The Paris Time Capsule (23 page)

Camille was a very different girl from Isabelle. She had grown up in Honfleur, the only daughter from a family of timber merchants who had worked in the industry for generations. Camille’s mother had worked as a lady’s maid herself at chateau Montagnac, which is a beautiful chateau just outside Hon
fleur standing to this day. Camille’s parents had married young and when her father went away to the First World War, leaving his young wife, Camille’s mother Marcelle Paget pregnant with Camille, nobody guessed that such a vital, bright young man would be killed in the Somme. Antoine Paget was twenty-four years old when this happened, and Marcelle never fully recovered from the shock.

Marcelle
gave birth to Camille and went back to live and work at the Chateau. Camille was raised by both sets of her grandparents, the Paget family and also the Bouchards, which was her mother’s family name. They were proud people, hardworking families who had hoped that the bright and clever Antoine had a chance of working his way up in the timber industry. He was talented with both his hands and his head and got on with everybody he met. His untimely death like so many other untimely deaths during that terrible war was met with such sadness on the part of his parents that they never fully recovered again.

It was in this atmosphere that the young Camille was raised. Like her father, she excelled at school, saw little of her mother, who had withdrawn back to her old life, hardly acknowledging her child. Camille had hopes of becoming a teacher when she turned sixteen and was keen to continue her education, with the encouragement of every teacher she had, but fate was to step in again and change Camille’s life for the worst.

It was her mother, Marcelle who paid all the bills for Camille, even though she took such scant interest in the child in any other way. When Marcelle died in 1934, there was no hope of Camille continuing her education. There was no one who could afford to maintain it and Camille knew that it would be miraculous if she could find any work at all what with the great depression. The only thing she knew how to do apart from read books was how to work as a maid due to the times she had spent with her mother at the chateau. Camille insisted on going to Paris, despite her grandparents’ angst, in order to maximize her chance of securing a position. There was nothing available for a girl with no experience as a servant in Honfleur.

Camille still cherished a hope that she could study at night to train as a secretary, now that the chances of becoming a teacher had disappeared with her mother’s death. Camille was sixteen years old when she climbed on a train and said goodbye to her grandparents for the very last time, not
realizing that she would never lay eyes on them again.

Paris was everything sh
e had hoped for and not at all as she had expected. After three months of unemployment and life in a boarding house, Camille finally secured an interview at a hotel in the 9
th
arrondissement with a lady and her granddaughter. That lady was Marthe de Florian and her granddaughter was Isabelle. Marthe had always found it difficult to secure a lady’s maid. Her reputation still preceded her.

When Marthe laid eyes on Camille, she seemed very please
d indeed. Camille had olive skin and dark eyes just like Isabelle, but where Isabelle was all roses and dimples and smiles, Camille had a beautiful, thoughtful face, framed by long straight dark hair. Marthe seemed struck by the girl’s discretion and she was convinced that Camille would not ask inane questions about the apartment in Rue Blanche.

Camille was hired immediately and she moved into the apartment straight away. Her duties included dressing both Isabelle and Marthe, tidying their rooms in the mornings, taking care of their wardrobes and attending to any mending that they might have. If the ladies were going out in the afternoons, Camille helped them dress. Soon they came to rely on Camille’s good taste and gave up the selection of outfits completely to her. She would choose evening gowns, manage their wardrobes and supervise both the daily maids who came in to clean and sometimes even the cook. She ran errands for her mistresses all over Paris and they came to find her indispensable at the very least.

As well as having some evenings free, Camille had one afternoon off each week during which she busied herself with the secretarial course that she had planned from the outset. She carefully saved up her francs and made smart purchases with any spare money that she had saved.

The secretarial course finished but Camille didn’t leave her post
in Rue Blanche. By the late 1930s she was so attached to Marthe and Isabelle that she didn’t have the heart to leave them in the lurch. They were almost like family to her, and she was well looked after by them. Camille kept putting off the idea of being a secretary, but she also kept in touch with the girls with whom she had studied at night.

Some of them had jobs now, and that meant they had a little money to spare on having fun. They encouraged Camille to go out with them to nightclubs and dance halls. Camille was young and this was Paris in the jazz age.

Camille and her friends favored a dance hall on a narrow street on the Left Bank. It was at the top of a flight of external stairs, and those floorboards in that hall creaked to the sound of fun and laughter almost every night.  Young voices chattered a mile every minute. So many of them were about to be obliterated by another tragic war. But when the music played and they danced, for a few hours they could forget about that specter. There was always an accordion player, and sometimes a band.

The soldiers were absurdly handsome in their uniforms. They would stand around the bar, pretending to have terribly serious conversations. But they were really only boys.

There was one young man who was altogether different. If he was in the room, Camille knew. There was something about his dark face, an earnestness tempered by the most devastating twinkle in his eyes that emerged now and then, and a smile that could melt chocolate.

He caught the interest of all the girls. That was no surprise. But the men crowded around him too, almost as if they were hanging on to every word he said.

The first night he was there, a young woman approached the group of fellows who were standing at the bar. This young man wouldn’t dance. However, Camille swears he caught her eye. She swears he smiled at her, and when he did, oh my goodness.

Camille wasn’t interested in any of the other men, now. It was as if they were nothing anymore. She was bored by her
companions’ whispered conversations. On the nights that he wasn’t there, Camille felt as if the entire place were empty of anything that mattered.

