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her if he presented her with the other half. Using two different names, sometimes Cécile, sometimes Andrée, she began to act as a liaison officer, and it became her job to pay the clandestine printers and to arrange for the collection of anti-German flyers and pamphlets and their distribution between printers and various depots. Sometimes her packets were so heavy that she could barely lift them, but she dreaded offers of help. Her main contact within the Resistance, the person who held the other half of her métro ticket, was a man called Maurice Grancoign, a former printer with L’Humanité . Cécile would later admit that, despite her bravura, she was afraid, all the time. ‘How could you do this work,’ she said, ‘and not be afraid?’
    By now, Cécile was divorced from her husband and when she went off on missions for the PCF, she left her little girl with her mother in the 11th arrondissement. Increasingly at odds with her feckless stepfather, and fearing that what little food came into the household seldom reached her daughter, she decided to send the child to live with a foster family outside the city. She herself moved into a small flat in the centre of Paris, rented for her by the PCF. ‘How can you do this work if you have a child?’ asked her mother. ‘It is because I have a child that I do it,’ replied Cécile. ‘This is not a world I wish her to grow up in.’
    While Cécile was busy helping set up the Paris networks, another young woman, Madeleine Passot, known to her friends as Betty, took off to travel from one end of France to the other, to recruit new members for the communist Resistance. Betty was 26, the only child of a Parisian family of committed socialists; her mechanic father had served a prison sentence for opposing French involvement in the First World War. As a small child, Betty had appeared so interested in politics that her father had nicknamed her la petite communiste . Drawn into the PCF, like Cécile, by the fate of the Spanish republicans, Betty had abandoned her job as a secretary in a big firm and volunteered for resistance work as soon as war was declared. With so many of the men under arrest, she quickly became a crucial courier between Paris and the south.
    Slender, fearless, elegant with her red nails and tailored suits, she was, she liked to say, the perfect candidate for ‘life in the shadows’. Often, she chose to sit with Germans on the trains going south, rightly confident that they would gallantly protect her at checkpoints, though these journeys, with money hidden in the false bottom of her suitcase and papers in the lining of her handbag, were terrifying. She particularly dreaded passing through Marseilles, where the staircase was exposed and police stood watching the passengers arriving. Often, she was stopped and searched.

    Betty Langlois, ‘Ongles Rouges’, and her companion Lucien Dorland
    During the autumn of 1940, Betty was seldom not on the road; walking miles in her high-heeled shoes, with weapons concealed in baskets of grapes, she begged for lifts from farmers across the demarcation line. On her journeys, she was sometimes able to catch up with her companion Lucien Dorland, with whom she lived in a small flat in Paris, though he was busy setting up youth groups in the free zone. On her travels, Betty used other names, sometimes calling herself Madeleine, Odette or Gervaise and would say she sometimes had trouble remembering who she was meant to be. Lucien was also a communist and high up in the party hierarchy. She found the long separations hard, but, like Cécile, did not feel she had much choice in the matter.
    By October 1940, the PCF in the Paris area had grown to over a thousand active members. Many were women, pressed into the fold by the absence of men, and, like Betty and Cécile, they were proving excellent as printers, distributors and liaison officers. The Bulletin de la France Combattante was run off by two women hidden in an abbey, while