Priscilla

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  She was one of remarkably few English women to have lived in Paris through the Occupation – perhaps one of less than two hundred. She learned what it was to be faced with decisions that her family and friends in England never had to confront, and yet which they judged others for having made.

  ‘Everything we did was equivocal,’ Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, ‘we never quite knew whether we were doing right or wrong; a subtle poison corrupted even our best actions.’ Once you opted for Système D – after ‘se débrouiller’: in this case, getting yourself the best deals and out of trouble by whatever means – there were no rules about how to act.

  With Cornet gone, Priscilla had to be exceptionally débrouillarde. The lack of options open to those, like her, who had no formal education and no political power – women in France could not vote until 1946 – meant that she had to use her body for survival. To ask the question ‘Did she have to sleep with all these men?’ is to see it from the wrong angle. Her body was what she had, and it dominated her life in a way that no man’s could dominate his. A Frenchman in her position would have had a different experience.

  Priscilla’s constant need to reach out to men to look after her can seem like sluttishness to an outsider, but it flowed from the unsexual side of her nature. All her affairs were similar in a way, subject to the vagaries of a man and in his slipstream. Although as a woman she formed the majority of the population, she did not enjoy the same choices as Robert or Vernier or Cornet. In the choices that she was forced to make, she was not so different from her female friends and contemporaries who dressed in clothes made of wood pulp – ‘it looked like tweed and dissolved in the rain,’ said Yvette Goodden – or smoothed a flask of tinted Ambresoie into their white legs (to ‘give the illusion of the finest silk stockings’ promised the advertisement) or dyed their ankles, as did Goodden, with iodine. Morality, truth, love – these values were no less ersatz. Margaret ‘Bluebell’ Kelly was aware of the falsehoods that she had to utter after she was accused of supplying false documents. ‘I don’t know how I could lie so convincingly. I think it was because we were living under such tension then that life and death were unimportant.’ Their fellow inmate at Besançon, Elisabeth Haden-Guest, also lied: ‘What people call “lies” are substitutes for basic rights. You lie, sure you lie, you might kill to stay alive, women might sleep with men to stay alive (they did in the camps) – you might betray your best friend, your closest family, for your own survival.’

  Nothing is easy or completely clear. All I know is that Priscilla, the little cork, made it through the Occupation. Fluctuat nec mergitur – storm-tossed but unsinkable.

  Now that Daniel Vernier had banished Cornet and secured Priscilla a new identity in his wife’s name, he was desperate to resume their affair.

  Priscilla kept him at arm’s length for as long as possible, but she was in no position to bargain. When she cast around for someone to support her, to provide food and clothes, fuel for her stove, it boiled down to two men: Vernier and her husband. ‘I had the choice of going back to Robert who refused to divorce me, or becoming kept by Daniel. I had no other alternative.’

  She had encountered Robert one morning in the street. He lashed his arms around her. How his voice rose. She knew that he was not as dull as he sounded. At least he did not make the baleful demand to know what she had been doing.

  Priscilla hated to hurt him. She could sense his terrible unhappiness and did not want to see his eyes looking at her. Neither of them said much. Their meeting was like any meeting between two parties one of whom has fallen out of love. When Robert appealed for Priscilla to return to Rue Nollet, Priscilla told him that she didn’t think she could bear it.

  ‘So the inevitable happened. I went back to Daniel.’

  Daniel Vernier rented a garçonnière at 11 Place Saint-Augustin where they could meet when Priscilla was not at the nursing home. He pretended to Simone that he was playing poker, something that he was known to do all night, ‘and quite often poker was an excuse to stay the night with me’. Simone hated the horses, so at weekends Vernier took Priscilla to the races. He introduced Priscilla as his wife while grimly parading her as his mistress. He knew that he could not make her love him. He was making her pay.

  It pained Priscilla to betray her doppelgänger. The real Simone Vernier had five children by now. ‘I was in an awkward position as I was always being invited to their home. In fact, I was treated as one of the family. Daniel seemed to have no sense of shame or guilt where I was concerned, but I suffered enough for two.’

