Sleeping with the Enemy [antikvár]

PROLOGUEDespite her age she sparkles; she is the only volcano in the Auvergne that is not extinct the most brilliant, the most impetuous, the most brilliantly insufferable woman that ever was.Gabrielle Chanel had barely been laid to rest in her designer sepulcher at Lausanne, Switzerland, when the city of Paris announced that France's first lady and Chanel's admirer and client, the wife of French president Georges Pompidou, would open an official exhibit celebrating Chanel's life and work in Paris in October 1972. Shortly before, Hebe Dorsey, the legendary fashion editor of the International Herald Tribune, reported the "homage to Chanel" probably would be canceled or, at the very least, postponed. Dorsey revealed that Pierre Galante, an editor at Varis Match, would soon expose shocking documents from French counterintelligence archives. Dorsey alleged that Chanel had had an affair during the German occupation of Paris with Baron Hans Günther von Dincklage: "a dangerous agent of the German information servicelikely an agent of the Gestapo."Chanel, the epitome of French good taste, in bed with a Nazi spy^worse yet, involved with an agent of the hated Gestapo? To the French, and especially to French Jews, veterans of the Resistance, and survivors of SS-run concentration camps, German collaborators were pariahs or, worse, fit to be spat upon. Granted, for years fashionable Paris had gossiped that Chanel had shacked up during the occupation with a German lover called Spatz German for sparrowat the chic Hőtel Ritz where Nazi bigwigs like Hermann Goring and Joseph Goebbels were pampered by the Swiss management. But the Gestapo? Hadn't Chanel dressed Mme Pompidou? Hadn't she been honored at the Elysée Palace? How could such an icon of French society have bedded a "German spy"? It was hard to believe. Even though tens of thousands of French men and women collabos had escaped punishment, being a