Le Figaro: "Odile de Vasselot, liaison officer".

A smiling woman appears in the doorway. The century opens its door to us. In her clear voice, the valiant Odile de Vasselot de Régné recalls episodes from her life as a member of the Resistance during the Second World War, but is reluctant to talk about the religious vocation that followed. Too intimate."It won't interest anyone," smiles the azure-eyed old woman. I'm afraid of what you'll write". Such a feeling has long been foreign to her: was she shuddering when, in 1940, she asked a friend on the sidewalk outside the cinema how to become a spy? "The Resistance was a fortress for me, and I couldn't find the door," says the woman who heard General de Gaulle's voice live on June 18th in the dungeon of her family's château in Poitou, on a fragile galena radio rigged with a needle.

She then meets a mysterious Madame Poirier, "very sophisticated, looking a bit strange, with dyed hair", who, after sounding out her courage and loyalty, enlists her in her Belgian network. How could a young girl of eighteen, from a good family, have spent months on a night train to Toulouse and back, alone, carrying packages with sensitive contents? "Dad was a prisoner of war in Nuremberg.I lied to my mother, otherwise she would never have accepted," asserts this sturdy lady, who joined the Saint François-Xavier community in 1947.

History in the making

Under the assumed name of Danièle, then Jeanne, she carried out a number of missions, including convoying Allied airmen by train. "One day, on January 4, 1944, we were on an express train between Brussels and Paris.I was accompanying two Englishmen who had certainly been spotted," she says. The Gestapo burst into the compartment where we were standing, and asked for our tickets. The two airmen remained stoic, avoiding compromising me. I felt them walk past me without blinking, surrounded by police officers, with remarkable dignity. One of them gave me a look in which I guessed gratitude. I still had their ticket enclosures in my pocket. To make the compromising papers disappear, I ate them". The scene seems to have happened yesterday, so vivid is the testimony. Odile de Vasselot de Régné's sharp memory jumps from one anecdote to the next. As the afternoon wore on, she recounted the day when, having spotted a priest at Saint Sulpice church in Paris loyal to Pétain, she arranged to go to confession with him. "I had the nerve to say to him: 'Father, am I in a state of mortal sin when I take British airmen across the border?

As she approaches the twilight of her life, this woman seems to capture the light and calm of her home, forming a halo of peace around her. A few streets away from the Musée d'Orsay, where she lives with her fellow retired nuns, she is gathering her memories byold resistance fliers, the same ones she used to slip into mailboxes across the capital eighty years ago. A flock of nephews and historians, curious about the fragments of a living history, pay her a visit. Not to mention her Ivorian friends, former students from Cocody, who call her almost every day. For in 1962, as a nun in Madeleine Daniélou's apostolic community dedicated to the education of young girls, she founded the Lycée Sainte-Marie in Abidjan (Côte d'Ivoire). She remained there for thirty years. "That's my character.I went to the place where people would get out of me what I could give," she says boldly. But I recognize that it's a great sacrifice not to have had children.

"God is everywhere

As for her religious vocation, she has no recollection of the event that made it inevitable. Although: "I do remember a moment during the war, when I was on the train to Toulouse, heading off into the dark night.I looked out of the window and said to myself: after all, God is everywhere, he can see me just as well here as if I were in bed in Versailles or at home. And I think that, since no one close to me was supposed to know I was on this train, all the in-betweens were cut out. This helped me a lot to develop a personal faith. God was my only friend, my confidant". That's the story, without the exclamation mark. Torn from her modesty as the daughter and granddaughter of military men, this confidence: "When I was little, I used to have acetone attacks that worried my family: when I was upset, I'd vomit bile. The doctor didn't think I'd make it past the age of 8, so bad was my health.As a result, everyone was afraid of upsetting me, so I was obnoxious.

Misdiagnosis. Over the past few years, she has toured schools across France, encouraging young people to sign up and telling them about her war, when she wasn't distributing meals, via the food bank, to the most needy. Her many decorations are nowhere to be seen, either in her speech or on her ample shirt. And yet, Officer of the Legion of Honor, Croix de Guerre 1939-1945, Medal of the Resistance, God knows she's received them all. The dinner bell has rung and Odile de Vasselot stands up, clutching her cane. She gives us one last look and murmurs: "I have a feeling you're going to talk about my old age or my spiritual life in your article. I'm very afraid of what you'll write about it: maybe you'll give me an acetone attack !" Barely time for a smile, and already the century is gone.

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By Guyonne de Montjou

Published on 03/09/2021