Priscilla (32 page)

In this muddled and futureless present, more important than any division between cowardly and heroic was the pressure imposed on her to construct a new moral system.

Priscilla never found a world into which she fitted except in Paris, and for a while, ghastly as it was, she became part of it. She would not have suspected this at the time, because it was so terrifying; but in a curious way the Occupation was when her life came to fruition. The war gave her a new identity. It taught her to live in the moment and to throw off the burden of her father and the past.

But the likeliest reason that Priscilla remained in France is also the simplest: she was – unexpectedly and infatuatedly – in love.

22.
EMILE CORNET

She remembered the cigarette burn of his look. He touched the inside of her arm and she felt the current jitter through her. I do not know how she met Emile Cornet, and there is no one left to ask. But he unsettled Priscilla from the start, and though their rapport was for the most part physical, it marked her life. Her relationship with Robert had been all about surface; with Cornet, everything flared from within, from what remained hidden.

‘He was rather an ugly little man with a sort of twisted face, but he was full of vitality and personality and he swept me off my feet.'

His full name was Emile-Hubert Cornet du Fonteny. He was born in 1905 near Charleroi, the son of a minor Belgian aristocrat whose title he used when it suited him. Known on the Grand Prix circuit as ‘le baron Belge', Cornet took over management of the family enamelworks, selling them in 1937 to concentrate on motor racing. He was planning to compete in the São Paulo Grand Prix when German tanks smashed over the Belgian border.

He was reckless, with a short man's large appetites. His impetuous, over-decisive nature often landed him in hot water. Months before he embarked on his ‘impossible amour' with Priscilla, Cornet had attempted to flee into Spain, but according to an Intelligence report in Kew he was arrested by the Spanish police and delivered back to the Nazis in Hendaye – ‘by whom he
has apparently been third-degreed and has given away practically everything viz the Murchie & Clayton case, he having been in contact with these in France.' Cornet's testimony resulted in Murchie and Clayton – organisers of the chief British escape network – spending prolonged periods in various Spanish prisons. His unpleasant experience discouraged Priscilla from attempting to cross the border. Any plan to leave France was shelved after they met.

‘He attracts me and makes me laugh.' For the first time, Priscilla's companion was an available man who satisfied her physically and with whom she imagined herself in love. Invincible in the strength of her infatuation, she forgot her married lover, her husband, the police. When her Jewish friend Hans expressed his concern, she shrugged. ‘I don't care. Let them search for me. I shall just disappear.'

‘For the first few weeks everything was perfect,' she wrote.

Cornet invited her skiing to Megève. An extension of Maxim's and Fouquet's, Megève had a reputation as ‘the white capital of the black market'. The pair stayed in a hotel on the outskirts and saw no one who knew them. Cornet
was an expert skier. Priscilla had difficulty in following him down the pistes, but he was patient. His winter sports clothes set off his dark looks.

He told her: ‘Without looking at you, I know every movement you make and every person you talk to.'

‘It's the same with me.'

She was out of her head. She felt no guilt. She had never been happier, she thought. Before she knew it, she was living with him – ‘and long was I to regret my folly'.

Robert and Vernier believed that Priscilla had escaped to Spain. In fact, between May and July, she was staying with Cornet in a large house near Paris, coming in once a week to sign at the police station in Batignolles.

Jealousy can be slow to show its fangs. ‘I will never let you go,' he said rather too often. ‘I don't care what happens. You cannot escape from me.' She mistook his possessiveness for strength.

The couple moved about ‘fairly freely'. Priscilla did not ask herself what he lived on. Cornet never appeared to work. She supposed that it was difficult for him to find a job, being Belgian. He could not motor-race, which was all he cared about. Even so, he seemed to have plenty of money, although how he made it was a mystery. Because of petrol rationing, cars were forbidden to most of the population; only 7,000 private vehicles were licensed in Paris. But Cornet enjoyed unexplained access to a car – and sometimes to a lorry – in which he chauffeured Priscilla at full throttle.

Her love of speed dates from this period. Cornet later reported to Priscilla how he had driven with the wife of the motor-ace René Dreyfus: ‘She is very sporty and drives like a man.
Almost as well as you
. Which is a compliment.' She continued to drive like the clappers in post-war England. ‘I am not a lover of motoring,' SPB wrote, after a hair-raising car journey with Priscilla through the Highlands. ‘Usually we go too fast. Pris likes touching the hundred and reminds me of Mr Toad.' Like Mr Toad, she was heedless of the dangers that she raced towards.

‘I still intend to marry you if one day you ever make the mistake of accepting me.' Cornet's obsession with Priscilla outlived the war. His letters confirm their
mutual attraction. ‘Since you left, it's been impossible to envisage having a love affair, still less a liaison. And everything is empty, empty, empty.' He addressed her as ‘femme fatale', ‘mon ping-pong', ‘mon future better-half'. He longed to settle down with her. ‘You were, and will always remain for me, the woman I loved most. And I do not regret our “impossible amour”. Oh no!!' One letter ends: ‘Write me when you feel like it, and if once you want to come back let me know and don't go straight back to Robert! Bye! Your best friend. Emile.'

Cornet hated the thought of Robert touching her. ‘I can't bear the way he looks at you and speaks to you,' Cornet said, following a charged encounter with her husband, after Robert discovered that she had not escaped to England. She had known Cornet barely a month and already he was pressing Priscilla to divorce Robert and marry him. She was never free when Cornet wanted her; only when her sclerotic nitwit of a husband deigned it. Worn down by his demands, Priscilla finally petitioned Robert for an annulment of their marriage on the grounds that no child had issued from their union nor ever could, and ‘offered to give proof of a certain number of facts'.

