Andrée's War Read Online Free Page B

seventy years after last meeting Renée, one of Andrée’s friends still remembered her as ‘quite stunning, so beautifully dressed, so immaculate in every way’.
    In 1939, Steve Passeur’s most successful play,
Je vivrai un grand amour
, was staged in Paris for the first time. Renée played the lead role and performances were selling out each night. It was during the preparations for the staging of this play that Alain, then nearly seventeen, became friendlywith François Clerc, a young man from the Bordeaux region of France, who at nineteen already held a pilot’s licence and had started a small removal business moving theatre props around the capital. He moved with such speed that one moment he was there and seconds later he had disappeared from sight. His political views dovetailed with Alain’s and the boys became close friends. Later he was recruited into the Resistance and would take over the leadership of the group when Alain escaped France and headed for Morocco in 1943. *
    Andrée was looking for a challenging, well-paid job and on 19 May 1939 recorded in her diary:
    Today I am having lunch with Renée. She might be able to help find me an interesting job.
    On 20 May she noted her conversation with Renée:
    Renée came around to tea this afternoon and told me that she had arranged for us to meet a close friend of hers, Roger Langeron, who is the Head of Police at Police Headquarters in Paris. She told me we were to meet him tomorrow and that I was to make sure I looked attractive and that I was elegantly dressed. She said that Langeron wanted to meet me and described him as a thoroughly decent, straightforward chap who has an aristocratic manner about him, thoroughly charming and not too old! I wonder?!
    On the day of the interview, Renée invited her younger sister to lunch. Stepping from the Place Vendôme into The Ritz, Andrée felt buoyed up with confidence as she and Renée made their way into one of the most elegant dining rooms in Paris. Renée complimented Andrée on what she was wearing and the way she had done her hair, although she could not resist having a dig at the British sense of dress by saying: ‘I was seriously worried you might have lost your dress sense while you were living in England, but no,you are as elegant as you ever were and being eighteen months older you have developed a quiet yet sophisticated air which will be noticed by all those you meet.’
    They enjoyed an excellent lunch, during which Renée continued to build up her sister’s confidence with a stream of compliments, before leaving The Ritz to make their way to Police Headquarters, an imposing grey building lying alongside the Seine on the Left Bank, near Notre Dame. As they approached the building, Andrée found it difficult to dismiss her thoughts about the procedures and events which took place within the confines of the building, a venue which over the years had housed some of the most notorious criminals in France. It was an austere, soulless government building with long, endless corridors, police cells and police interview rooms, and crowded with large numbers of uniformed police officers with loaded guns attached to their hips.
    They smiled at the duty officer by the gate, who immediately recognised Renée, and minutes later the two young women were sitting in the office of one of the most powerful men in Paris.
    Préfet Langeron was a tall, imposing man in his forties with the forceful personality that often accompanies great power and authority. As Renée knew, he was looking for people he could trust. He spoke kindly to Andrée: ‘I understand from Renée you are interested in working at Police Headquarters. We need someone to help out in the Passport and ID Department and I like to take on people I know personally. I will follow your career carefully and do anything I can to help its progress. I hope you will decide to come and join