punctuated the skyline; Sacré-Coeur still sat on top of its hill at Montmartre watching over the city’s inhabitants as they went about their business; and the silver ribbon of the Seine continued to wind its way past palaces, churches and public gardens, looping around the buttressed flanks of Notre-Dame on the Île de la Cité and churning beneath the bridges that linked the river’s right and left banks.
But something had changed. Not just the obvious signs, such as the groups of German soldiers who marched along the boulevard, and the flags that unfurled themselves in the wind from the facades of buildings with languorous menace – as she walked beneath them, the whisper of the fabric emblazoned with stark black and white swastikas on a blood-red background seemed to Mireille as loud as any bombardment. No, she could sense something else that was different, something less tangible, as she made her way from the Gare Montparnasse back to Saint-Germain. It was there in the look of defeat in the downcast eyes of the people who hurried past; she heard it in the harsh monotone of German voices from the tables outside the cafes and bars, and it was driven home by the sight of military vehicles bearing more Nazi insignia – those grim emblems which seemed to be everywhere now – as they sped past her through the streets.
The message was clear. Her country’s capital no longer belonged to France. It had been abandoned by its government, handed over by the country’s politicians like a bartered bride in a hastily arranged marriage.
And although many of those, like Mireille, who had fled in the face of the German advance a few months earlier were now returning, they were coming home to a city transformed. Like its citizens, the city seemed to be hanging its head in shame at the brutal reminders that were everywhere: Paris was in German hands now.
As the afternoon light began to stretch the shadows cast by the window frames across the broad expanse of the cutting table, Claire hunched a little closer to the skirt upon which she was stitching a decorative braid. Finishing it off with a few quick over-stitches, she used the scissors which hung from a ribbon around her neck to snip the thread. Unable to help herself, she yawned and then stretched, rubbing the ache of a day’s work from the back of her neck.
It was so boring in the atelier these days, with many of the girls gone and no one to gossip and laugh with at break times. The supervisor, Mademoiselle Vannier, was in an even worse mood than usual as the work mounted up, cajoling the seamstresses to sew faster but then pouncing on the slightest slip in quality which, in Claire’s eyes, was usually imagined.
She hoped some of the other girls would return soon, now that the new administration was organising special trains to bring workers back to their jobs in Paris, and then it wouldn’t be so lonely at night in the bedrooms under the eaves. The sounds of the city beyond the windows seemed to Claire to be muted nowadays, and an eerie silence fell as soon as the ten o’clock curfew arrived. But in the quiet darkness the building creaked and muttered to itself and sometimes Claire fancied she heard footsteps in the night, so pulled the blankets over her head as she imagined German soldiers breaking in and searching for more people to arrest.
She might have been one of the youngest of the seamstresses but Claire hadn’t fled, as so many others had done, that day in June when France fell to the Nazis. It was simply not an option to run back home to Brittany with her tail between her legs, when she’d only recently managed to escape the little fishing village of Port Meilhon, where nobody had the slightest sense of style and where the only men left were either ancient or stank of sardines, or both. With the recklessness of youth, she’d decided to take her chances and stay in Paris. And it had turned out to have been a good choice, since the government had surrendered so that the Germans would allow the city to remain intact. The departure of several of her more senior colleagues meant that she had been allowed to work on some of the more interesting orders to be sent up from the salon on the ground floor. At this rate, perhaps she’d catch Monsieur Delavigne’s attention