Priscilla (36 page)

The boy who had left his Paris slum at eleven and subsisted out of dustbins now drove a white Bentley. White flowers were another obsession, orchids and dahlias especially. Chamberlin endowed 100,000 francs for a dahlia prize. ‘Send me flowers' – his reply when those he had helped enquired how they might repay him. He could not bear to see a flower die.

When Göring outlawed the black market in March 1943, Chamberlin, now in the Gestapo, exchanged hunting down goods for hunting down Jews, Allied airmen, members of the Resistance. His men visited the One-Two-Two following a mission against maquisards in Haute-Savoie. Fabienne Jamet, the brothel owner, described in her memoirs seeing Frenchmen dressed in German uniforms sitting downstairs with a magnum and a few girls, boasting ‘Did you see how I hit him? He'll be pissing blood for a week, that poor bugger . . .' She said of Chamberlin's gang: ‘They'd beaten people up, tortured people, and there they were, laughing about it . . . We saw them all at one time or another. Horrible creatures.'

At his requisitioned home in 93 Rue Lauriston – which was equipped with cells and ‘where torture was a daily practice', wrote Gillian Sutro – Chamberlin entertained journalists, industrialists, actresses, politicians, German leaders. He knew personally Hitler's Ambassador to Paris, Otto Abetz. He was on tutoyer terms with Vichy Prime Minister Pierre Laval. He was ‘untouchable' said one police inspector after being locked up in a cell on the second floor. Chamberlin boasted to Fabienne Jamet's husband: ‘If you have any mates inside you'd like sprung, you've only got to ask. I can fix it.' If anyone could have authorised Priscilla's freedom, it was Chamberlin.

Chamberlin's toxic influence over the Paris police is reflected in a Police Judiciaire report of 30 August 1944. ‘Chamberlin-Lafont dictates his wishes to the office of the prefect of police and his demands are met, contrary to state security.' An Inspector Metra verified that Chamberlin's gang had taken him from his house to the Quai des Orfèvres, where Chamberlin ordered Metra to release a group of criminals. Four other inspectors and the police commissioner in Neuilly registered similar abuses: Monsieur Henri did what he wanted. In one hearing at the Court of Appeal, ‘he freed an arrested woman he knew, drawing his pistol and threatening anyone who opposed him.'

The police report failed to reveal the identity of the woman he rescued, but Chamberlin's taste, which is what convinces me that he knew Priscilla, was for semi-aristocratic women married to useless husbands. The post-Liberation press titled them the ‘countesses of the Gestapo'. Blonde, often bisexual, the countesses found the irascible Chamberlin hard to resist and queued up to debase themselves: the Marquise de Wiet, a former hairdresser who lived below Priscilla and Cornet; Annie de Saint-Jaymes, the separated wife of a gay antiquarian, who furnished 93 Rue Lauriston with antiques provided by her husband; Vicomtesse Marga d'Andurain, a former mistress of Mussolini; Evanne, the opium-addicted Princess Mourousi; Sylviane, the soi-disante Marquise d'Abrantès. Then there was the authentic Marquise d'Austerlitz, who taught Chamberlin to ride. In his interrogation, he described this ginger-headed equestrian as ‘a crazy woman and a bitch', with absolutely no restraint in her choice of lovers.

Chamberlin's most representative mistress – the woman who had first unleashed in him his appetite for attractive titled blondes – was Max Stocklin's protégée: Comtesse Marie Tchernycheff-Bezobrazoff. When Stocklin introduced them at Chamberlin's reception it sparked an improbable coup de foudre.

The hothouse flowers. The foie gras. The tasteful gilt furniture – courtesy of Monsieur de Saint-Jaymes. And muffling any scream from the library, the laughter of guests, the fluting voice of her host. How could a bad actress have responded other than she did when Monsieur Henri gave Marie a tea-service that had once belonged to the Empress Eugénie – part of a carve-up of the American's ambassador's silverware collection; not to mention a laissez-passer which allowed her to circulate in Paris after the curfew, to visit him.