  Priscilla now existed on the margins: shuttling between Dr Devaux’s nursing home and Daniel Vernier’s garçonnière. Frightened that everything she said or did was observed, she learned the trick of the trout, to sneak out of sight behind stones. She avoided people’s glances. If she suspected that she was being followed, she darted into a shop and out of the employees’ entrance.

  Vernier gave her money. She read. She slept. She kept her head low as Simone Vernier. She remembered the two rules of concealment that John Buchan imposed on his hero Richard Hannay: ‘If you are playing a part, you will never keep it up unless you convince yourself that you are it.’ And the second: ‘If you are hemmed in on all sides in a patch of land there is only one chance of escape. You must stay in the patch and let your enemies search it and not find you.’

  The things that she missed were English films and taxis. ‘There were a few soap-boxes in which one could sit and be pulled along by a bicycle, but the price was colossal’ – and she never had the heart, the men were so thin. Without Cornet to drive her, she reverted to cycling everywhere. She had to have a numberplate and a licence; if you could not produce the licence, the handlebars were confiscated.

  Fear thickened the air. Everyone hurried and yelled out commands. In July, a grenade had been tossed into the car of the Commandant of Greater Paris; in September, more ‘terrorists’ gunned down the SS colonel in charge of the STO. Hitler ordered reprisals. Suddenly, there were many more Germans in uniform.

  She concentrated on what was immediately in front of her. One morning, she wheeled her bicycle through the Jardin de Luxembourg where she had discussed her pregnancy with Gillian. Gardeners had raked the leaves into rusty heaps. A cart rattled by with a girl on it, undernourished and grey-faced; the age her child would have been.

  ‘One didn’t think,’ said Yvette Goodden. ‘One lived without really analysing anything. One lived from day to day. The main thing was to live. To have enough clothes, food and not to get into trouble.’ These were Priscilla’s ambitions. Except that she did get into trouble.

  26.

  KESSEL

  In London, Gillian pursued every lead. She had achieved one modest breakthrough. ‘Through Free French friends, I managed to find out about Zoë whose husband (a naturalised Jew) had been imprisoned in a Stalag; through the Red Cross I sent him parcels.’

  But about Priscilla Doynel, her fate: nothing.

  On the assumption that the Germans had interned Priscilla at Besançon, Gillian questioned former internees who had escaped back to England through Spain. Some came to work for the Free French in London, among them Rosemary Say and Frida Stewart. But neither they, nor Elisabeth Haden-Guest – who returned in April 1942 – had information.

  Gillian pestered her Secret Service contacts. She was most dependent on her thirty-four-year-old pilot, Edouard Corniglion-Molinier. One morning, she heard that he had suffered an accident during a mission and was in a London hospital. Gillian telephoned him and they talked, the Colonel his usual ebullient self: ‘Tu verras que tous fonctionne à merveille – you’ll see, everything is working marvellously.’ Gillian took him some apples, hoping for a discreet conversation and news of Priscilla. ‘I walked into his room and there lay Edouard surrounded by women, about three or four. “C’est le harem,” I said, dumping the apples on his legs. I pretended the car was waiting outside and wished him a prompt recovery and hopped it.’

  Gillian now shifted her attent
ion to a friend of Edouard and Vertès, the novelist Joseph Kessel, whose undercover work also took him into Occupied France.

  Kessel had escaped from France to England in January 1943. He impressed Gillian on the evening she met him as ‘a Dostoyevsky figure’: a big-boned ‘peasanty-looking’ man in a badly cut suit with a shy, gap-toothed smile. Over the sobs of a violin she heard the sound of glass breaking. ‘The waiters seem rather clumsy,’ she murmured. But it was Kessel – ‘doing his Cossack number’. His party trick was to chew wine glasses, hurling the broken stems over his shoulder.

  They hit it off at once. ‘My deadpan look generally freezes up people famous for their wisecracks.’ It had the opposite effect on the Russian. ‘I made Kessel laugh, which is why all his letters started “My little clown”.’

