How France’s Top Woman Spy Escaped from the Nazis—Part 2
On Boulevard des Poilus — the sun-dappled, tree-lined street in Aix-en Provence where the former Miollis army barracks is located — lycée students walk to school and women carrying shopping bags make their way to the local markets. There’s no sign anywhere that one of the French Resistance’s most daring escapes — by spy leader Marie-Madeleine Fourcade — took place on that quiet thoroughfare 78 years before.
Captured by the Gestapo and thrown into a stuffy barracks cell on a hot July night in 1944, Marie-Madeleine began searching for a possible escape route almost immediately. But first, she walked over to the cell’s barred window to get a breath of air. Standing there, she took a closer look at the window, which was large and had no glass panes. A thick, horizontal wooden board was screwed into the window frame and blocked more than half the opening, leaving a relatively small space at the top to allow in air. There was also a space between the board and the bars covering the window.
Without the right tools, it would be impossible to remove the board and one or more of the bars. But could she possibly slip between the board and the bars and ease her body out? Marie-Madeleine, who grew up in Shanghai, remembered her father telling her how Chinese robbers would oil their bodies to squeeze through the bars of the gates and windows of houses they had chosen as targets. Thanks to her extreme fear and the stifling heat, her own slight, slender body was slick with sweat. Could she follow the bandits’ example? She decided to try.
She waited until about 3 a.m., when the guards outside her cell went off duty. Pushing the cot under the window, she picked up a large wash basin, turned it upside down, and put it on the cot. After taking off all her clothes, she climbed onto the basin, a light summer dress clenched between her teeth.
She managed to pull herself up and over the board. With her body tightly pinned between the board and the bars, she began trying to ease her head between the gaps. The first two were far too narrow. The next one was wider, and she thrust her head as hard as she could through the opening.
Although extraordinarily painful, the maneuver worked: her head popped through. With her body slick with perspiration, she squeezed one shoulder through, then her right leg. The most searing pain came when she began easing her right hip through; she told herself that the agony of torture would be far worse than what she was enduring now.
Miraculously she succeeded and found herself out on the ledge, with her dress still gripped between her teeth. Just as she was about to jump, she saw a sentry standing in front of the barracks, a few hundred feet away from her window. When she touched the ground, the soft thud of her feet alerted the sentry, who clicked on his flashlight and shouted, “Who’s there?” She lay flat, and the beam of the flashlight passed above her. When the sentry finally turned it off and moved away, she wrapped her dress around her neck and scuttled on her knees, like a crab, across the street.
There, she jumped up and ran off, stumbling in the darkness. Crossing another street, she spied a graveyard — le Cimetiere Saint-Pierre — which was dotted with family mausoleums, some as big as chapels. She put on her dress, found a crypt with a broken door and crept inside. Sinking down to rest, she examined the damage to her body from the escape: her face was bruised and bloodied, her knees badly skinned, and the soles of her bare feet shredded from running through brambles and on the stony streets.
She knew she couldn’t stay there for more than a few minutes. Dawn was beginning to break, and before long, the guards would open the door to her cell and find her missing. It was vital that she reach Helen des Isnards’ house in the country no later than 7 a.m., to stop him from going to her flat in Aix and walking into a Gestapo trap.
The trouble was that, although she had been there several times, she was not sure how to get to the road leading to the house. Trembling with fear and pain, she retraced her steps through town, past the barracks from which she had just escaped. Everything was quiet in the golden early-morning light, and although a few passersby looked curiously at the young woman with bloodied bare feet, the sentry in front of the barracks paid her little heed.
Just a few minutes later, as she finally turned onto the road leading to des Isnards’ house, she heard in the distance the sounds she had feared: the barking of dogs and the unearthly din of sirens. They had discovered her escape.
She kept walking as her mind scrambled to come up with a way to dodge the roadblock that would soon be set up on this road, as well as on all the others leading out of Aix. Leaving the road, she headed into the field that stretched beside it, where a number of old peasant women were gleaning stray ears of corn left on the ground from the previous harvest. Marie-Madeleine joined them, stooping over and picking up an ear or two, while, from the corner of her eye, she saw soldiers halting foot and motor traffic and checking papers. None of them paid attention to the women in the field.