Marie moved into Henri Chamberlin's bedroom in Rue Lauriston, and in December 1942 set up, under his protection, her own purchasing emporium. When Marie was imprisoned in Fresnes in March 1943, during the sudden round-up of black-marketeers, Chamberlin went to see both Helmut Knochen, chief of Gestapo operations in Avenue Foch, and Karl Boemelburg, director of the Gestapo in Rue des Saussaies. Marie was let out after fifteen days.

Could Henri Chamberlin have done the same for Priscilla and stopped Roger Le Meur from prosecuting her?

All that Priscilla was prepared to admit to Gillian about Emile Cornet's racketeering was that his jacket was lined with expensive gold watches smuggled out of Switzerland. Her ignorance was almost plausible, but it begs some pretty tantalising questions. Was ‘Monsieur Henri' himself one of Cornet's ‘very odd friends' – and, if so, how much did the knowledge that Cornet might be engaged in something illicit and violent appal or even excite her? In
Belle de Jour
, Joseph Kessel writes about Séverine: ‘In order to stimulate her desire for Marcel she had increasingly frequent recourse to imagining the dangerous and mysterious circles in which his young life moved . . . She hoped to watch him in the underworld and revive in herself, if only for a while, the sense of fear which was at the core of her sensuality.'

Moody, with a long thin nose and the piercing black eyes of a goshawk, Chamberlin was not a person whom Priscilla would forget; and Chamberlin, with his taste for young comtesses, would not have overlooked my blonde twenty-five-year old aunt.

Chamberlin liquidated all records of his gang, as did his contacts in the Préfecture. When it came to investigating what had gone on during these years, anything to do with the French Gestapo was sensitive. According to the book on the Occupation which Gillian used for her research, the officers charged with the inquiry discovered the rottenness to be so far-reaching that they were under orders to close the files on the grounds that the nation's morale, already severely weakened, ‘would not support the shock of such devastating revelations'.

In December 1944, Chamberlin was hastily executed to ensure that he took with him to his grave as many embarrassing secrets as possible. He was sanguine about the death sentence, telling his lawyer that he had lived two lives and could afford to lose one. ‘For four years I had what l love most in the world, orchids and Bentleys. So I don't regret anything.'

Max Stocklin was tried thirteen months after Chamberlin was shot. The court reconvened on 19 January 1946, to hear the verdict. There is no record of what Emile Cornet said in defence of his friend, only his reaction. Stocklin was sentenced to ‘forced labour in perpetuity for espionage and commerce with the enemy' – a penalty which included ‘degradation and national indignity' and the confiscation of his goods, valued at 20 million francs, once these could be located.

Cornet wrote immediately to Priscilla: ‘Some time or another Max will be let out and he can go to Switzerland.' He predicted accurately. The last document in Stocklin's police file was a clipping to say that Max Stocklin had been amnestied on 23 June 1952.

24.
RESORTISSANTE BRITANNIQUE

One July morning in 1942, early on in their relationship, Priscilla ran away from Emile Cornet after he tried to rape her.

She telephoned Daniel Vernier as soon as Cornet left the apartment. ‘I had to lock myself in the lavatory all night, I was so frightened.' Vernier dropped everything, picked her up at 10 a.m. and, stopping briefly at the police station in Place Charles Fillion – this is the occasion when she signed for a month in advance – drove her to a small hotel in the Dordogne. At some moment on the road to La Roque Gageac, she revealed the reason behind Cornet's assault: she had admitted to her jealous lover her previous romance with Vernier.

They arrived at the hotel at nightfall. Several actors were also staying there, shooting a film. ‘The leading lady turned out to be a friend of Emile's and an acquaintance of mine. I had to explain to her that I had left Emile and did not want him to know where I was.'

The days passed. The weather was warm and Priscilla bathed in the river. Vernier stayed a few miles away in his father-in-law's chateau, Domaine de Mirabel. He came over for lunch. Gradually, Priscilla recovered.

