The elusive adventures of Catherine Dior

When Catherine Dior, one of the heroic French Resistance workers captured by the Nazis, came face to face with her torturer at his trial in 1952, to receive the suggestion from his lawyer that it was a case of mistaken identity, she burst out furiously to the judge: ‘I know what I’m saying. This affair cost people their lives.’

It is one of the very few vivid glimpses we get of her in Justine Picardie’s book. The respected former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar has tackled what is the most difficult subject for any biographer: a person about whom virtually nothing is known. Claire Tomalin brought it off in The Invisible Woman, the story of Charles Dickens’s shadowy mistress Nelly Ternan. Catherine Dior is almost equally undocumented, save for her testimony to the War Crimes Commission.

So little is recorded about the sister of the great Christian that Picardie has had to build up a picture of her life by relying on the diaries and testimonies of others around her, or whose lives touched hers, be it working for the French Resistance, surviving the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp or in the rarefied atmosphere of French couture salons. Pages often go past without a single mention of our heroine. In fact this is a book largely about other people, some of them with barely discernible relevance. What, for instance, has the well-worn story of Edward VIII, Mrs Simpson and the abdication to do with either life in Ravensbruck camp or Dior’s New Look?

But enough of this nit-picking. As Picardie tells the story, we plunge almost straight into the second world war, when the Dior family found themselves near Cannes, in the Unoccupied Zone of France under the rule of Marshal Pétain (by June 1940 Paris had fallen and much of the country was under German administration).