“Goddammit!” Jess exploded when she heard. As if it wasn’t bad enough having the men in charge treat them like imbeciles, now the women were turning their backs on each other too. If only she hadn’t gone to Rennes in the first place. If only she’d done what Lee Carson of the International News Service had done and gone AWOL. Of course an order had been put out on Lee but so far she’d been missing for a week and nobody had managed to locate her.

Jess was only allowed out of Rennes after Paris fell. She and Iris Carpenter hitched a ride to the Hotel Scribe, designated point for all correspondents in Paris. As they came over the hill to the north, Jess could see the city bathed in sunshine, white and innocent, waiting peacefully as if nothing had ever been the matter and they’d all taken too long to arrive. Once through the Porte d’Orléans, a group of women and girls bearing fresh flowers ran up to Jess and filled her arms with blooms, calling her la femme soldat.

“Oh no, I’m just a correspondent,” she protested, until Iris grabbed Jess’s Leica and took a picture of her, blushing, laden with flowers, the beaming Frenchwomen in the background. She would send the photo to Victorine, Jess decided. Victorine would like the idea that her people thought Jess was a soldier.

It took a while to navigate the Parisians, who were cheering every vehicle on every street, but they finally reached the hotel, standing orderly and Haussmanian just across from the ornate and undamaged splendor of the Opéra. The dead geraniums in the window-boxes were the only visible sign that something of significance had happened in the city.

Over the next few days, the Hotel Scribe filled every corner, every crevice, with correspondents and their associated gear. The Rue Scribe was lined with jeeps and bedrolls, and gas masks and duffel bags lurked in piles in the lobby. The press office took over the entire first floor, where the censors scribbled out all the words they didn’t want read and correspondents haggled and begged to keep their stories intact. The transportation room was stacked to the ceiling with jerry cans of gasoline. The mess had nothing but K-rations and coffee but also, somehow, champagne.

As soon as she could, Jess took to the streets, knowing she could find her own damn story rather than waiting for one of the PROs to tell her what to write about. The male correspondents, on the other hand, didn’t seem in much of a hurry to hunt down their words, not when the ladies of Montmartre required no hunting down whatsoever and needed little persuasion to give up their wares. Jess lost count of the number of times she witnessed correspondents entering or leaving brothels. The Hotel Scribe was almost as bad—women hurried into elevators under the guise of being someone’s cousin even though the correspondent in question had no French blood in his body. Sex, it seemed, was easier to procure than nylon hose, and a hell of a lot cheaper.