‘Then one day I received a letter from a friend in Paris telling me to expect Emile's visit as he had found out where I was.' The actress had betrayed her. ‘I determined to hide, so I stayed in my room for a few days having briefed
everyone carefully. Emile turned up and lunched in the hotel. He asked if I was known there and they all said “No”, so he went away puzzled.'

Cornet had threatened Priscilla, saying ‘You cannot escape from me.' In La Roque Gageac, his words preyed on her. She wrote a note to Vernier and took a train to Paris, lodging with Zoë Temblaire at 31 Boulevard Berthier. Then Zoë betrayed her, contriving a meeting at which Cornet turned up. ‘As soon as I saw him, I couldn't help myself. I was still in love and however awful life was with him it would be worse without him. So I went back.'

In our century, Priscilla would have recognised in Cornet's blazing jealousy, punctuated by outbreaks of physical violence, the symptoms of domestic abuse. But he was a violent and dangerous man with violent and dangerous friends who offered her protection. For the next eight months, the couple resumed what she called ‘their cat and dog existence' – to the despair of Daniel Vernier.

If Priscilla felt powerless to break her Belgian lover's stranglehold, Vernier most certainly did not. Outraged by Cornet's brutal attack on Priscilla and by the obsessive manner in which he kept her captive, Vernier vowed not to rest ‘until he had got Emile banned from France and sent back to his own country'.

An anonymous letter to the Gestapo in Rue des Saussaies, reporting that Cornet continued to work in the now banned black market? A word in the wrong ear? Priscilla never did find out how Vernier achieved it. But an entry in Gillian Sutro's notebooks salutes his success. ‘Germans came twice to search the flat. The second time Emile was seized and sent back to Belgium. Pris fled by back door.'

The Gestapo had come for Cornet early on a cold day in March 1943. Priscilla heard their footsteps on the stairs, grabbed her coat and left by the porte de service on the first floor, which was close to the kitchen. Many years later, I stood opposite the side doorway out of which she slipped, and followed her route.

Beret down over her forehead, not daring to look anyone in the face or to appear in any way conspicuous, Priscilla set off. Her reaction on her release from Besançon, two years before, had verged on the insouciant. ‘One soon got used to seeing German uniforms about the place and one ignored them.' But the Paris of March 1943 was not the triumphant Paris of March 1941. The Germans had surrendered at Stalingrad in February, with 200,000 dead; the Allies had defeated Rommel at El Alamein; and the Germans had marched into Vichy. The whole of France lay under Nazi rule, with Gestapo numbers in Paris increased to 32,000. In their repressive measures, it was possible to read signs of nervousness.

Priscilla turned the corner into Rue Lord Byron and kept on walking. A gendarme glanced back at her twice, his eyes drifting down her front as if looking for a yellow star.

Cornet had prevented her from appreciating the danger she was in. She was an ‘espèce sans carte' in a city where notices on every corner demanded to know: ‘Etes-vous en règle?' But her documents were not in order. Her British passport was a liability. Her French carte d'identité had expired four
months earlier. And Cornet's possessiveness, combined with his fierce antipathy towards Daniel Vernier, had prevented Priscilla from letting Vernier supply her with fresh papers.

With Cornet not there to protect her, the gravity of Priscilla's situation was exposed. She could not go to the Mairie without a valid identity card to claim her monthly coupons for food and clothes. But more dangerous for a ‘resortissante britannique' like Priscilla was to be caught without papers or with the wrong papers. She risked being bundled into a police van and sent to Libenau, a women's internment camp in Germany, as had happened to an English gymnast she had known in Besançon.

Priscilla crossed Avenue de Friedland. A policeman stopped the traffic to let three German lorries go by. She continued walking towards Rue Beaujon, merging into the early morning crowds. Her fear was to run into a police checkpoint. Sudden curfews and round-ups were a permanent feature following the introduction of the Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO), compelling French men over eighteen and French women over twenty-one to go and work in Germany. Since February, Gestapo officers in plain clothes watched for signs of anyone going backwards at the sight of barriers being put up outside the Métro or cinemas. The Gestapo were looking for STO defaulters, but also Jews, saboteurs, spies, and – after murderous attacks on Germans – random hostages.