On a cold rainy day last week, curious Parisians packed a dingy courtroom in the Palais de Justice to hear a red-robed judge pronounce sentence on Mathilde Carre. She was a pert, petite woman with bangs —the very picture of a Parisian gamine. The French thought they understood Mathilde, though they could not forgive her.
Daughter of a substantial family of professional soldiers, Mathilde Carre was on the loose in Paris just after the German conquest. She was young, attractive, divorced, and she found it all too easy to have a good time. An ex-captain of the Polish army got her into the Réseau Interallié, an important network of the Franco-British underground. This Pole, a handsome man named Roman Czerniawsky, had been an intelligence officer. With Mathilde's brilliant help, he was soon feeding the British war office valuable information on the German order of battle. Mathilde was the network's cryptographer. Her fervently admiring comrades called her La Chatte (The Cat), because she moved so noiselessly.
Czerniawsky had a pale, dark-haired mistress named Renee Borni. Perhaps Mathilde was jealous. In any case, when the Gestapo pounced on the three of them in a frowsy little Montmartre hotel, Mathilde was more like a purring cat than a fighting tigress. Soon she was having an affair with a Gestapo corporal named Hugo Bleicher.
In a little notebook, Mathilde had the names and addresses of 35 comrades in the underground. Solicitously, she accompanied her new German lover on his rounds as he picked up the 35. Most were sent to Buchenwald; only 14 ever got back to France.
After a while, Mathilde met a gaunt Frenchman named Pierre de Vomecourt, who also worked for the underground. He asked her to work with him. When he found out that she was playing a double game, she persuaded De Vomecourt that she had important information which the British should have. She wanted to get to England, she said, out of the Boche's reach. With some difficulty the British intelligence spirited Mathilde and De Vomecourt out of France, and La Chatte sat out the rest of the war in a British jail. One British operative said of her: "For Mathilde, resistance and espionage work, which we found to be difficult and hazardous business, were like children's games."
Last week, in the dingy Palais de Justice courtroom, Mathilde sat with a wry twist on her feline mouth. She was sentenced to die before a firing squad.
What had Mathilde Carré wanted from life? During the trial, the prosecution had read this, from her diary: "What I wanted most was a good meal, a man, and, once more, Mozart's Requiem."