They set off at dawn, but the lines of people along the roads were so great that they did not reach the château until nightfall. The following day, they heard that Paris had been declared an open city, rather than have the Germans perhaps destroy it. Five days later, the elderly General Pétain, the hero of the Great War who had secretly brought the mutiny to an end, took over as premier of France.

“That’s good,” Roland declared. “Pétain has judgment. He’s a man one can trust.” And when, the very next day, Pétain declared an armistice with the Germans, Roland only shrugged and remarked that he didn’t see what else the old man could do.

It had always been a source of some amusement to Roland and Charlie that Marie insisted on listening to the BBC on her wireless. The signal was not strong, but she could still pick it up at the château.

“You spent too many years in England,” Roland would tell her with an affectionate kiss. “You believe that only the English news can be trusted.”

But it was thanks to Marie’s prejudice that the family listened to a broadcast, arranged at short notice, that very few people in France ever heard.

It was late afternoon on the very day after Pétain had announced the armistice that Marie called to Roland to come to the wireless at once. Charlie was already in the room, sitting with his leg stretched out on a stool.

“There’s going to be a statement from a French officer, who has just flown to London,” she told him urgently.

“About what?”

“I have no idea.”

The voice that came across the airwaves was deep, sonorous and firm. It announced, in total defiance of Pétain, that France had not fallen, that France would never surrender, but that Frenchmen outside France, in England and in France’s colonies, with the help of others including the Americans across the ocean, would restore France. And it urged all men under arms who were able to do so to join him as quickly as possible.

The message was startling. The language in which it was delivered was as magisterial as it was simple. The voice declared that, in the meantime, though he had only just been promoted to the rank of general, he was declaring himself the legitimate government of France, in exile, and that he would broadcast again from London the following day.

The name of the general was de Gaulle. “That’s the man who wanted more tanks,” Marie said. “The one that the English officer told me about after Munich.”

“He’s mad, but magnificent,” Roland remarked.

Charlie said nothing.

But the next day, he told Roland and Marie what he proposed to do. And Marie’s heart sank.