Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Robert’s lawyer succeeded in arguing that such documents invalidated her allegations. The judge dismissed Priscilla’s application. She tried again the following year – with the same result.

  Why was Robert adamant in blocking Priscilla’s request for an annulment? An obvious explanation is that his family did not get divorced. It was forbidden; in 600 years, it had not happened once.

  At Boisgrimot, news of Priscilla’s elopement fell on his mother with the unwelcome impact of the German invasion. Adelaide’s faith made it irrelevant that Priscilla might have grounds for wishing to separate from her youngest son because he had not slept with her. Until the First World War, Adelaide had refused to allow divorcees into the house. Soon after Priscilla’s petition, probably broken by it, her mother-in-law died.

  Priscilla’s behaviour also upset Yolande and Georges – to whom had fallen the role of guardians of the Doynel family honour. More dangerous still, it set her on a collision course with the French government and with the nation’s father-protector: the white-haired octogenarian whose ubiquitous features had begun to appear on ashtrays above the logo ‘A new France is born’.

  Marshal Pétain’s regime marched to the beat of a gymnastic Christianity, but was perched on precarious legal foundations. One day in February 1942, getting out at the wrong floor of his hotel in Vichy, Pétain opened a door and found a young woman typing away on a portable table, before realising that she was sitting on the bidet. He asked what she was typing. ‘The Constitution.’

  It was not only the Consitution that was changing. A key act of Pétain’s National Revolution was a reform of the divorce law, prohibiting divorce in the first three years of marriage, and then only in exceptional cases of physical cruelty. Adultery – to which the Maréchal was no stranger – was not considered grounds for divorce, but was to be treated as a punishable crime. A wife’s infidelity was considered a graver fault than her husband’s. In December 1942, the Vichy government allowed wives of POWs caught having an affair to be fined or imprisoned. This was in addition to the 23 July Law, which made a married woman found guilty of ‘abandoning the hearth’ liable to a year in prison and a 20,000-franc fine. With 1.8 million Frenchmen absent in German prison camps, including Robert’s brother Guy, it was important not to feed their anxieties.

  Ever since the Armistice, Pétain had worked to fortify the family unit as the ‘essential cell’ of social order, cemented by the promotion of the woman as a faithful wife and child-bearing mother who worked tirelessly and did not budge from the hearth. A woman’s offspring were more cherished still. Patrick Buisson, the best recent historian of Vichy France, argues that it was better to be a single young mother with an illegitimate child than to be sexually sterile with no children at all. In February 1942, abortion became a crime that carried the death penalty – and two people were guillotined. And yet with all their men away, it was not so easy for French women to fulfil the Maréchal’s expectations.

  Desperate to conserve a freedom she had not enjoyed until now, Priscilla, who had had an abortion in France and sought a divorce – and who, in addition, was ‘sans issue’ and ‘sans profession’ – risked placing herself outside the protection of Church and State.

  Her husband was a Catholic loyal to the French government, but more than that Robert still loved Priscilla, still regarded her as his wife, and desired to win her back. And he had a further reason for his intransigence. Robert did not believe for a moment, having met him, that Emile-Hubert Cornet du Fonteny was the man to make Priscilla happy. He was not alone in his reservations. Among Priscilla’s letters is one from Berry, her former room mate in Besançon: ‘I used to worry about the Belgian with whom you lived in Paris, just because, although he made money off and on, both he and you spent what he made recklessly so that there were bad times.’

  Priscilla’s new lover was a figure out of some black comic strip. I was reminded of Hitchcock, and also of the French director Louis Malle, as I followed my unsuspecting aunt down into the underworld to which Emile Cornet now introduced her, and in particular Lacombe, Lucien (1974). All because of a flat tyre, Malle’s young protagonist, rejected by the Resistance, wheels his bicycle into a provincial French town, sees large cars, hears music and, before he knows it, is swept up into working for the German police. From early 1942, Priscilla drifted in the same milieu which inspired Malle’s most controversial character. And the more I uncovered, the deeper I understood why its French audience had found Lacombe’s amoral story hard to accept and impossible to talk about. ‘Forget suicide and incest,’ said Malle’s brother Vincent. The subject touched on a taboo more potent and raw and shaming than either. ‘It shows how easy it is to be on the wrong side and not realise it.’

