that moved as they passed him in review. Grandclément junior, meanwhile, looked on in distant admiration from first Beirut and then Tunis, where he continued his studies under the Jesuits. Finally, in his late teens André changed schools for the fourth time and returned to Paris to take his Baccalauréat.
Grandclément senior, whose brother and cousin were also admirals, had long made it clear that he expected his son to follow the family tradition and join the navy. It was now time for André to do his duty and prepare for the entrance exams for France’s naval college, the École Navale, at Brest. But something seems to have snapped in young André during his period of preparation for the great naval school. One day, he peremptorily resigned his place and joined up as an ordinary soldier in a Senegalese rifle regiment in Sfax, North Africa. Writing to a friend he said: ‘So now I am going to be with the negroes, with whom, if truth be told, I find a greater affinity than with the whites.’ André Grandclément had become – and would remain for the rest of his life – the outsider who longed to be inside.
Explaining his sudden and perplexing flight from a naval career, Grandclément junior later wrote: ‘At eighteen, I rejected my father as a result of a foolish row. If that had not happened I would have maintained the family tradition … [but then] I would have ended up less human – like my father.’
A little later, on a weekend visit to the Bizerta home of one of his father’s friends, the twenty-year-old André, ever romantic, ever impetuous, fell in love with the colonel’s daughter, Geneviève Toussaint, known as ‘Myssett’. Almost immediately he announced his intention to marry his new sweetheart. The admiral was predictably furious, but his son was adamant.
The couple married in Bizerta on 6 November 1929. Though he did it with bad grace and complained of the expense, the old admiral made the journey from Paris to join a small flotilla of senior naval Grandcléments who sailed into the cathedral of Notre-Dame-de-France in Bizerta for the ceremony, complete with clanking swords, heavy encrustations of medals, elegantly trimmed naval beards and, of course, the inevitable feather-festooned cocked hats.
André and Myssett had five children in quick succession. Three died young, leaving two daughters: Ghislaine, paralysed as a result of brain damage at birth, and Francine, four years her junior.
A year after the wedding, André suddenly announced yet another change of course: he was thinking of leaving the army. The young Grandclément family, now feeling the pinch financially (another regular feature of André Grandclément’s life), transhipped to Toulon. Here, in 1932, André declared that he was not after all leaving the army, but would instead attend the officer school at Saint-Maixent in the Somme valley. As ever, full of hope and resolution, he wrote to his wife: ‘I am very happy … and well aware of the value of two years of engagement once again in the business of learning and study.’
All seemed set fair once more. But then, fate again intervened – this time in the form of a serious riding accident which left him unfit for military service as a result of a damaged lung and, according to his doctor, tuberculosis as well. A short period of work in the wine business on the Côte d’Or followed. Then thanks to the patronage of a cousin, he was offered a job as a salesman with the insurance company Mutuelle Vie in Bordeaux. He and his family moved into a cramped first-floor apartment above a garage on the Rue Basse, a narrow street set back from the Pont de Pierre. It was all a long, long way from the pomp, gilt and glitter of the Bizerta cathedral wedding, just six years previously.
The twenty-six-year-old Grandclément who arrived in Bordeaux in 1935 was tall, slim, elegant, suntanned and clean cut. Though he had a curiously expressionless face, he was considered handsome, with blue eyes, a slightly hooked nose, a prominent chin and meticulously coiffured hair. Many who knew him commented on his verbal dexterity and his ability to carry an audience, albeit with a tendency, on occasion, to sound pompous. This together with a certain grace made him impressive – even beguiling – on first acquaintance: ‘intelligent, amiable, sensitive, good looking and with considerable presence,’ said one contemporary. Others were less enamoured. ‘He greatly overestimated his own importance. He was a kind of [ideological] gigolo,’ remembered one close colleague, while another described him as carrying ‘himself badly with a stooping head and shoulders as a result of some chest affliction. He has a pale face and a prominent nose.’
André Grandclément’s early opinions were those of his class and upbringing: Catholic and conservative, but not active in either cause. Later, preparing for the navy, he apparently shared the royalist sympathies of his classmates. After his marriage to Myssett the couple affected a bohemian lifestyle; there are even some suggestions of left-wing views during André’s time with the Senegalese rifle regiment. By the mid-1930s, however, he was close to the Croix-de-Feu, a right-wing political organisation, subsequently banned for its fascist leanings. Later police reports reflect these internal ambivalences, one noting him as a ‘dangerously militant communist’, suspected of hiding arms, while another described him as ‘a faithful partisan’ of the Vichy government. In reality, in these immediate pre-war years, André Grandclément, the perennially restless optimist who was always certain that the next chance was the best one, was still seeking a safe harbour for his views, just as he was looking for a secure financial future for his young family and a fitting purpose for his life.
The truth was that behind what was, at first sight, an imposing front, there lay a weak man in everything except his attachment to his daughters – especially little Ghislaine. The chief drivers of his personality were vanity, a hunger for recognition and the certainty that, despite the low opinion of his father and the moderate opinions of his contemporaries, there was nevertheless some important purpose to his life to match his hitherto unrecognised talents.
On 24 September 1939, just days after war broke out, Grandclément met a pretty young divorcée who worked in the same office building in Bordeaux. Not long after, the two became lovers and in due course he declared Lucette Tartas – vivacious, intelligent, firm in her views, and in many ways much stronger than her lover – his ‘official mistress’. In this capacity, according to the curious French custom of the time, Lucette was recognised by the family and his wife. Myssett, her heart broken, took to the country with the two girls and began an official separation from her husband.
The love affair between Grandclément and Lucette Tartas was deep, genuine and endearing. ‘Their love for each other dazzled … like a couple straight out of one of those pre-war musical comedies,’ one contemporary observed.
Weeks after meeting Lucette, and despite his physical incapacity, Grandclément managed to pull enough strings to be declared ‘fit for service’. He joined the battle for France, fighting with an infantry regiment engaged in the frantic attempts to stop German armour breaking through the Ardennes forest. Here he showed considerable military ability and was mentioned in dispatches for bravery. But this too did not last. When France surrendered, he was demobilised and returned to the role of a humble insurance agent in Bordeaux.
By 1940, with burgeoning medical expenses for the treatment of Ghislaine, the Grandcléments were once again in difficult financial straits. It was all too much for Myssett, who now sued for divorce. But by early 1941 the insurance business started looking up again – so much so that in September of that year André and Lucette were able to move house. They rented an elegant and spacious apartment at 34 Cours de Verdun, in a fashionable neighbourhood of central Bordeaux and just opposite the main headquarters of the special French police brigade under Pierre Poinsot.
By now, the public face of André Grandclément was hiding a deeper and much more dangerous life. The war had finally provided him with a secure political anchorage. He was, he decided, conservative, republican and, like many of his class (especially the fascist-leaning revolutionary group known as the ‘Cagoule militaire’ in the army, with whom he had both connections and sympathy), intensely patriotic, right-wing and nationalist. To start with he was a fervent supporter of Pétain’s Vichy administration.
