bel-Air. Both men, at different times, returned to Paris to report to Corre, pick up money and get further instructions.
On Wednesday 9 June, two cars, a Peugeot 402 carrying Filliol, Alice Lamy and François Baillet, and Fauran’s red Oldsmobile with Jakubiez on board, met on the road between Alençon and Domfront, a few kilometres from Bagnoles. Bouvyer arrived separately, by train. At 1.30 p.m., four of the men went to eat in the restaurant where Carlo, Nello and Marion were having lunch. Marion had decided to catch the 4 p.m. train to Paris. How happy Mirtillino ‘will be to have you there’, Amelia wrote to Marion. Marion planned to return to Bagnoles two days later.
Dinner at the Hotel Cordier was not until late so, after dropping Marion at the station, the two brothers drove on to Alençon, visited the fourteenth-century Gothic church of Notre-Dame, bought postcards and sat writing them in a café. Nello bought some embroidered handkerchiefs for Maria. At 6.45 p.m., while the sun was still high, Alice Lamy, who had been watching them from a street corner, gave the signal that Carlo and Nello were leaving.
Towards 7 p.m., the Peugeot overtook Carlo’s Ford and soon after stopped at the roadside near the Château de Couterne, a few kilometres from Bagnoles. It was a deserted, thickly forested spot, giving excellent cover. When Carlo drove around the corner and saw the parked Peugeot and a group of men ostensibly about to change a tyre, he pulled over; Nello got out to see whether he could help. Heedless as ever, neither brother seems to have given any thought to the possibility of an ambush.
Filliol took out his revolver and fired. Nello staggered, tried to protect himself, was punched and fell over. Jakubiez attacked him with a dagger, stabbing at Nello’s chest, right arm and neck; in all, he delivered seventeen wounds. Carlo, scrambling out of the car to come to his brother’s help, was shot and then stabbed. There was blood everywhere. The killers searched Carlo’s pockets and took his wallet and various documents; they left Nello’s money untouched.
At this moment a young hairdresser, Hélène Besneux, cycled past: seeing a pool of blood and a group of men, she hastened on, pedalling as fast as she could. Filliol and Jakubiez got into Carlo’s car and drove it to a secluded spot close by, where they tried, but largely failed, to set it on fir
e using a Nestlé tin full of explosive. Before they left, they dragged the two bodies into the woods, where they lay, Carlo half covering Nello, their arms stretched out, a dagger by their side.
In Paris, when the Cagoule heard the news, Aristide Corre wrote in his diary: ‘Our affaire Rossignol is finally concluded. Here is one matter that won’t be giving us any more trouble.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A Corneillian Tragedy
It was not until 2 o’clock on the Friday afternoon that Marion, having heard nothing from Carlo, telephoned the Hotel Cordier. A surprised concierge told her that her husband had not been seen since the previous day. Soon after, a reporter rang the bell of the flat in Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. On seeing his expression, Marion began to cry. The maid quickly pushed the reporter out of the door, saying that Marion had a bad heart. The man went round to the offices of Giustizia e Libertà, found Cianca, and told him that he had heard that Carlo was dead. Cianca hurried round to see Marion. Mirtillino, hearing agitated talk and then seeing his mother’s anguished face, thought at first that it was about money, because he had often heard his parents exchange angry words about the amount that Carlo was spending on the anti-fascists. Normally, she spoke to him in Italian. Now she said, in English, ‘Darling, Babbo has been killed.’
In Bagnoles, the bodies had not been discovered for some time. Two men returning home from the fields had come across the half-burnt car in the ditch, seen what looked like a bloodstained glove on the seat and reported it to the local mayor. A carthorse had been sent to pull the car back on to the road. But it was only on the Friday morning that a blacksmith called Henri Jarry, stopping to relieve himself by the side of the road as he cycled towards Bagnoles, spotted the two corpses. In the police report, Carlo was described as lying on his back, his left shoe and right glove missing; Nello was said to have his face pressed into the earth, his trouser legs pulled up to his knees. The autopsy confirmed signs of struggle, and many knife and bullet wounds. The dagger was found lying nearby. On Saturday 12 June, Marion arrived to identify the bodies. Inadvertently, Mirtillino later saw the photograph of his dead father and uncle; his first thought was that their bodies looked alien and somehow shrunken.
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 40