  Priscilla and Cornet moved back to Paris at the beginning of July. Cornet had found them ‘a very nice flat’ in a short cobbled street near the Etoile. The address – 11 bis Rue Lord Byron – was in the heart of Nazi Paris and less than a hundred yards from the Champs-Elysées.

  But three months into Priscilla’s new relationship, cracks appeared. ‘I was not at all happy as too many things worried me.’

  Priscilla’s immediate concern was the French police: she had heard that the commissioner of Batignolles was looking for her.

  It was always going to be a long shot that the Paris police had preserved a file on Priscilla. In a shabby room inside the Préfecture de Police in Rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, the archivist shook his head. My best bet was the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. His reaction was disappointing, though hardly surprising. Most dossiers on foreigners were hurriedly removed as the Germans entered Paris, and scuttled in the Seine.

  Half a dozen researchers sat reading old crime reports in silence. The archivist was walking towards the door when I went through the motion of trying out Emile Cornet’s name. Heads lifted as I explained in schoolboy French that he was ‘un amant de ma tante’.

  But Cornet drew the same negative response as had Priscilla.

  At the risk of disturbing everyone, I mentioned Max Stocklin, a name that I had read in one of Cornet’s letters. Almost all I knew about Max Stocklin was that he was sentenced for espionage and collaboration in January 1946. Might a record exist of his trial?

  ‘Non,’ said the archivist, and left the room.

  But the name Stocklin registered with his young assistant. Seated behind an ancient computer, she called it up. Nothing. She persisted, entering a different code, slowly accessing a separate stack in the labyrinth – and on the third attempt there he was, Max Stocklin, with his file number.

  ‘What was your aunt’s name again?’

  I told her. She typed it in, pressed enter. And up on screen it came: ‘Doynel de la Sausserie, Priscilla.’ Through Max Stocklin, I had found her. But what was Priscilla doing in the same database as such a dubious figure?

  The survival of Priscilla’s police dossier no. 162.191 was, everyone agreed, a piece of luck. Her name was written in Gothic script on the beige folder. Inside, documents covered her activities in Paris from July 1942 – two months after she told Robert that she was returning to England – to October 1942. They comprised six letters from the French police, one from the SS, and an interview conducted by a senior French policeman, Roger Le Meur.

  On 7 February 1942, the Germans had relaxed their order for Priscilla to sign every day in a book reserved for British nationals. From now on, she was required to register once a week at her local police station. Five months passed before Le Meur reported to his German superior: ‘She has not always executed this measure very regularly.’

  Interest in Priscilla was aroused first on 8 July. The police commissioner of Batignolles, in charge of the book, was livid to discover that Priscilla had signed for four weeks ‘in advance’. He acted without delay to arrest her, but was too late, he wrote to Le Meur. ‘Ordered immediately to the commissariat to be interrogated over this fraud, the undersigned did not present herself and it was her husband Doynel de la Sausserie, 43, grazier o
f French nationality, who responded yesterday. He explained that his wife had abandoned their home at the end of May, probably to follow a lover, and that from this moment he didn’t know her address or what had happened to her.’ The commissioner understood from Robert that ‘she has changed domicile without authorisation since the end of May 1942, letting us believe that she was still at 103 rue Nollet. Her actual address has not been discovered.’

  A fortnight later, perhaps alerted by Robert, Priscilla showed up at the police station in Place Charles Fillion and explained that she was now living in Rue Lord Byron. She changed address again the following week, an indication of Cornet’s concern not to have the French authorities on his tail. On 30 July, she moved into a hotel in Place des Augustins and was staying there when, on 12 August, the commissioner summoned her to his office and took down her statement. He passed it on to Le Meur, chief of the Section des Britanniques, who was to decide whether to prosecute her.

  Given the widespread practice among the French of incriminating each other during the Occupation, it was natural to expect Roger Le Meur, when investigating Priscilla’s case, to be deluged by reports of her adultery. An Abwehr Major estimated that there were thirty million anonymous denunciations made in France between 1940 and 1945.