  Kessel was not then widely known for Belle de Jour; the novel was not published in English until 1962, and then without Vertès’s illustrations. But he became celebrated for the words of a war-song that he composed in the course of a few minutes on a Sunday afternoon shortly after his arrival in England.

  A favourite haunt in London was Le Petit Club Français off Hyde Park, where he took Gillian. There one night they heard a guitarist, Anna Marly, sing a Russian melody. On 23 May, Kessel was staying in Ashdown Park Hotel in Sussex when, after waking from a nap, he remembered Marly’s tune. Phrases surged into his head. ‘Come up from the mines, comrades. Come down from the hills.’ With the assistance of his nephew and the hotel’s out-of-tune piano, Kessel wrote the words of ‘Le Chant des Partisans’, which became the instant anthem of the Resistance.

  In London, forty-three-year-old Kessel served as one of de Gaulle’s aides-de-camp. He flew to Algeria with him and later joined ‘Operation Sussex’, based at a secret location in Hartford Bridge. Kessel was one of fifty agents who took off on midnight flights to gather information from Occupied France. His job was to liaise with agents on the ground, bring back their coded messages and translate these on the flight home, often as the plane was weaving to avoid flak.

  Gillian, who sent him to find Priscilla, wrote that Kessel was ‘a brave man when it came to going to dangerous places, but quite incapable of ringing up a woman he fancied in case of a rebuff’. Lovable, naïve, strangely innocent, he had made his initial approach to Gillian through an intermediary, ‘to find out if his advance would be welcome’. Out of some complicated revenge on Vertès, Gillian gave Kessel the green light. But the amount of vodka he consumed was not conducive to a memorable sexual performance.

  On the first occasion when he came back with Gillian to her house, he fell asleep in his underwear on the sofa. In the morning, he could not remember a thing. ‘Est ce qu’on a chuté? Did we do it?’ with a sheepish expression.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  She served him breakfast in her kitchen and left. ‘I said I had to rush off to BCRA to draw maps for bombing targets.’

  Gillian perceived Kessel as a masochist who enjoyed carrying his cross, and he viewed her in a similar light – ‘We’re from the same tribe.’ She wrote: ‘Kessel and I shared a common kink. He wrote Belle de Jour because he loved his wife, but had not lust for her. It was the same situation as I had, which was one of the reasons we understood each other so well. We knew that one could love without desire and desire without love.’ For Gillian, Belle de Jour was Kessel – as in pre-war Paris it had been Priscilla.

  When Gillian looked back at their affair, she was grateful. ‘Kessel was responsible for my writing career. He loved my letters, said I had a style of my own, colourful and sharp – probably because I am a spectator as well as wanting to live my life, which I did.’

  Furthermore, it was Kessel who would eventually track Priscilla down in Paris. But that was still eighteen months away, by which time Priscilla had got herself into an awful lot of trouble.

  All of a sudden Emile Cornet was telephoning her. She had not seen him since the morning when she heard the Gestapo coming up the stairs and escaped through a back door; had decided, in fact, ‘to have nothing more to do with him’. Then there he was, in Paris, calling her from a small hotel on the left bank, pleading in a thin unfamiliar voice, needing help.

  Without a word to Vernier, Priscilla bicycled to Cornet’s hotel. ‘He was ill and had abscesses all over his back.’ She stayed and nursed him for three days. She felt sorry for him, was how she explained it. Deliberately, she had left behind her French identity card in the name of ‘Simone Vernier’: she feared his violent response were he to discover that she was now passing herself off as Daniel’s wife.

  Evicted by the Gestapo to Belgium, Cornet had honed his jealousy to a trembling point, and blamed Vernier for his arrest: ‘He always vowed that Daniel did this to him.’ But that told only half the truth.

  Cornet’s expulsion had followed Göring’s decision in early 1943 to suppress the black market, after the French Ministry of Industrial Production informed the German authorities that contracts could not be honoured without long delays, owing to incredible corruption and rampaging inflation. Anyone who worked for Bureau Otto had to close their offices and suspend contraband activitities. The docks and warehouses in Saint-Ouen were shut down. Trafficking was made illegal – for everyone, ‘without any exceptions’.