A burning Robert instructed his lawyer to take advantage of a recent law which encouraged the judge to seek delays and promote reconciliation. Important correspondence in Robert's possession proved that during their four years of ‘unclouded union' the couple had never ceased to show one another feelings of the tenderest attachment. For instance, a few days after ‘brusquely abandoning the marital home, to go and live with a certain Emile', Priscilla had written Robert a letter which concluded: ‘I kiss you tenderly.' Another letter from Priscilla contained the following passage, the few sad lines being all that remain of her letters to Robert: ‘I hope that everything is going to get better with E . . . Thank you again for everything you did. I relax and try to think as little as possible. Until now I have managed to avoid the blues. I'm thinking of coming back just after Pentecost, but I won't stay longer than 48 hours in Paris before going to Le Touquet . . . I leave you with a strong hug.'

Robert's lawyer succeeded in arguing that such documents invalidated her allegations. The judge dismissed Priscilla's application. She tried again the following year – with the same result.

Why was Robert adamant in blocking Priscilla's request for an annulment? An obvious explanation is that his family did not get divorced. It was forbidden; in 600 years, it had not happened once.

At Boisgrimot, news of Priscilla's elopement fell on his mother with the unwelcome impact of the German invasion. Adelaide's faith made it irrelevant that Priscilla might have grounds for wishing to separate from her youngest son because he had not slept with her. Until the First World War, Adelaide had refused to allow divorcees into the house. Soon after Priscilla's petition, probably broken by it, her mother-in-law died.

Priscilla's behaviour also upset Yolande and Georges – to whom had fallen the role of guardians of the Doynel family honour. More dangerous still, it set her on a collision course with the French government and with the nation's father-protector: the white-haired octogenarian whose ubiquitous features had begun to appear on ashtrays above the logo ‘A new France is born'.

Marshal Pétain's regime marched to the beat of a gymnastic Christianity, but was perched on precarious legal foundations. One day in February 1942, getting out at the wrong floor of his hotel in Vichy, Pétain opened a door and found a young woman typing away on a portable table, before realising that she was sitting on the bidet. He asked what she was typing. ‘The Constitution.'

It was not only the Consitution that was changing. A key act of Pétain's National Revolution was a reform of the divorce law, prohibiting divorce in the first three years of marriage, and then only in exceptional cases of physical cruelty. Adultery – to which the Maréchal was no stranger – was not considered grounds for divorce, but was to be treated as a punishable crime. A wife's infidelity was considered a graver fault than her husband's. In December 1942, the Vichy government allowed wives of POWs caught having an affair to be fined or imprisoned. This was in addition to the 23 July Law, which made a married woman found guilty of ‘abandoning the hearth' liable to a year in prison and a 20,000-franc fine. With 1.8 million Frenchmen absent in German prison camps, including Robert's brother Guy, it was important not to feed their anxieties.

Ever since the Armistice, Pétain had worked to fortify the family unit as the ‘essential cell' of social order, cemented by the promotion of the woman as a faithful wife and child-bearing mother who worked tirelessly and did not budge from the hearth. A woman's offspring were more cherished still. Patrick Buisson, the best recent historian of Vichy France, argues that it was better to be a single young mother with an illegitimate child than to be sexually sterile with no children at all. In February 1942, abortion became a crime that carried the death penalty – and two people were guillotined. And yet with all their men away, it was not so easy for French women to fulfil the Maréchal's expectations.

Desperate to conserve a freedom she had not enjoyed until now, Priscilla, who had had an abortion in France and sought a divorce – and who, in addition, was ‘sans issue' and ‘sans profession' – risked placing herself outside the protection of Church and State.

Her husband was a Catholic loyal to the French government, but more than that Robert still loved Priscilla, still regarded her as his wife, and desired to win her back. And he had a further reason for his intransigence. Robert did not believe for a moment, having met him, that Emile-Hubert Cornet du Fonteny was the man to make Priscilla happy. He was not alone in his reservations. Among Priscilla's letters is one from Berry, her former room mate in Besançon: ‘I used to worry about the Belgian with whom you lived in Paris, just because, although he made money off and on, both he and you spent what he made recklessly so that there were bad times.'

Priscilla's new lover was a figure out of some black comic strip. I was reminded of Hitchcock, and also of the French director Louis Malle, as I followed my unsuspecting aunt down into the underworld to which Emile Cornet now introduced her, and in particular
Lacombe, Lucien
(1974). All because of a flat tyre, Malle's young protagonist, rejected by the Resistance, wheels his bicycle into a provincial French town, sees large cars, hears music and, before he knows it, is swept up into working for the German police. From early 1942, Priscilla drifted in the same milieu which inspired Malle's
most controversial character. And the more I uncovered, the deeper I understood why its French audience had found Lacombe's amoral story hard to accept and impossible to talk about. ‘Forget suicide and incest,' said Malle's brother Vincent. The subject touched on a taboo more potent and raw and shaming than either. ‘It shows how easy it is to be on the wrong side and not realise it.'

Priscilla and Cornet moved back to Paris at the beginning of July. Cornet had found them ‘a very nice flat' in a short cobbled street near the Etoile. The address – 11 bis Rue Lord Byron – was in the heart of Nazi Paris and less than a hundred yards from the Champs-Elysées.

But three months into Priscilla's new relationship, cracks appeared. ‘I was not at all happy as too many things worried me.'

Priscilla's immediate concern was the French police: she had heard that the commissioner of Batignolles was looking for her.

It was always going to be a long shot that the Paris police had preserved a file on Priscilla. In a shabby room inside the Préfecture de Police in Rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, the archivist shook his head. My best bet was the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. His reaction was disappointing, though hardly surprising. Most dossiers on foreigners were hurriedly removed as the Germans entered Paris, and scuttled in the Seine.