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84-year-old Mme Cumin worked a printing press in her launderette.
    In November, after a wave of arrests, the number of PCF members fell to below three hundred, but a month later had passed the thousand mark again. Resilient, energetic and prepared to sacrifice themselves, the Communists shared a sense of solidarity and comradeship, and the courage with which they went about their work was not lost on possible new recruits. ‘Those responsible for this war have fled,’ the PCF announced. ‘They have sown desolation and death. It is now up to us to rally the people and to save France.’ As Heydrich reported to his superiors, the PCF was turning out to be the sole organisation ‘in a position to rally those in search of a political cause’.
    To avoid too many losses, the PCF was structured into tight three-person cells, so that no member knew the names of more than two others at any one time. For Cécile and Betty, the arrival of the Germans had had a galvanising effect. The long months of the phoney war had been a bleak and perplexing time and when Betty looked back on them she spoke of them as a ‘void’. Now, she had a mission.
    It was, however, getting more perilous all the time. One by one, highly conscious of the danger their work posed to their families, aware of the growing numbers of informers and the sophistication of the Gestapo, many of the activists—like Cécile—were leaving home and disappearing to work in other neighbourhoods and under other names. What many would later remember was how lonely they felt, constantly changing lodgings, seldom talking to anyone for more than a few minutes at a time.
    Among the members of the pre-war PCF was a large number of university teachers and graduates from France’s prestigious École Normale Supérieure. And it was from these men and women that now emerged the first serious, united, intellectual resistance to the occupiers.
    In the 1930s, French intellectual life, epitomised by a small group of people—not all but most of them French—living and meeting on the Left Bank of Paris, had been at the centre of the European stage. This group read and wrote for the Nouvelle Revue Française , gathered in the art deco auditorium in the basement of the Palais de la Municipalité or in cafes in the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Though not all politically to the left, the mood was for the most part radical and socialist and there was much talk about the menace of Mussolini and Franco, about the need for peace and the importance of winning better working conditions for France’s impoverished working classes. The cause of the Spanish republicans was supported passionately by many of them. André Gide, André Malraux, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Louis Aragon and his companion Elsa Triolet were among those whose voices were frequently heard in the pages of magazines with titles that perfectly expressed the longings for a better age: Esprit, Combat and Ordre Nouvelle . When, in 1929, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre had launched their Annales d’Histoire Economique et Sociale , to look at society through a different lens, one that focused on the conditions in which ordinary people lived rather than on the deeds of politicians and rulers, it seemed perfectly to express the mood of the times.
    Between 1933 and 1940, Paris became one of the only safe meeting places for intellectual exiles from Hitler, Mussolini and Franco and their dictatorships. One of the issues that exercised many of those sitting and arguing in the cafes was whether the proper role of the intellectual should be that of a seeker after truth, as the novelist and philosopher Julian Benda maintained, or whether on the contrary, it was important to become an écrivain engagé , one who got his hands dirty. In a decade of floundering political causes and alliances, with foreign, military and economic policy adrift from one end of the world to the other and French intellectuals defined by their attitude to communism,