Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 Read Free Page A

circles. But by the conclusion of my research, and thanks to my education in literary and political theory, I have come to believe—and I hope my readers will agree—that I have partly answered the question of what drives, so to speak, a person like Lou Villars. Not that there ever was another person like Lou Villars. Without claiming too much for my little book, I will only say that I have tried to make my humble contribution to the literature on the mystery of evil .
    How could someone, how could anyone, do what Lou Villars did? How did she sleep at night? Why would a French patriot who worshiped Joan of Arc tell the German army where the Maginot Line ended? And why, during the Occupation, would she work for the Gestapo?
    Before I realized that my career would involve teaching the French classics to first-formers and correcting papers, I dreamed of becoming a philosopher, of spending my time contemplating (and perhaps solving) the great philosophical riddles. Though this has not been my destiny, I now find myself faced with a moral quandary worthy, in my opinion, of serious consideration:
    Lou Villars did evil, unforgiveable things. So what does it say about the biographer, me, that researching and writing her life has given new meaning and purpose to my own less dramatic, less reprehensible existence?
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    Chapter One: The Childhood and Early Education of Lou Villars
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    SOON AFTER I began my research, I consulted several neurologists to ask if a relatively mild childhood head injury could affect a person’s entire future. The doctors agreed to see me when I explained that I was a writer, a profession for which, in my experience, physicians feel an absurd respect. At first they seemed happy to chat, perhaps because, before this book took its toll, I was still young and reasonably attractive.
    I’d begun to wonder if Lou had been permanently affected by a fall from a swing on which she had been playing with her older brother, Robert. I owe my knowledge of this incident to the late Dr. Frederic Pontuis, the Villars family physician, who kept a log of his house calls, and whose grandson Gilles was kind enough to share with me his grandfather’s account of an emergency visit to the Villars home to tend the injured girl.
    Later Lou would trace certain themes that ran through her life—her veneration for Joan of Arc, the insomnia, the spying—to this early mishap.
    The neurologists I interviewed had never heard of Lou Villars, or pretended not to. And though her story was interesting, it took a while to tell, and I could see them getting restless by the time I got to the part about her racing career, her court case, and the Berlin Olympics. Inevitably they reminded me that they had patients to see.
    Without hard scientific data to back up my theories, I will simply write what happened and trust my intelligent readers to draw their own conclusions.
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    It was a Sunday afternoon. Lou was ten years old. She and her brother Robert had gone out to play after lunch.
    Henri Villars, Lou’s father, had been a lieutenant colonel in the French army, a position from which he was removed (with a pension for life) for reasons that have gone unrecorded, perhaps due to the intercession of his fiancée’s influential family. After his retirement from the military and his subsequent marriage to Clothilde Dupont, the daughter of local landowners, the couple, together with Henri’s mother, moved to a country house, two hours northwest of Paris, where they lived, comfortably but not extravagantly, on Colonel Villars’s pension and the annuity from Madame Villars’s inheritance.
    Their first son, Robert, was born in 1907, followed four years later by the arrival of a daughter, Louisianne, a name chosen by her patriotic father for its association with the French colony stolen by the Americans. Lou’s birth disappointed Henri, who had hoped for a second son, especially because his older boy