Molière. To them Paris was a garish, eager, overpainted whore with her skirts pulled up over her hips and they raped her, each in his own way. The Storm-troopers forced young French girls to go to bed with them, sometimes at the point of a bayonet, while their leaders like Goering and Himmler raped the Louvre and the rich private estates they greedily confiscated from the newly created enemies of the Reich.
If French corruption and opportunism rose to the surface in the time of France’ s crisis, so did the heroism. One of the underground’ s secret weapons was the Pompiers, the fire department, which in France is under the jurisdiction of the army. The Germans had confiscated dozens of buildings for the use of the army, the Gestapo and various ministries, and the location of these buildings was of course no secret. At an underground resistance headquarters in St. Remy resistance leaders pored over large maps detailing the location of each building. Experts were then assigned their targets, and the following day a speeding car or an innocent-looking bicyclist would pass by one of the buildings and fling a homemade bomb through the window. Up to that point the damage was slight. The ingenuity of the plan lay in what followed next.
The Germans would call in the Pompiers to put out the fire. Now it is instinctive in all countries that when there is a conflagration the firemen are in complete charge: And so it was in Paris. The Pompiers raced into the building while the Germans stood meekly aside and watched them destroy everything in sight with high-pressure hoses, axes and— when the opportunity presented itself— their own incendiary bombs. In this way the underground managed to destroy priceless German records locked away in the fortresses of the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo. It took almost six months for the German high command to figure out what was happening, and by that time irreparable damage had been done. The Gestapo could prove nothing, but every member of the Pompiers was rounded up and sent to the Russian front to fight.
There was a shortage of everything from food to soap. There was no gasoline, no meat, no dairy products. The Germans had confiscated everything. Stores that carried luxury goods stayed open, but their only customers were the soldiers who paid in occupation marks which were identical with the regular marks except that they lacked the white strip at the edge and the printed promise to pay was not signed.
“ Who will redeem these?” the French shopkeepers moaned. And the Germans grinned,“ The Bank of England.”
Not all Frenchmen suffered, however. For those with money and connections there was always the Black Market.
Noelle Page’ s life was changed very little by the occupation. She was working as a model at Chanel’ s on rue Canbon in a hundred-and-fifty-year-old graystone building that looked ordinary on the outside, but was very smartly decorated within. The war, like all wars, had created overnight millionaires, and there was no shortage of customers. The propositions that came to Noelle were more numerous than ever; the only difference was that most of them were now in German. When she was not working, she would sit for