Marie-Madeleine continued gleaning for several more minutes — until the soldiers and roadblock were well in the distance. Joining the road again, she finally found des Isnards’ house. The front door was unlocked, and Marie-Madeleine limped inside. As she did, she called out the names of des Isnards and his wife. She opened their bedroom door, and they sprang from their bed, their eyes wide with surprise. “I’ve just escaped,” she said. And then she collapsed.
*
Within an hour of her arrival, Marie-Madeleine, des Isnards, his wife and small daughter were gone. Putting two-year-old Catherine on the back of her bicycle, the pregnant Marie-Solange des Isnards cycled about twenty miles to a chateau owned by members of her husband’s family north of Aix-en-Provence. Helen des Isnards, meanwhile, whisked Fourcade off to a hideout he shared with other local resistance groups in the hills near Aix.
According to an Alliance operative who brought her a change of clothes, the Germans were rampaging through Aix in a door-to-door search for her and des Isnards, but thus far his headquarters had not been touched and all his agents were in hiding. Des Isnards’ radio operator, Michel Leveque, brought his transmitter to the hideout. Late that night, they would move on to a maquis camp near Sainte Victoire, the impressive limestone peak looming over Aix.
In the previous few months, the maquis — members of quasi-guerrilla groups who lived off the land — had become a major force in the French resistance. Most of them were young Frenchmen who had left their homes and gone underground to avoid being sent to Germany as forced laborers. But the maquis with whom des Isnards cooperated were mostly Spaniards who had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and had fled to France after General Franco’s fascist forces took control of the country in 1939.
In 2022, the narrow, winding road leading to the mountain is paved and well-marked. But in July 1944, when Marie Madeleine and her two companions set out by foot, all of them carrying bags and weapons, it was strewn with rocks and gravel. Her lacerated feet were still raw, and the hike, which was steeply uphill and took all night, was both painful and terrifying. At the slightest sound, the three took cover in the underbrush bordering the road. Such interruptions were frequent, as a seemingly endless parade of German patrol vehicles passed by. Marie-Madeleine found it increasingly difficult to walk, and des Isnards and Leveque had to help carry her.
As they approached the camp at daybreak, she collapsed, and a mule-driven cart was summoned to take her the rest of the way. The camp was well protected: sentries stood guard in a stand of juniper trees on a small bluff overlooking the road, and the camp itself was tucked away in a clearing surrounded by dense thickets of underbrush. Thanks to des Isnards and Alliance, the maquis, as well as other resistance groups in the area, were well supplied with weapons, other military gear, and food.
In a corner of the clearing, Leveque set up his battery-powered transmitter, with its aerial wrapped around a pine tree. After she recovered from the grueling hike, Marie-Madeleine set to work encoding the messages that continued flooding in from Alliance sectors around the country. The miracle of the network, she later told one of her agents, was that, despite all the attempts to kill it, it “constantly pushed back. It never stopped working.”
Marie-Madeleine loved everything about her days at the maquis camp, particularly the experience of working and sleeping outdoors in the cool, drier air of Saint-Victoire’s foothills. After more than a week in this idyllic setting, she decided that, with her feet almost completely healed, it was time to move on to Paris. She dyed her hair yet again and had a new photograph taken. Armed with a new name and a new set of forged identity papers, she left the camp on July 29, riding pillion on a motorcycle behind one of the maquis, her arms clasped tightly around his leather-jacketed middle.
Three weeks later, Paris was liberated. Marie-Madeleine was not in the capital for the delirious celebrations that followed. A few days earlier, she had left for northeastern France to scout out information about German positions for the U.S. Third Army as it dashed toward the German border.
In the south of France, meanwhile, Helen des Isnards and his agents provided vital intelligence for the landing of Allied forces on the Cote d’Azur in mid-August. After helping to liberate Aix on August 21, des Isnards joined American troops in their drive up the Rhone Valley.
I finish my mission to retrace Marie-Madeleine’s escape at lunch on the terrace of an elegant boutique hotel boasting a spectacular view of Sainte Victoire and the nearby Chateau Vauvenargues. Not far away, in thickets of underbrush, the maquis had set up the camp where Marie-Madeleine took refuge. During our lunch, my companions and I raise a toast to her and the many tens of thousands of other French resistance fighters, most of them now forgotten, who risked — and lost — their lives to return freedom and honor to their country.
