Jeanne wanted to know whether “Monsieur Diard” had returned yet to the villa. Mme Hardy replied that she had no news at all.
Two days later, on the evening of 20 August, Landru arrived in the dark on a bicycle. He lost his temper when Mme Hardy showed him Jeanne’s letter, stuffing it in his pocket. In the morning Mme Hardy saw him cycle off to the station at Chantilly.
Another week passed, as Jeanne sat tight in Paris. From her fifth-floor window, she could watch André set off for work after breakfast, turning south down the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis towards his shirt factory rather than north towards the cheering crowds on the forecourt of the Gare de l’Est. Every hour, boys barely older than André were kissing their mothers and sisters goodbye and clambering onto the troop trains that snaked out of the station towards the front.
Towards the end of August, a young woman who had briefly worked for Jeanne as an assistant seamstress passed by the apartment. She found Jeanne in some distress, complaining that her fiancé was an imposter who used false identity papers and that the villagers in La Chaussée thought he was an enemy spy. Jeanne did not reveal Landru’s name or the fact that he was a criminal on the run. Instead, she claimed that he had disappeared shortly after being “mobilised” and then turned up out of the blue at her apartment while he was on “military leave”. According to Jeanne, he had confessed to her that he was married with children, but was divorcing his wife, whom he did not love; meanwhile, his feelings for Jeanne were unchanged.
Jeanne’s visitor left with the impression that Jeanne had refused to forgive her fiancé and had ended the relationship. It was not true. Shortly before or after this visit, Mme Hardy saw Landru and Jeanne arrive at the villa in La Chaussée on foot, having walked from the station in Chantilly. They only stayed for a day or two, and to Mme Hardy’s frustration, she could not engage Jeanne in a neighbourly chat. “She was not the same as before, she appeared sad,” Mme Hardy recalled.
Jeanne brought a bundle of dirty linen back to Paris, grumbling to her concierge that soldiers had created “havoc” by dossing down in the villa; for La Chaussée now lay directly in the path of troops marching towards an alarmingly fluid front. This “allied offensive”, dutifully reported by the censored press, was in reality a series of murderous, mobile engagements that killed around 40,000 French soldiers in one week alone.
Sometime in early September, Landru appeared again on his bike in La Chaussée and stayed for several days. Mme Hardy resumed her surveillance, still worried that Diard was spying for the Germans. In her motherly way, Mme Hardy also fretted that André might be among the French casualties. Here, perhaps, lay the cause of Jeanne’s evident sadness, Mme Hardy thought.
“He has been called up,” Landru lied, when Mme Hardy dared to broach the subject of André with him.
Mme Hardy remarked that André was still “very young”, unaware that at 17 he could not even volunteer.
“It is necessary that he does his military service like everyone else,” Landru said curtly, sounding pleased to have got the boy off his hands.
***
One by one, the “Fashionable House” lads were going off to the war. On Saturday, 29 August, André stood on the platform at Paris’s Gare de Montparnasse, waving goodbye to his best friend Max. Lucky Max, André thought: at 18, Max was just old enough to volunteer for the mounted infantry and was bound for a training camp near Bordeaux.
As the train crawled out of the station, Max’s mother, standing next to André, noticed this boy’s “great sorrow” through her own tears. Putting on a brave face, André now kept an eye on Mme Morin, as Max had asked him to do.
“I accompanied your mother all the way to her home,” André wrote shortly afterwards to Max, “reassuring her as best I could about your destiny, and telling her that I will come and give her news about you as soon as possible.” It did not occur to André that Max might also be writing to his mother.
At his training camp, Max was soon learning how to ride his first horse, much to André’s envy. Meanwhile, “Fashionable House” had collapsed, because the owners of the business had been mobilised. “I’m currently unemployed, the factory closed last Thursday, you cannot even imagine how time drags,” André lamented to Max in early September.
Max’s gang of “Fashionable House” mates, who had let André tag along with them, had also gone off to barracks or training camps.
“Your mother has no doubt told you about the departure of Robert Ballenger to Vannes, of Marcel Huber to Saint-Nazaire,” André rambled on to Max. “As you can see, almost all the lads have left.”
Putting his loneliness to one side, André wanted to hear more about Max’s training horse: had Max already stroked its neck? Also, “the Bordeaux girls, my good chap!” André teased Max: “Are they to your taste?”