This strange state of affairs went on for a little while because Camille didn’t have the courage to speak to the man. She was too scared to break the enchantment
that seemed to be between them in case it weren’t real.

A couple of times, one of Camille’s friends asked who he was, where he came from. The soldiers were secretive. They would tap their fingers on their noses, smile at a girl,
and tell her that he was nothing to worry their gorgeous minds about.

But there was no doubt in Camille’s mind that something momentous was about to happen. There was no doubt in her mind that this something was more than exciting. Although she tried to focus on her job and on all the things she was supposed to do, she found her thoughts turning in a hopeless spin, no more so than when she lay awake in her small attic room at night.

When he walked over her way, one night, stopped and introduced himself as Zach Marek, Camille felt her heart rate skyrocket. When he smiled right at her, it was all she could do to take the hand he offered and walk with him to the dance floor.

Once they started to dance, Camille never wanted to stop. It was the way Zach took her in his arms, so gentle, so unlike any of the other young men, who all seemed immature boys now that she had danced with Zach.

When Zach asked if she was coming back the following evening, Camille knew that she wanted to see him every evening for the rest of her life. Zach drew her close and a few nights later when he walked her home and kissed her outside the apartment in Rue Blanche for the very first time, Camille knew she was in love.

They danced, they joked with all the other young people at the dance hall. Camille’s friends accepted that they were a couple, and yet she knew that he was holding something back.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1939 that Zach asked her to meet him at a bistro because he wanted to talk. It wasn’t until they had finished their meal that Camille learned what she had suspected he was protecting her from all along.

Zach Marek told her he was a Jewish refugee who had escaped the Sudetenland on the eve of it becoming part of Nazi Germany. His family had been glassmakers in that region for generations.

Now Jewish people in his homeland were being attacked in the streets, Fascist organizations harassed them and synagogues were being burned to the ground. Zach was a medical student. He knew he would no longer be able to study or live in peace in his own country, so he fled. He only just managed to escape before all Jews were barred from leaving. Furthermore, by late 1938 the Nazis had ordered that all Sudetenland refugees be sent out of Paris and out of London.

Zach was helping at a hospital in Paris, dodging the authorities, working undercover. He was respected and needed there too.

Camille reached out a hand, held Zach’s across the tiny wooden table in the corner of the bistro where they sat. They both knew that Hitler would not spare France. They both knew that somehow Zach would become involved, and they both knew that his situation was more than precarious, it was a downright a danger to them both.

Zach kept in touch with fellow refugees in Paris. It was late 1939 that Camille was approached.

She was told that if she informed on him, her Jewish lover, Zach Marek, that the Nazis would not deport him, but otherwise he would be removed forthwith. It was entirely up to her. They gave her twenty-four hours to make her decision. Camille had never been so terrified, nor so determined in her life.

Camille agreed to spy on him for the Nazis but Camille fed them lies. The game that she played to protect Zach became more and more deceptive and more and more dangerous
and the year wound on.

By May 1940, Camille knew she was pregnant. On the same day she learned this wonderful and complicating news, she was on her way to meet Zach when she was stopped not by the Nazis but by French government agents questioning her activities with the Germans. Camille, who was becoming more and more adept at protecting Zach and now the most precious thing she had of all, told them the truth quickly once they had identified themselves enough to satisfy her.

She agreed with no hesitation to report back to the French authorities exactly what was going on with her Nazi contacts. In return the government agreed to allow Zach to remain n Paris. In return they agreed not to deport him to one of the camps they had now established in the south of France for foreign Jews.

May turned to June. Isabelle was agitated. She was alone. The sound of air raid sirens had wailed over Paris and there were bombings over the city in early June. Isabelle couldn’t take Marthe’s p
recious things with her but it was clear that she was going to have to flee. In a panic, she called Marthe’s lawyer. When he came to the apartment, Camille let him in then worked in the kitchen while the discussion about Isabelle’s will took place. Isabelle told the solicitor to leave everything to Virginia if anything happened.

Camille delivered the signed document to the lawyer’s office two days later and Isabelle told Camille to pack for their escape to Spain. Several of the families that Isabelle knew had left already, their car roofs loaded with every imaginable and useless thing.

Camille packed mindlessly. She had contacted Zach, but every time that she talked to him, every time that she went to his apartment, she was terrified that she was being followed possibly by French as well as German agents.

She continued to pretend to work for the Germans. It was lucky she was smart but her balancing act was of the most precarious kind. She reported to the French every question that the Nazis asked her. She met with them in the most obscure places and at the most obscure times of day and night, always alone.

But it was the threat of the Nazis who kept her awake at night, and it was right before the eve of the invasion of Paris that everything went terribly wrong.

Isabelle was determined that her train ticket out of Paris was going to get her down to Spain. Camille knew so much better, she had read reports of soldiers barricading the stations. Isabelle was not going to leave Paris on a train. Th
e only way out of Paris was to walk.

Isabelle took one suitcase and Camille packed her things too. She knew this day would most likely be the last time she saw Isabelle.

It was in one of those charming cobbled lanes in Paris that it happened. Three men turned into the lane behind Camille and Isabelle who lugged their suitcases at Isabelle’s insistence, towards the nearest station.

The assassins shot her dead in the confusion and the last minute panic that was the eve of the invasion of Paris. Isabelle. They shot Isabelle dead instead of their target Camille, and the last thing Camille saw of her mistress was the beautiful girl’s terrified eyes, asking Camille the question that her lips could no longer form. What was this?