The Dior family in their garden, c.1920.Catherine sits in the middle, between her parents. Behind them, left to right, Christian, Jacqueline, Bernard and Raymond. Christian’s surviving writing also provides a sense of the emotional resonance and powerful influence of the landscape. The young trees that were planted, as he described them in his memoir, ‘grew up, as I did, against the wind and the tides. This is no figure of speech, since the garden hung right over the sea, which could be seen through the railings, and lay exposed to all the turbulence of the weather, as if in prophecy of the troubles of my own life … the walls which encompassed the garden were not enough, any more than the precautions encompassing my childhood were enough, to shield us from storms.’ Though 12 years his junior Catherine (1917-2008) was close to Dior in temperament and shared particularly his devotion to flowers. As children, growing up in the grand Villa les Rhumbs near Mont-Saint-Michel, he and she were allowed to create flower beds in the shapes of a tiger and butterfly.

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Both Jacques and Lotka were kept in solitary confinement, and repeatedly interrogated and tortured at Montluc prison in Lyons, which was run by the notorious SS officer Klaus Barbie. On 19 August – four days after the Allies had landed on the Mediterranean coast – they were executed by a firing squad, part of a group of twenty-four resistants murdered there during the final atrocities of the Occupation. A few days later, the Germans abandoned Montluc, and Lyons was liberated on 3 September 1944. In the course of researching this book, I have been fortunate to meet Liliane’s son, Nicolas Crespelle, who was the much-loved godchild of Catherine Dior. We met in Paris for tea one day, at a café in the same street as the Dior archives, and he appeared to me as quintessentially Parisian as his mother did to Gitta: distinguished-looking, urbane and unruffled, despite having arrived by bicycle. Nicolas was very generous in sharing what he knew, while also emphasising how much had been kept secret from the post-war generation. He was born in February 1947, in the same week as the launch of the New Look collection, and his sister Anne in 1945. ‘No one told us about the war,’ said Nicolas. ‘Catherine only talked to me about it on one occasion, when she said she had been in a camp in Germany.’ All he knew about his mother’s role, at least while she was still alive, was that she had ridden a bicycle during the war; but whenever she started to talk about why she had spent so much time on these cycling expeditions, his father would say that it ‘wasn’t interesting’. A soft rain is falling over the midsummer roses that are blooming in the garden of Les Rhumbs, and a sea mist is gathering, veiling the solid lines of the house. This substantial late-nineteenth-century villa, positioned high above the Normandy town of Granville, overlooking the English Channel, was the childhood home of Christian Dior. Hence the decision to turn it into a museum that cherishes his heritage, while the surrounding garden, created by his mother, has become a park open to the public. It is surprisingly quiet this morning in the grounds, perhaps because of the damp weather, although the museum has several dozen visitors who have come to see a new exhibition, dedicated to Princess Grace of Monaco, and displaying clothes designed for her by Christian Dior. One of the words most often used about Catherine Dior, by her few surviving friends and relatives, is ‘discreet’; and it is telling that even a decade after her death, several of those who knew her still request anonymity when answering my questions about her relationship with Hervé des Charbonneries.

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Aside from the garden, the place that Christian felt safest in was the linen-room, where ‘the housemaids and seamstresses … told me fairy stories of devils … Dusk drew on, night fell and there I lingered … absorbed in watching the women round the oil-lamp plying their needles … From that time I have kept a nostalgia for stormy nights, fog-horns, the tolling of the cemetery-bell, and even the Norman drizzle in which my childhood passed.’ Catherine’s story is beautifully, hauntingly told in spare and elegant prose by Picardie . . . awe-inspiring.” —Laura Freeman, The Times (UK) This, then, is the context of Catherine’s proud service in F2, the facts of which emerge from the few surviving manuscripts outlining its formation and activities, in the archives of the Resistance. These reveal Catherine’s tireless activities within the organisation in gathering information and compiling intelligence reports to send to the British secret services in London. She wrote up the reports on a typewriter that she continued to use for correspondence throughout her later life.

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Picardie’s research is remarkable, her writing grabs and holds the reader tight from beginning to end . . . An exceptional discussion on France during WWII and the couture industry, [Miss Dior] is fascinating reading and will not disappoint.” —Judith Reveal, New York Journal of BooksIt wasn’t until thirty-five years later that Lili told Gitta more about the terrifying circumstances: ‘She had carried four messages, three to individuals in the morning and one to a group meeting that afternoon; eight people had been arrested that day, two in the morning and the six others that afternoon, just as Lili had turned into the streets on her bicycle. All would be executed, mostly hanged after being tortured. “A bad day,” she remembered. Were there many like that? She shrugged, “Ah oui . . .”’