Then there was the damage to the roof. And though Consuelo learned that a British bomb, and not a German one, had missed the bridge it aimed for a half mile distant during the fight for France and instead flattened the fourth floor of the chateau, she resented that the Nazis hadn’t offered to close the gaping hole above them, especially as the summer became late fall and the temperature turned cold. The Villeneuve staff had to put a tarp over the roof’s remnants, but that did little good. When it rained, water still flowed down the stairwell. Winter nights chilled everyone, brutal hours that required multiple layers of clothing. The bomb had set off a fire that momentarily spread on the second floor, which destroyed the central heating system. Now, before the children went to bed, they had to warm a brick over a wood-fired oven and then rub the brick over their sheets, which heated their beds just enough so they might fall asleep.
Finally, there was Olivier. The family found out that he had been arrested by German forces near Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, a commune in Lorraine in northeastern France, on June 27, five days after the armistice. He was now imprisoned in the sinister-sounding Oflag XVII-A, a POW camp for French officers in eastern Austria known as “little Siberia.” He was allowed to write two letters home every month, which had been censored by guards. What little Consuelo gleaned of her husband’s true experience at the camp infuriated her further.
Given all this, it wasn’t really a surprise to see Consuelo act out against the Germans. On one occasion, a Nazi officer, who was a member of the German cavalry and an aristocrat, wanted to pay his respects to Madame La Rochefoucauld, whose name traveled far in noble circles. When he arrived at Villeneuve, he walked up the steps, took off his gloves, and approached Consuelo, who waited at the entry, all stocky frame and suspicious gaze. He gripped her hand in his and kissed it, but before he could tell her it was a pleasure to stay in this grand home, she slapped him across the face. The Terrible Countess would not be wooed by any German. For a moment, no one knew how to respond. Then the officers, only half joking, told Consuelo a welcome like that put her at risk of deportation.
Robert was his mother’s son. The fact that the Nazi officers were a few rooms away only increased his talk about how much he hated them, those Boche. He was brash enough, would say these epithets just loud enough, that even Consuelo had to shush him. But Robert seemed not to care. His olive complexion reddened with indignant righteousness when he listened to Charles de Gaulle’s speeches, and even after the German high command in Paris banned the French from turning on the BBC, Robert did it in secret. He never wanted to miss the general’s daily message. Oftentimes, to evangelize, he would travel across Soissons to the estate of his cousin, Guy de Pennart, who was his age and shared, roughly, his temperament. Guy and Robert talked about how they were going to join the British and fight on. “I was convinced that we had to continue the war at all costs,” Robert later said.
He was seventeen by the fall of 1940 and had graduated from high school. He wanted to join de Gaulle but wasn’t sure how. One didn’t “enlist” in the Resistance. Even a well-connected young man like Robert didn’t know the underground routes that could get him to London. So he enrolled at an agricultural college in Paris, ostensibly to become a gentleman farmer like his father, but, more likely, he went to meet people who might help him reach de Gaulle.
These individuals, though, were not easy to find. There was little reason to be a résistant in 1940. The Germans had disbanded the army and all weapons, all the way down to hunting knives, had been handed in or taken by Nazi authorities. The “resistance” amounted to little more than underground newspapers that were often snuffed out, their editors imprisoned or sentenced to death by German judges presiding in France.
So Robert and a small number of new friends, all of them more boys than men, turned to one another with refrains about how much they despised the Germans, and despised Vichy, a spa town in the south of France where Pétain and his collaborating government resided. The boys talked about how France had lost her honor. “I didn’t have much good sense,” Robert said, “but honor—that’s all my friends and I could talk about.”
Its vestiges were all around him. Villeneuve was not just a home but also a monument to the family’s history, replete with portraits and busts of significant men. The La Rochefoucauld line dated back to 900 AD and the family had shaped France for nearly as long. Robert had learned from his parents about François Alexandre Frédéric de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, a duke in Louis XVI’s court. He awoke the king during the storming of the Bastille in 1789. King Louis asked La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt if it was a revolt. “No, sire,” he answered. “It is a revolution.” And indeed it was. Then there was François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, a seventeenth-century duke who published a book of aphoristic maxims, whose style and substance influenced writers as diverse as Bernard Mandeville, Nietzsche, and Voltaire. Another La Rochefoucauld, a friend of Benjamin Franklin’s, helped found the Society of the Friends of the Blacks, which abolished slavery some seventy years before it could be done in the United States. Two La Rochefoucauld brothers, both priests, were martyred during the Reign of Terror and later beatified by Rome. One La Rochefoucauld was directeur des Beaux Arts during the Bourbon Restoration. Others appeared in the pages of Proust. Many were lionized within the military—fighting in the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, against the Prussians. The city of Paris named a street after the La Rochefoucaulds.
For Robert, the family’s legacy had followed him everywhere throughout his childhood, inescapable: He was baptized beneath a stained-glass mural of the brother priests’ martyrdom; taught in school about the aphorisms in François VI’s Maxims; raised by a father who’d received the Legion of Honor, France’s highest military commendation. Greatness was expected of him, and the expectation shadowed his days. Now, with the Germans living in the chateau, it was as if the portraits that hung on the walls darkened when Robert passed them, judging him and asking what he would do to rid the country of its occupiers and write his own chapter in the family history. To reclaim the France that his family had helped mold—that’s what mattered. “I firmly believed that … honor commanded us to continue the fight,” he said.
But Robert felt something beyond familial pressure. In his travels around Paris or on frequent