A Dangerous Woman by Susan Ronald

Author:Susan Ronald [Ronald, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

19

FALL OF FRANCE

There are three non-military objectives to be controlled right away: Communism, the haute banque, the NRF.

—OTTO ABETZ, 1940

There had been two false alarms in preparing for war in France, the first in March 1938 when the British refused to back the French calls to intervene militarily to protect Czechoslovakia, and the second six months later, in September, with the Munich Crisis. Many viewed the August 26, 1939, alarm as another drill. It wasn’t. On September 3, 1939, both France and the United Kingdom declared war on Hitler’s Germany for invading Poland. The soldiers who gathered at Paris’s Gare de l’Est railway station, decked out in their uniforms and steel helmets—but still carrying family blankets, clean socks, and handkerchiefs along with food from home—headed to their northern and eastern fortresses. Not for long. During the “Phony War,” which lasted until May 10, 1940, soldiers watched and waited. Parisians, no longer able to kid themselves that war could be averted, nervously tried to get on with their daily lives.

The winter of 1939–1940 was one of the most ferocious on record in Europe, with temperatures in northern Spain reaching zero degrees Fahrenheit. While housewives complained of frozen spigots, soldiers at the front—watching and waiting—were freezing in the Siberian winter. Society ladies contributed what they could to relieve the suffering of France’s soldiers, and foremost among these was Florence Gould. “We keep warm as best we can,” Pierre Dux, a former member of the Comédie-Française, wrote in thanks to Florence, “with whatever falls into our hands, like vandals, including old furniture … parquet flooring, and by emptying the rum barrels that our Marianne of war sends to us, the generous Mrs. Frank Jay Gould.”1

Yet before the real fighting began that spring, Florence suddenly rushed back to Nice on hearing that her mother had been hospitalized. They had remained close, if not always confidantes, or in each other’s company. Florence had fulfilled her mother’s dreams of their living well and becoming part of le Tout-Paris. If Berthe still disapproved of her daughter’s wilder side, there is no record of any rift between them. On the contrary, Berthe lived among the Riviera’s high society thanks to Florence’s, and of course Frank’s, largesse. Sadly, Berthe died on April 16, 1940, of heart failure before Florence arrived. Both Florence and Isabelle, dressed in designer black with black veils covering their faces, accompanied their mother’s body back to Paris for burial at the Montparnasse Cemetery—allegedly in the same crypt where their father had been transported back for burial in 1911. For both, it was the end of an era, if not an end to the fictitious family history.

Isabelle, dark and slender, had never married. It is possible that her sexual preferences did not lie in that direction. Equally, she may well have preferred to live close to Frank, without commitment, and with his millions at her disposal. Many wagging tongues presumed that she had moved to the south of France to keep Frank company, rather than to look after her mother.

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