Before he left Paris, Max had thoughtfully asked his mother to make friends with Mme Cuchet, for he knew that Jeanne constantly fretted about André trying to enlist as an underage volunteer. It soon became plain that the two women did not have a great deal in common. Mme Morin was a respectable, strait-laced housewife, ten years older than Jeanne, who shocked her new acquaintance by mentioning casually that she could not wed her fiancé because he was already married. Mme Morin could scarcely believe her ears when Jeanne added that this same monsieur had used a false identity.
“Her account made me freeze,” Mme Morin recalled. “I felt I had to advise Mme Cuchet to break with this individual, who was not an honest man. She did not speak to me about him any more.”
The two women stuck from then on to the safe subject of their respective sons. Mme Morin remembered how Jeanne was “heartbroken” that autumn at a false rumour that 17-year-olds would soon be able to volunteer for the army, without parental permission. Conversely, André was full of joy at the same unfounded news.
André had at least persuaded Jeanne to allow him to attend weekly prearmy training classes for teenage boys at a barracks near their apartment. It was great, André reported to Max at the start of October, even though he could not train for the cavalry because the barracks had run out of horses. Instead, he was going to join the infantry, and this was great too. André and his classmates had marched one day around the quartier, singing patriotic songs.
“We are taught in a really marvellous way,” André enthused to Max. “An infantryman who was passing through the barracks showed us this week how to dismantle a machine gun. He even taught us in a summary way how to fire it if necessary.”
And then Jeanne stepped in. “I have to tell you that I haven’t been doing any military training for the past fortnight,” André informed Max in late October. “It was becoming completely useless, given that Maman does not want me to sign up.”
André was determined to do something for the war effort, rather than stew at home with his possessive mother who seemed to have no desire to resume her old work as a seamstress. He soon found a job as a trainee mechanic at an automobile plant in north-west Paris that was making vehicles for the army.
“My old chap, it’s just like barracks life,” André joked in his next letter to Max. His alarm went off at 5.30 am and after a quick breakfast with Jeanne he was on his bike, in time for the early shift.
Even now, Jeanne could not leave André alone. One day, André was working on the assembly line when Jeanne turned up unannounced with Mme Morin to see how he was getting on.
“You can just imagine how I felt!” André wrote to Max indignantly. “I had my hands full and completely filthy as I was in the middle of dismantling a car.”
His new job lasted barely a month. In late November, Jeanne abruptly pulled André out of the factory without informing his employer. All of a sudden, she and André were leaving Paris for a new life in the country with Landru.
***
Mme Oudry, 60, ran a property agency in Vernouillet, a quiet little town near a loop in the Seine, about 35 kilometres north-west of Paris. Towards the end of November, a bearded man called “Monsieur Cuchet” walked into Mme Oudry’s little office to enquire about an unfurnished house for rent with the curious English name “The Lodge”. She showed him around and he liked the place but explained that his wife would need to see it as well in order to give her final approval.
Next day, Jeanne and André caught the train to Vernouillet with Landru to inspect The Lodge. It was a peculiar double-fronted property, standing near the bottom of a narrow street called Rue de Mantes that wound uphill to the town centre. The Lodge was really two houses in one, with a small annexe or “pavilion” on the higher side adjoining the main villa further down the hill. Confusingly, a garage formed the ground floor of the villa and provided access to the rear garden, while the first-floor front door was reached via a flight of external steps.
This is what Jeanne saw when she opened the door and stepped into a narrow hallway:
• To the left, a living room and dining room, leading onto the twostorey annexe, where there was an oven;
• To the right of the hallway, a staircase going down to the garage and up to three first-floor bedrooms and a spacious attic;
• At the end of the corridor, a kitchen with no oven, a pantry and a washroom;
• At the rear of the house, more steps leading down to the surprisingly long garden, flanked by drystone walls and incorporating a disused, tumbledown stable directly behind the annexe.
Jeanne could see that the garden lacked any real privacy, because it was overlooked by the neighbouring house on the uphill side, while the wall on the downhill side had collapsed in places. It was not ideal for her purpose but she decided The Lodge would have to do. The three of them returned to Mme Oudry’s office, where Jeanne and André watched in silence as “Monsieur Cuchet” signed the short-term quarterly lease.
