‘Santé! You need help, I’m told?’

Hanne repeated the story she’d told Wilson the previous evening.

‘We’ll see what we can do. Let me tell you briefly about myself first.’ Marguerite paused as she drank some of her coffee, then topped the cup up with cognac before taking a packet of Gitanes from her handbag and offering them round. She took time to light her own, and soon the group was wreathed in a cloud of the strong tobacco.

‘The Germans occupied Paris on the fourteenth of June 1940: before then, I led the classic life of a bourgeois wife. My husband ran his family business, which manufactures and supplies paper products, and we lived in Saint-Germain in the 7th arrondissement in a beautiful apartment with views over the Champs de Mars. Two or three days a week I helped a friend out in her boutique on Avenue de Friedland.

‘In truth, the occupation did not make a great deal of difference to our lives, although of course we all shook our heads and said how appalling it was. But in our case we were fine. We’d never been political, and my husband’s business prospered considerably, as he gained contracts from the Germans for supplying paper and stationery products. You see, what you must understand is that most people could just continue with their lives and ignore the reality of the situation so long as it was not affecting them directly. But as the war went on, people began to find they needed to come off the fence – is that the correct phrase?’

The others nodded.

‘For me, that happened in July 1942, when more than thirteen thousand Jews were arrested in Paris and taken to deportation centres and from there to Auschwitz – it was known as the grand rafle. Tens of thousands more were to follow them, and of course we now know that hardly any returned. From that point on it was impossible to ignore the situation.

‘Now my husband – his name is Eugène, by the way – had an accountant based in rue Saint-Lazare in the 9th, an old established practice that the business had used for a long while, though Eugène felt they were too old-fashioned for him and was looking to get out of their arrangement.

‘One morning he arrived early for a meeting at their offices and a junior employee let him in. While he was waiting, he went to look for the bathroom but got lost, and to cut a long story short – he recounted it to me in great detail, I promise you – he opened the door to a room where a family was hiding. As he said, it was obvious they were Jews. The accountant pleaded with him to keep it quiet – he said the father was his optician and he was hiding them until the resistance could get them out of Paris – but Eugène ignored him and reported it to the authorities immediately. He said it meant he could kill two birds with one stone: he got rid of more Jews and he was able to get out of his arrangement with the accountants.