Sleeping with the enemy: the wartime story of ‘La Chatte’

The name ‘Carré’ immediately evokes the shadowy world of espionage. Ironically, however, few people today have heard of the real Carré, also known as ‘Victoire’ and ‘La Chatte’, a female intelligence agent inside Nazi-occupied France whose life had enough plot twists and moral ambiguity to satisfy any spy novelist.

Mathilde Carré (1908-2007) had beena clever but rather neglected child. Desperate to give her life meaning, and inspired by the poems of a patriotic aunt, she had romantically decided ‘at all costs, to die as a martyr for France’. Thirty years later, after a number of false starts, the second world war finally presented her with the chance to live a life of real value. Recruited by Roman Czerniawski, a Polish air force officer stranded in France, she became the crucial French linchpin for his Allied espionage ambitions.

Between 1940-41, before much systematic French resistance had been organised, the two audacious amateur agents built up the hugely valuable Interallié intelligence network. At the end of their first operational year, Carré felt ‘life had grown wings’. The hall light sometimes flickered in time with the dots and dashes of her wireless transmissions, there was a makeshift darkroom in her cupboard, and her medicine packets were full of microfilms. She thrived not only on the knowledge that she was playing a crucial role for her nation, but also on the danger, adrenalin and admiration that this brought. Enter Hugo Bleicher of the Abwehr, in October 1941, and it all went horribly wrong.

Carré had lived with the very real threat of discovery and execution for more than a year. Yet when her arrest was swiftly followed by the stark choice between being shot or turning informer, the terrified agent realised that she was not, after all, ready to die for France, or even for many of her fellow agents.