Prologue
Paris, 1945
Her family, or what remained of her family, gathered around the bare wooden casket in which her body lay shrouded in silence. After the departure of the handful of visitors that morning, more concerned with their own survival now that the war had finished than paying their final respects to one of France’s most extraordinary women, the room, the apartment and the family stood in silence.
Silence was both a mark of respect, and defined the isolation of the family. Even her assembled family, those who had survived the Second World War, was insufficient to disguise the segregation and alienation which she had suffered for most of her married life.
The silence in the room was broken by the occasional sigh of resignation, a shaking of the head, a shrugging of the shoulders. The family looked at each other, and wondered why. But there was no answer. Now there would never be an answer. Yet the private note from the President of the National Assembly had spoken of her as being the reason for the separation of the French Catholic Church from the French State, a woman who had brought down a corrupt government, as the pivotal reason for the foundation of modern Zionism, and as the person who, more than anyone else, had forced the French military to modernize and rid itself of privilege and discrimination. Yet almost nobody had come to pay their respects now that she was dead.
The undertaker, assuming that the crowds would last well into the afternoon for a...
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