Shadow Over Paris — A synopsis
Charlotte de la Cour is French and has studied languages at Oxford. She chose to study in England because her widowed, English mother wanted to be with her while she was studying for her degree.
With the collapse of France looming, Charlotte decides to remain in England but looks for employment as a translator at the Inter Service Bureau in Baker Street. She spends a couple of hours with a Mr. Jefson who persuades her to consider returning to France as an SOE agent. He believed she could be embedded in Paris (Charlotte's home town) before the expected arrival of the all-conquering German Army.
Charlotte travels to France on the pretext of visiting her Aunt Matilde in the hope she can persuade her to return to the relative safety of England until the war is over (by Christmas!). Her aunt refuses.
When Charlotte arrives at the Gare du Nord railway station in Paris, she is struck by the overwhelming smell and black smoke hanging over the city. There is no longer any public transport, which means she is faced with walking to her aunt's smallholding at the edge of the city.
She is approached by Jacques Garnier driving a horse and carriage. He offers to take her to her aunt's. He explains why Paris is empty and smelly. And why there are no birds. Jacques is seventy and explains to Charlotte his family have fled to the south. He chose to stay to look after his horse.
A few days after arriving in Paris, Charlotte bumps into Jacques again who persuades her to ask for work at the Hotel Metropole. She is taken on by Armand, the concierge, as a waitress, knowing that there will be plenty of work once the Germans have arrived.
Charlotte has no idea how she is supposed to contact Jefson in London, but soon meets Agata Stasiak, a Polish SOE agent who turns up at Aunt Matilde's cottage. Eventually, later in the story, Charlotte begins to put two and two together and realises that her first meeting with Jacques Garnier, the subsequent advice to seek employment at the Hotel Metropole, and the appearance of Agata Stasiak are all linked.
Charlotte meets a local Franch lad, Nicolas Escoffier, who's job at a government ministry has gone. She meets him through an American family: Eugene Bayard who owns the Metropole and is an arms manufacturer selling weapons to the Germans. Because America is neutral, there is no impediment to this kind of business. The Bayards live in an exclusive chateau, part of which has been assigned to the American government as an annexe to their embassy in Paris.
Charlotte begins an amicable relationship with Nicolas and starts meeting him after work for a coffee and cake by the River Seine. It is here that she is introduced to Margot Aveline, a curator at the Louvre, and a lecturer at the Sorbonne. The task of certifying the works of art that the Germans are stealing and shipping to Berlin falls to Margot, and it is through this work that she deliberately tries to delay any shipment that the Germans want to take away. She also works for the fledgling Resistance group in Paris.
Nicolas is a staunch Communist and has dreams of one day leading the Communists to government and become President. He invites Charlotte to a clandestine meeting in the Latin Quarter one evening; a meeting that is raided by a German patrol. They avoid any punishment because Nicolas's friend, Bobby Bayard, is a New York Post accredited columnist in Paris. And it is this that persuaded the officer leading the patrol to let them off with a warning.
The first real encounter with inordinate fear for Charlotte is where she agrees to go with Agata Stasiak on a midnight trip to meet up with a Lysander aircraft in the middle of the countryside to pick up a crate and some small arms. But once it is over, and the adrenaline rush subsides, she realises just how dangerous the work is that Agata Stasiak is involved in. It makes her job of waiting on the Germans at the hotel seem pretty insignificant.
But through the story we meet Jacques Garnier's sister, Liliane, who runs an upmarket brothel in the heart of the city, and it is Jacques' hope that those girls Lilliane trusts, will be able to learn much from the pillow talk they encounter.
As the German presence begins to tighten, despite their wishes to make Paris a free, uncomplicated cosmopolitan city, so does the effect on the Parisiennes as controls are introduced in the form of rationing, reporting restrictions and the beginning of the persecution of the Jews and the theft of anything and everything the fleeing, rich Jews left behind. Secret societies are banned, which includes Freemasons. This encourages the Germans to remove (steal) a lot of art and sculptures from the Freemasons' establishments.
Charlotte and her aunt are handed a blow when a young, German officer is billeted with them. This is something the Germans chose to do in order to build up a presence outside of the city centre. And because Agata Stasiak uses Matilde's smallholding to transmit back to London, this puts them in danger of being caught and imprisoned.
The officer assigned to Matilde's home is Hans Gruber. Unlike the image created by the Nazi machine, Gruber is a pleasant, gentle man who despises the darkness his uniform represents. He goes out of his way to be as nice and homespun as he can, but Matilde cannot deal with it. The reason for this is because her husband is a prisoner of the Germans, and she is horrified to think of having a German living in her house. And as a result of Gruber's generosity to her by filling her food cupboard with provisions that would not normally be available to her, it makes her feel like a collaborator, and with it the shame it implies.
Another encounter that Charlotte experienced was being approached by Franch Army deserters and being asked for cigarettes and her favours. It was a fact that the French Army of three million men had been smashed by the German war machine, and 1.8 million soldiers captured. This led to deserters and abandoned soldiers to wander around France and Paris with nothing and nowhere to go. Charlotte survived the encounter by the good grace of a soldier who came her rescue.
Then one day, the German Listening station in Paris picked up a transmission to London from the area within a few kilometres of Matilde's cottage. A triangulation brought it even closer as Agata transmitted from Matilde's barn. Agata isn't found but later in the day she is picked up by the Germans and thrown into the local police station before being taken to Paris and handed over to the Gestapo.
Charlotte learns of this and cycles hurriedly into Paris to see Jacques Garnier. She knows that Agata could crack under torture and reveal everything. This means that she and Matilde would have to flee and head south to Spain. Jacques sends her back to Matilde's and then travels over to Margot Aveline where he asks her to get a team together. His order was that Agata had to be killed before she is handed over to the Gestapo. Despite the order, Agata is rescued and spirited away; her final point of departure from Paris being organised by one of the characters in the story (I haven't mentioned her), which should come as a pleasant surprise to the reader.
As life continues, and as Charlotte sees her role as less important than she first imagined, so her involvement with Nicolas Escoffier deepens until they are sharing a bed. It was an inevitable consequence of spending a lot of time together and the hopelessness that permeated their lives.
But Nicolas isn't the kind to settle into an acceptance of the life many Parisiennes now see as their unfortunate lot. And eventually, Nicolas's impetuosity brings the story to a surprising but understandable conclusion.
Michael Parker.