  A fear of being denounced governed the action of The Raven, the classic film of this period. After the war, Priscilla met its rancorous director Henri-Georges Clouzot with Gillian, who promptly became his lover. ‘No man has ever made me walk so much,’ Gillian complained. All that walking, Clouzot told her, was a habit acquired during the Occupation. Clouzot was still chafing from the fall-out of having made The Raven with a German-financed company. Gillian wrote: ‘For Clouzot, I was a girl who had been loved by men who had loathed and despised him for having collaborated by working for the Germans. It was a bone he never stopped chewing. Out of the blue he would say, “Your friend Kessel won’t shake my hand, for him I’m a collabo.”’ What embittered Clouzot was that The Raven, shot in 1943 for Continental Productions, was an exposé of denunciation.

  People in a village start receiving anonymous letters. The letters accuse the recipient of adultery. Before long, the community is at each other’s throats, each person suspicious of the other – which is what happened that summer in Sainteny, after Monsieur Virette, the village carpenter, was denounced for possessing a revolver.

  Priscilla heard the distressing details from Robert, how Virette was taken to prison in Saint-Lô and then shot. Jacqueline Hodey, the grocer’s daughter, told me that it was the worst moment of her life. ‘I saw Monsieur Virette leave. I had his young son Daniel with me. I used to look after Daniel, aged eleven, while he was doing his catechism. I was walking along the street with a crocodile of fifteen kids when the curé said, “Quickly, take the children back,” because he had seen a lorry go up to the house. The lorry then passed us and I could see Monsieur Virette in the back between two armed soldiers, and Daniel said, “They’re taking Daddy away.” I led the children into church and that was the last time Daniel saw his father.’

  Similar denunciations took place in Paris. During my fruitless search for Priscilla in the French National Archives, in a box of papers ostensibly relating to British internees I came across a chilling letter addressed to the German Commandant, Place Opéra, dated 13 June 1941. The anonymous author was ‘100% in agreement’ with the German position on collaboration and the Jewish question – ‘and this is why I hope you will permit me, Monsieur, to alert you to what is happening at the Restaurant Beulemans in Boulevard Saint-Germain.’ Two Greek Jews, sisters, both of them mistresses of the owner, were leading a wicked life with German officers. Writing in an educated hand in turquoise ink on thick cream paper, the author provided further details about these Jews, ‘who have done us so much harm’, and hoped that by joining forces with good Frenchmen, the two nations, Germany and France, would be able to work towards universal peace.

  Priscilla was not Jewish. And yet her British passport made her an enemy. Like the Greek sisters, she was a despicable example of everything a French woman should not be: a childless and unemployed adulteress who had deserted an adoring husband and former POW, to live with a highly suspect lover. In other words, a prime candidate for denunciation.

  So why did the senior French official in charge of investigating Priscilla go out of his way not to prosecute her?

  Roger Le Meur’s interview with my aunt was handwritten over four pages. She did not hold back except to conceal the identity of her father, in case she risked being detained as the daughter of a ‘personnage célèbre’. Compliantly, Le Meur recorded the names of her parents as ‘Stuart and Snow, Noris [sic]’. Stuart, her father’s first name, was not likely to excite German suspicions.

  Otherwise, Priscilla told Le Meur everything: her childhood in England, her upbringing in Paris, her internment, the rocky state of her marriage, her sex life. His report betrayed his sympathies. ‘Mme Doynel de la Sausserie exercises no profession and after leaving her husband, because he did not give her children, she received from him subsidies and continues to see him from time to time. He, son of a wealthy family of agriculturalists, is owner of several farms in Normandy which guarantee him a substantial income. Today aged 43, Doynel de la Sausserie is a jaded man who can hardly give great satisfaction to his young wife [“un blasé qui ne pouvait guère donner de grandes satisfactions à sa jeune femme”] and this is the main reason why she has left the marital home.’ Her impotent husband personified to Le Meur the argument about national decadence that had led to the collapse of France. Up until recently her marriage had seemed ‘very united’, and there was general surprise in Priscilla’s circle when she took her leave. ‘Enquiries have revealed nothing unfavourable about this stranger, especially from a political point of view, and although her sympathies remain with the English cause, she abstains from all commentary and from all activity which could attract enemies.’ Glowingly, he concluded that ‘Madame Doynel de la Sausserie enjoys the esteem of all, and one cannot see in this stranger any element of eventual trouble to the interior of our country.’

