Feature


“Mathilde Carré, known as The Cat spent her evenings in the officers’ mess, dressed in black silk pyjamas and flirting while her lover played the piano”


human being I have ever met – man or woman’. Soon aſter the fall of Poland she arrived in London


demanding to be allowed to work for the secret services. One of the men who interviewed her reported that she was an ‘expert skier... a great adventuress... and absolutely fearless... I believe we have a PRIZE’. Once recruited she was sent to Budapest where she met


a handsome, powerfully built Polish officer, with piercing blue eyes. His name was Andrezj Kowerski, a holder of his country’s highest medal for bravery, the ‘Virtuti Militari’, and who had lost the lower part of a leg in a shooting accident. Christine had an immediate impact on him. He was bewitched by the slight, suntanned woman with dark eyes and a ‘kind of crackling vitality’ who walked as if she was dancing ‘full of grace’. Within days the pair had become lovers. Tey spent their first night together, cushioned against the freezing winter in Christine’s flat. Kowerski described it as ‘amazing, warm and cosy...everything magical and wonderful and fun’. Te next morning he avoided Christine’s maid by hiding naked in a cupboard. As the war went on, so the list of Christine’s lovers grew, she was always attracted to wild, strong men who shared her passion for excitement and danger. Christine leſt a trail of broken-hearted men in her


Above: Nancy Wake Left: Françoise Arnoul as Suzanne Ménessier dite Cora and Kurt Meisel as Capitaine Heinz Muller in the 1958 film La Chatte, based on the life of Mathilde Carré


Her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Krystyna Skarbek was a young Polish Countess recruited


by the British at the start of the war and given the name Christine Granville. One officer said she had a ‘mesmeric power’, able to switch on her personality ‘like a searchlight’ blinding ‘anybody in its beam’. Her dark looks were described as ‘La Beauté du Diable’ – the Devil’s beauty. Her first husband found her ‘dotty, romantic and forever seeking change’; the marriage soon ended. Her second husband, himself an adventurer, described her as ‘the most intrepid


wake. In Budapest one spurned suitor threatened to castrate himself with a revolver. He missed and shot himself in the foot. Later, the same man tried to end his misery by jumping off a bridge into the Danube. He failed to notice the river was frozen and succeeded only in breaking his legs. Christine was unimpressed. She could use her hypnotic powers on any living thing.


Once she was hiding from a German patrol equipped with fierce dogs to flush out fugitives. One of the animals found her and within five minutes of being in Christine’s company became devoted to her, ignoring the calls of its handler. Christine escaped with it and gave the dog as a pet to a local resistance leader.


Continues page 57 The Amorist May 2017 11


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