A couple of days later, a removal van brought all Jeanne’s furniture down from Paris. Landru now decided to retrieve his camionnette from the farmhouse in Normandy where he had billeted his family, parking it in The Lodge’s substantial garage.
Around Vernouillet, Landru and Jeanne soon aroused the same suspicion as in La Chaussée. Landru pretended to Mme Oudry that he was a designer of aircraft tailfins, prompting rumours that he might be a German spy. He also informed Mme Oudry that Mme Cuchet held a senior position with a leading Paris fashion house and had to go “constantly” to America. André, meanwhile, was rarely seen outdoors.
***
At his training camp in Bordeaux, Max was fed up with André, who had not written to him for the best part of a month. Finally, just before Christmas, André got round to replying to Max’s last letter.
“What a hassle!” André declared, blaming the move from Paris for the delay. “It has been worse I’m sure than fatigue duty,” André prattled on. “Enfin, that’s how it is, we are almost settled in and I am starting to get my breath back.”
André did not explain to Max why he and his mother had left Paris; nor did André mention the man masquerading as his father. Indeed, André had never referred to Landru, alias Diard, alias Cuchet, in any of his letters to Max.
Over Christmas, Jeanne received a letter from Mme Morin who – possibly prompted by Max – was worried that she had heard nothing from Mme Cuchet since her departure from Paris. It took Jeanne a week to reply, and when she did, her tone was guarded and unwelcoming.
Jeanne began by explaining implausibly that she had not written sooner because she had not wished to “disturb” Mme Morin during her mobilised husband’s recent home leave. Besides, Jeanne continued, there was “the speed with which we decided [to move], in two or three days everything was rushed through.” Jeanne assured Mme Morin that she planned to come to Paris soon and would not fail to call on her.
“Please believe me that I also look back fondly on the moments we spent together and I really hope that we don’t lose sight of each other.”
On the other hand, a visit by Mme Morin to Vernouillet might be difficult because “at the moment the place is rather muddy”. Of course, Jeanne added, she would be pleased to see Mme Morin at The Lodge “as soon as the weather will allow”, which might not be till the summer. Jeanne’s hint to Mme Morin was obvious; for the time being, she wished to be left alone.
Sometime in January, Jeanne wrote a similar letter to the sister of her late husband, who had also expressed a desire to visit Vernouillet. Once again, Jeanne explained that the “poor weather” meant such a visit was currently impractical.
Even after a month in Vernouillet, the reclusive new tenants at The Lodge had made almost no impression on their immediate neighbours. The local butcher, who lived with his family at the bottom of Rue de Mantes, dimly recalled “Monsieur Cuchet” strolling up the hill one day with André, who was wearing mechanic’s overalls. The butcher’s wife thought she might have seen Jeanne and André heading off somewhere on their bicycles. On the other side, the young housewife whose property overlooked the rear garden of The Lodge could only remember later that the man might have been a secret German agent.
In early January, Jeanne allowed André to travel twice to Paris to collect the post from their old apartment. It was probably on one of these trips that André picked up some fantastic news, at least from his point of view. France had lost around 300,000 men in the first five months of the war, a staggering casualty rate that had already forced the government to bring forward the mobilisation of young men born in 1895 and 1896, the socalled “classes” of 1915 and 1916. By the second week of January, the press was reporting accurately that the government was about to announce the call-up in the summer of 1915 of André’s contingent, the “class” of 1917. Suddenly, Jeanne faced the prospect of losing André to the army within a matter of months.
André could not wait to tell Max, who had just been posted to the front. “Ah! You lucky dog,” André wrote enviously on 20 January, before alluding to his own good news. “I believe I too will soon be savouring the pleasures of garrison life,” André continued. “Perhaps you and I will meet one day in the trenches, you as a dragoon and me as a foot-soldier, for I am sure in advance that I cannot avoid this destiny.”
André was still pumped up with patriotic fervour a week later when he wrote to his mobilised uncle, the husband of Jeanne’s sister-in-law. André had heard that his uncle had just been promoted from private to the lowly rank of adjutant. It was a signal honour for the family, André believed, and he felt obliged to convey his congratulations.
Then André and Jeanne fell silent, as if they had simply disappeared.