  Instead of locking up Priscilla for failing to sign in at the police station, or charging her for adultery and desertion as the state empowered him, and as many might have demanded, Le Meur took no further action. Why? Had he joined that line of men who instinctively were moved to shield Priscilla? Or was he acting under orders? Something did not add up. It looked as if Priscilla had a protector – if not Roger Le Meur, then someone higher in the French or German administration.

  All these interrogations rattled Priscilla. One morning in the street, looking pale and ill, she bumped into Daniel Vernier. It amazed him to find her still in France.

  Her eyes made the worst fault of all – looked away. Then out it came: about Emile Cornet, how Priscilla had decided to get a divorce and marry him, her difficulties with the police. She blurted out: ‘I am worried about my papers.’ Her French identity card was valid only until 29 October 1942.

  Vernier’s feelings for Priscilla had not cooled. He took it ‘very badly’ that she had fallen head-over-heels for an unemployed Belgian racing driver, the source of whose wealth was so murky. Even so, Vernier suppressed his hurt and agreed to help. But he ‘made me promise not to lose touch with Simone or himself as he foresaw difficulties with the Gestapo’.

  The French police may have shown lenience, but the German authorities were becoming more vigilant. Two years on and the reality of the Occupation was starker. The atmosphere in the streets around the Champs-Elysées – treacly with Viennese walzes when Priscilla returned from Besançon – carried a new note; tense, edgier. The Germans were no longer trying to charm the French with correct behaviour. The handsome blond youths who had first entered Paris, marching behind horses with bleached tails, had vanished to the Russian front. Their replacements were paunchy veterans who, from behind white hoardings, out of range of grenade throwers, eyed Priscilla with suspicion. Black-bordered posters carried the names of th
ose shot for an act of violence against the German Armed Forces. Many of the condemned were Communists who had supported Vichy until June 1941. From August, there was a steady stream of assassination attempts on German officials, for which Hitler personally demanded ‘the most severe measures’ in retaliation. In February 1942, against the backdrop of a worsening war in the East, Hitler ordered the Military Commander in Paris to execute up to 100 French for every German murdered; more than 550 hostages were killed by the end of the year. The numbers joining the Resistance rose further after Pierre Laval announced the Relève in June 1942, pressing for three French workers to ‘volunteer’ in German factories to secure the release of every French POW. The Nazis targeted Communists, but also foreigners. Americans were as vulnerable as the British, following America’s entry into the war in December 1941. Most vulnerable were Jews like Hans Mayer in Priscilla’s short story. Further anti-Jewish measures were introduced in May, demanding the wearing of a yellow star and forbidding Jews from crossing the Champs-Elysées. Priscilla was aware that people all over Paris were being arrested by the French police and, increasingly, by the Gestapo.

  What Priscilla feared as ‘the Gestapo’ was in fact a confusing maze of German intelligence and counter-intelligence networks often tangling with each other. Until now, responsibility for security had been the jealously guarded domaine of the Military Commander in France who placed control of all intelligence operations under one organisation, the Army’s counter-intelligence service, the Abwehr. The SS – the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing – had kept a low profile in the shadows of the German Army, with a small staff of forty restricted to information gathering. But their numbers had stealthily grown, causing resentment for their ‘not always useful dealings’. The arrival in May 1942 of Himmler’s personal representative in Paris, General Carl-Albrecht Oberg, signalled the moment at which the SS started to steal power away from the Abwehr. To the anger and mistrust of the Military Commander, General Carl-Heinrich Von Stülpnagel, Oberg was appointed ‘Supreme SS and Police Leader’. One of the buildings that his men took over was the Ministry of the Interior near the Elysée palace, 11 Rue des Saussaies. Almost immediately, Oberg placed the French police in the Occupied Zone, who until then had functioned semi-independently, under the tighter grip of the German police, and expanded to two units the number of Frenchmen working directly with the Gestapo.