German officials claimed these people had been relocated to temporary work camps, but as far as anyone knew, none had ever been allowed to so much as pack a bag before they left, much less return to their homes.
It was when Fabrice—feeling like a revolutionary—dared to show the book to his school friend Claude that Claude began to speak to him about working against the Nazi occupation. After a few days, Claude took Fabrice to meet an old man below the Arc de Triomphe, who interviewed him extensively about his background, his feelings for the Germans, his talents.
“You must be very sure, and never mention anything, toanyone. Not even in your own family. It is risky,” the man told him. “There is a constant danger of betrayal. The cells aren’t in contact for fear that if one is brought down, the others will be revealed through torture. We meet in small groups, and we use false names. That way if someone is picked up, they can’t betray the rest, even if they tried to.”
“I want to help,” Fabrice insisted. “I won’t tell a soul.”
The meeting took place in the apartment of a doctor named Duhamel, on the rue Paul Valéry, off the Avenue Victor Hugo.
“A doctor’s office is a useful cover,” Claude explained when they approached, “because so many different kinds of people can come in and out without arousing suspicion.”
Fabrice learned that the wealthy Dr. Duhamel dutifully cared for wounded German soldiers in public, while secretly treating wounded British and American airmen, then facilitating their escapes across the border to Spain. This required finding extra food for the wounded at a time when some Parisians were forced to eat cats or “bread” made ofchestnuts and sawdust. The doctor’s office became a hub of information and smuggling; messages with ideas for bombing targets were hidden in stinky cheeses from Vichy, then transferred to those who had a radio and could broadcast the messages to London. Rural cells, calledmaquis, sent information on German troop movements through notes sewn into farmers’ underwear.
In the meeting were a handful of people of different ages and backgrounds: a student, a communist, a trade unionist, a Polish immigrant. And Paulette. Though Fabrice listened intently to the frightening, thrilling things people were saying during the meeting, he couldn’t keep his eyes off her.
She was the doctor’s secretary. She perched on the edge of a desk, a red beret on her head, her clothes old but neat, a thin belt defining her waist. But it was her blue eyes that captured his attention, flashing as she spoke with fiery conviction, determination radiating from her. Later Fabrice would come to realize that others did not find her anything special, and it amazed him; to Fabrice, Paulette was the embodiment of everything he could ever want, ever aspire to. The turn of her wrist, the flash of pale chest where her blouse gapped, the way she tucked a wayward lock of honey-gold hair behind one ear as though slightly annoyed, but continued undaunted with her impassioned speech.
Fabrice was enthralled.
Paulette was to be his official contact. She was brave, fierce, unafraid. She had been working with the Résistance since the very beginning of the occupation; as a young woman, she could bicycle through the streets without arousing suspicion.
“We of the Résistance come together with different visions, and different aims,” said the doctor. “But we are united by love for country, and hatred for an occupying force which seeks to overwhelm and co-opt us. The Allies are working from without; we must help them from within. But bear in mind: You are entering a world of shadows.”
While they spoke a plump, middle-aged woman sat by the window, peering outside, as though not listening. At first Fabrice thought shewas rude; later he came to realize that someone was assigned to keep watch at the large windows overlooking the street. Usually it was this same woman, who turned out to be the family maid, named Carine. The fine furniture, carpets, and oil paintings in the office—and the fact that they still had a full-time maid—were evidence of the Duhamel family’s privilege, and Fabrice’s father used to speak of wealth as the font of evil. But at least with this family, Fabrice decided, their privilege was the basis for educated defiance of the enemy.
It was a little like being invited to play a part in a theater performance, Fabrice thought, as talk swirled around him: how to obtain false papers, adopting a false name. Paulette showed them all the back ways out of the building, in case they were found out. Even the doctor and his wife didn’t speak to each other about what they were doing, for fear of being captured and tortured for information about each other. Those going undercover had to sever ties with family and friends to achieveclandestinité.
It was a shadowland fraught with danger. Fabrice had never felt more alive.
• • •
Fabrice was useful to the cause because he was young, and had inherited his mother’s blond hair. There were very few young men left in Paris—most were in work camps or exiled with the military—but his papers declared him to be too young for obligatory work service, so Fabrice was able to move more or less freely through the streets.
Also, he had a gift with words.
The war was being fought not only on the battlefields but in the minds and hearts of the citizenry. Information was key.
“The Nazis keep control of the media, thePariser Zeitung,” Paulette told him. He tried to concentrate on what she was saying, and not simply the shape of her cupid-bow lips as they moved. “It is published in German with the occasional single-sheet supplement in Frenchsummarizing the news. As the only official source of information for the French people and the German army of occupation in northern France, it has its own correspondent in Vichy.”
Fabrice was familiar with the paper. ThePariser Zeitungwas vehemently anti-British, anti-communist, and anti-Semitic. In a quiet act of resistance, citizens would go out of their way to use this paper to sop up the oil when they cooked or to line the bottoms of birdcages.
The newspaper flattered the French people and attempted to demonstrate that the two cultures were not only harmonious but complementary. Editorials heaped praise upon the French banking system and the businesses represented at the Leipzig fair and the France Européenne de la Photographie exhibition. Glowing articles raved about Paris, its monuments, museums, cafés, nightlife, gourmet cuisine... and the beautiful Parisian women.
“According to the Nazi line,” explained a man known to Fabrice only as the Belgian, “Paris is to become the playground for the German overlords; this is the role France is expected to play in the New Order.”
“Pigs,”said Paulette, pretending to spit.
The Belgian grunted his agreement, then told Fabrice about the resistance efforts in print. An underground newspaper calledLe Médecin Françaisencouraged doctors to approve collaborators forservice de travail obligatoire, while medically disqualifying the others.La Terretold farmers how best to smuggle their produce to feed Résistance members, andBulletin des chemins de ferurged railroad workers to sabotage German trains and other transport.Libération-NordandDéfense de la France,both begun by student groups, had mass circulations in the tens of thousands.
Fabrice’s favorite example wasUnter uns,a newspaper published in German specifically for the occupiers; it printed stories of humiliating German defeats on the eastern front.
Fabrice started by writing tracts that were churned out on old mimeograph machines. Then a friendly printshop in the Maraisallowed them to print their flyers in the middle of the night, running the risk that an astute German might notice the typeface was the same as officially sanctioned documents. They crowded the words together on a single sheet because printing materials—paper, ink, stencils—were scarce and precious, as their sale was prohibited to anyone but the occupiers.
Fabrice began to wear mittens, even out of season, to hide the telltale ink stains on his fingers. Working for hours in the printshop most nights, he barely slept. In the mornings he and Claude would shove thick sheafs of freshly minted pamphlets into the fronts of their jackets, then leave small piles on busy street corners and church steps, secured with a rock so they wouldn’t blow away. When possible they might slip them directly into mailboxes, or hand them over to Paulette or other unnamed contacts in the dark.
While he had been warned of the tension of living with the constant fear of exposure and betrayal, Fabrice relished his new role. He made up lie after lie to his parents to explain his whereabouts, and hardly spared a thought for his little sister, Capucine. Eventually he went home less and less, preferring to sleep on a small pallet at the back of the printshop, or on one of the doctor’s extra cots.
He was playing a role in a drama, and Paulette was his heroine.
