Elsa’s heartbeat matched the rhythm of her shoes on the pavement. A single mistake—a flyer dropped, a satchel searched—and Fresnes Prison would be her next home. At the boulevard Saint-Michel, cafés were filled with subdued voices. German uniforms flashed at the corner, their boots loud on the stones. The Luxembourg Gardens loomed to her right, their gates locked and chained. She recalled the sound of children’s laughter there before the war and felt the papers in her satchel grow heavier, matching her mood.

As she turned down the rue de Vaugirard, the smell of roasted chestnuts lingered in the air. Each shop window she passed reflected her figure—an ordinary woman apparently heading home at dusk. Yet her every step from the Sorbonne’s ancient cellars, where professors and students worked shoulder to shoulder at clattering typewriters and battered mimeograph machines, was an act of war.

She soon reached rue de l’Odéon, where her friend Sylvia Beach had permanently closed her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, in response to the German occupation. But she knew that Sylvia’s upstairs apartment, aka “the back room” of her shop, still sheltered forbidden words and several of Elsa’s nude sculptures. Across the street, Adrienne Monnier’s bookstore, La Maison des Amis des Livres, remained open, hoping for better days.

Elsa’s first stop was a smoky café. Inside, conversation buzzed around the hiss of an espresso machine. She nodded to the waiter, who pretended not to notice as she slid a stack of papers beneath a folded newspaper onto a back table. The spirit of France will not be extinguished. Join us. Resist. Within the hour, the bundle from her satchel was divided among students and workers.

Planting the seeds of the growing Resistance, the flyers would scatter by morning, carried in pockets and handbags and slipped under doors, a thousand small sparks flying through the neighborhoods of Paris.

**

Elsa and Claude had temporarily switched residences with his parents. The elderly Blanchards were living in the younger couple’s Paris apartment, while Claude and Elsa hid RAF and American pilots who’d crashed or landed in fields near the Blanchards’ country home in Luzarches. The pilots passed vital information to Allied forces, delivered by Resistance couriers like Claude and Elsa.

In a cramped closet hidden behind an armoire whose warped doors barely closed, two downed RAF pilots were huddled: Flight Sergeants Roy Frederick and Leslie Tweed, both in their twenties. The smell of wool coats and mothballs permeated their hiding place.

After three nights of playing cards with the pilots, Elsa pulled clothing from Claude’s and his father’s closets, to provide warm, inconspicuous outfits for the perilous trek over the mountain range above Vittel, France, into Basel, Switzerland. She packed satchels with first-aid supplies, bread, cheese, dried sausages, and thermoses filled with chicory. Kissing the cheeks of each pilot, she murmured, “Bonne chance.” Claude took her into his arms for a long embrace. He lingered another moment, inhaling her scent. “I’ll send word when we’ve made it,” he promised.

Claude led Roy and Leslie to a mule and wagon in the barn. “My beloved Cocteau,” Claude said, “the only mule in Paris who doesn’t recite poetry!”

The pilots hid under a false floor in the wagon which Claude covered with a tarp. After piling cabbages and potatoes atop the tarp, he took the reins in hand and Cocteau pulled the wagon through the streets of Luzarches. Just another farmer making deliveries.

At the first checkpoint, two Nazi-Vichy soldiers inspected his papers. One circled the wagon, clicking his rifle against the false floor. Cocteau flicked his ears but stood quietly, while Claude struggled to appear calm. Thankfully he was soon waved through. By evening, Luzarches was 15 miles behind them.

When Claude finally lifted the wagon’s false panel, he and his passengers were inside a fellow Resistance fighter’s barn. Roy and Leslie stiffly climbed from their hideaway, rubbing their benumbed legs and arms. They greedily shared the meal Elsa had prepared and washed it down with lukewarm chicory. After a few hours of sleep, the trio resumed their trek. Cocteau and the wagon remained behind.

***

Two weeks later, the men reached the foothills. Even in darkness, they could see the Vosges Mountains looming above, ridges covered with snow. From his previous journeys Claude knew these slopes, and he moved at a steady, unhurried pace, his tall frame bent slightly under the weight of his rucksack. The two pilots followed in single file. They carried no lanterns; light was too great a risk. Moonlight’s reflection from snow revealed the winding track ahead.

Beyond the ridges lay the Swiss frontier, a thread of land between the Vosges range and the Jura foothills. After trudging silently for hours through the forests, Claude signaled a stop. Their final approach would cut across farmland and through an orchard of skeletal apple trees—within sight of Grenzpolizei, the German border police and their dogs.

On the Rhine plain below, Basel lay half-hidden in mist, half-gleaming in early morning light—its rooftops a scatter of russet tiles and dark slate, pitched and irregular, as though the whole city had been stitched together across the centuries.

For the exhausted figures on the ridge, the sight seemed surreal. Beyond those rooftops lay neutral ground, safety, a chance to breathe without fear of the Germans and their dogs. Yet the river glinting below was also a barrier, silver-bright and menacing with Nazi patrols.

****

In the back room of Shakespeare and Company, Elsa found a brief refuge in the smell of paper and ink. The doorbell chimed, and Adrienne stepped inside carrying a bundle of books. Sylvia handed one to Elsa. “For you,” she said lightly. “The Little Prince.”

Inside the flyleaf, a single penciled line:
“Les oiseaux sont passés à travers les nuages.”*

Elsa closed the book, her pulse quickening. Somewhere beyond the Swiss pines, Roy and Leslie were now safe. In tears, she prayed that she would soon hear Claude’s steps returning.

Sheila Grether-Marion

was born and raised in Pasadena, California, and is the grand-niece of Elsa Behr Blanchard (1888–1979). Sheila, a Chair Emerita of the Pasadena Playhouse Board of Directors, is retired from careers as a professional fund-raiser for non-profits and as a financial advisor at Merrill Lynch. She now has more time to focus on writing her memoirs. The stories about Elsa and Claude in MacQueen’s Quinterly are the first excerpts to be published from her manuscript-in-progress of historical fiction. She is also writing a play about her grand-aunt.

During high school, Sheila was an usher at The Pasadena Playhouse, and later served many years on The Playhouse Board of Directors. A former actor and professional fund-raiser, she assisted in raising millions of dollars for non-profit organizations, and received several awards including The President’s Award for Public Sector Initiatives in 1982, as well as citations from Mayor Tom Bradley, the Board of Los Angeles Library Commissions, and the Los Angeles County Library for her work to raise funds to combat illiteracy.

In 1987, Sheila began her second career, as a broker and financial advisor with Merrill Lynch in Pasadena, and retired three decades later as the senior partner of her investment team. She now lives in Sierra Madre with her husband, Mark.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Resurrection by Sheila Grether-Marion, a feature article about her recovery from an injury received during a canoe ride on the Zambezi River; published 2 November 2018 in So Cal Women’s Conference Magazine (Volume 7, Number 1), pages 30-31. Magazine is available at Issuu.com.