  Only the creator of Bureau Otto remained immune. A grey and protean ectoplasm, Hermann ‘Otto’ Brandl drifted above the sparring factions of Göring, the Abwehr and the ultimately victorious Gestapo, and continued to sell gasogenes across the border into Spain under the protection of the German War Office. But those who had worked for Brandl were not so fortunate. It shocked several of his suppliers to find themself thrown into Fresnes – notably Brandl’s ‘principal agent’ Max Stocklin, who, like Cornet, had flouted Göring’s injunction; Stocklin was reported by Allied Intelligence to be engaged in ‘a big smuggling racket in German foreign exchange’ after the Gestapo found ‘a large amount of gold on him’. Stocklin was one of 1,859 arrested.

  All of which makes it hard to explain Cornet’s decision to return to Paris other than his obsession with Priscilla. He knew the dangers: the Gestapo had warned Cornet upon ejecting him the first time ‘that if he set foot in France again he would be shot’. He was taking his life in his hands – hers too – when he arrived from Belgium, lovesick, broken in health, and begged Priscilla to come to his hotel. How petrified both must have been at the appearance of two men in SS uniforms with SD on their sleeves who entered his room without a word of introduction and levelled sub-machine guns.

  Priscilla and Cornet were driven to the Gestapo headquarters in Rue des Saussaies. Cornet was cross-examined and transferred to a cell in Fresnes. Priscilla was questioned closely for nearly two days – then suddenly and wholly unexpectedly released.

  Had she had her false papers on her, Priscilla believed that she would ‘no doubt have been shot’ for suspected espionage or abetting the enemy. It is impossible to know. But even if she did make the right call in shedding the identity of Simone Vernier when she visited Cornet, it fails to explain the Gestapo’s behaviour.

  Think of it: an Englishwoman, daughter of a prominent BBC broadcaster, let out of Besançon to have a baby, who did not have that baby, who had already committed a serious breach of her conditions by not signing at the police station in Batignolles, who against Vichy law had abandoned her husband and home, who had been living in adultery with one black market trafficker that we know about, and associating with several others. Whatever light Priscilla is held up to, she does not look like someone whom the Gestapo would let go easily. To persuade them, it needed a person of influence.

  Max Stocklin? Conceivable – at the time of her release by the French police. Now it seemed less likely. Freed on bond, Stocklin was on no better terms with the Gestapo than Cornet. Stocklin’s other protégé, Henri Chamberlin? A distant possibility. He had sensibly detached himself into the Gestapo camp and had a record of bribing them to set free at least two women he was involved with. But this does not mean that Chamberlin achiev
ed the same result for Priscilla, and nothing in the available records connects him to her release.

  Gillian Sutro believed that someone very high up had arranged matters with the Gestapo. In her opinion, the evidence pointed to another lover of Priscilla, who – in the photograph that I had seen in Priscilla’s papers – sat waiting for her beside a warm fireplace in an apartment hung with Impressionist oil paintings. The man who signed himself in his only surviving letter to her: ‘Otto’.

  27.

  ‘OTTO’

  The address had been typed over with XXXs. When I rubbed a crayon across the thin blue paper, I could make out 3 Mozartstrasse, St Moritz. The date was ‘4-3-1947’. The letter was typewritten, in English:

  ‘My darling little Pris!

  ‘Since I came home from France in June 1946 what they did with me I will tell you when we meet again. I am searching for you little Pris all over Europe. Nobody has seen you any more and your last letter which I got is dated November 44. All my notices they took away and so I haven’t had no addresses of you or your family in England.

  ‘First of all, how are you? What have you done in all these years? I have the feeling that you are living in England? Is that true. And your health? Poor little thing had to suffer so much while living in Paris. Everything turned out well? Pris – darling, how much I have thought of you all these 2 years. We were so sweet together and Pris is carved very deeply in my heart. Do you remember when we drove with the bikes to town having lunch together or seeing your friend Zoë (I wrote several times to her and no answer). What a shame I was always in a hurry, but when I tell you why you may understand it now.