In June 1940, the roads of France were choked with refugees. Families pushed handcarts loaded with bedding and whatever else they could carry from their homes. In barely six weeks, the French army, considered until recently the strongest in Europe, had collapsed. Paris was occupied by Nazi Germany, and the elderly Marshal Pétain, the hero of Verdun, went on the radio to tell the nation that the fighting had to end.
Among the wounded and displaced was a French woman, a former teacher now working as a nurse. She resolved, in a phrase she would later use to describe herself, to die if necessary as a martyr for France. Within a year, she would help build one of the largest Allied spy networks in occupied France. She would then betray it to the Germans.
Her name was Mathilde Carré. She was born Mathilde Lucie Bello on June 30, 1908, in Le Creusot, an industrial town in the Saône-et-Loire region of eastern France. She showed early academic ability, and in the 1930s she studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and qualified as a teacher. In 1933 she married Maurice Carré, a fellow teacher, and the couple moved to French North Africa. The marriage did not last long. By the time World War II, which began on September 1, 1939, reached France, Carré had returned to the continent. She was a young, ambitious woman in a world about to be turned upside down.
When Germany invaded France in May 1940 and the country collapsed within six weeks, Carré was working as a nurse and watched her homeland fall under occupation. In the autumn of that year, she met the man who would give her life its decisive direction. Roman Czerniawski was a Polish air force officer who had escaped the defeat of France and was building an intelligence network for the Allies. The Poles knew him by the code name Valentin, and to the French he was known as Armand.
His organization, called Interallié, was a French-Polish network reporting to British intelligence in London, and it grew with remarkable speed. At first, microfilms were sent to the United Kingdom via a contact line to Marseille, from where they were forwarded to London. By the spring of 1941, the organization had established a wireless connection with London, and the network soon had agents operating across almost the entire German-occupied zone of France, making it one of the largest resistance networks in the country.
Carré joined the headquarters section. Following the network's practice of giving its central staff code names beginning with the letter V, she became known as Victoire. But the nickname that stuck was "La Chatte" — the Cat — because of the secrecy and quiet that marked her working style. It also reflected how her contemporaries marveled at her repeated escapes from death, convinced she had nine lives like a cat. She and Czerniawski became lovers, and she quickly emerged as one of Interallié's most valuable members.
Thanks to her composure, her charm, and her ability to draw information from German officers she met at social gatherings, she supplemented the network's intelligence with what she gathered from her own contacts. Her wireless messages to London became known by their opening line, "The Cat reports," and she became known by that nickname within the UK intelligence community as well.
In October 1941, the network drew the attention of the Germans. The task of dismantling it was assigned to Hugo Bleicher, a French-speaking intelligence sergeant who would become one of the most effective German spy hunters in occupied France. A captured agent gave him names and addresses, and the arrests began. In November, about 21 members were seized in Cherbourg, and on November 17 the leaders, including Czerniawski and Carré, were arrested in Paris.
After only one night in custody, Carré broke. She asked to speak to Bleicher and revealed everything: the names of network members, the location of hidden documents, and the sites of its caches and materials. This information allowed the Germans to dismantle Interallié almost completely. She was released the next day and went to live with Bleicher, who became both her lover and her handler.
She kept her old code name, Victoire, but she now worked for the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service, against the people she had once fought alongside against the occupiers. She accompanied the Germans on their raids, and on at least one occasion she personally identified a former comrade, greeting him with a kiss in a café moments before he was led away. She helped the Germans capture at least 60 of her former colleagues. Many were arrested, some were deported, and others were executed.
The Germans also seized four of the network's wireless transmitters. With Carré's help in using the codes, transmission schedules, and agreed security procedures, they were able to keep sending messages to London as if nothing had changed. It was the captured radio link that drew the man who would end her double game.
Pierre de Vomécourt, a British intelligence agent with the Special Operations Executive, working under the code name Lucas, had no wireless operator of his own and no means of reaching London, and he was financing his work from his own money. In late December 1941, he was introduced through a lawyer in Paris to Carré, who offered him access to a transmitter. To test her, he had her send a request to London for funds. Two days later, the reply came, and he collected the money. Reassured, he did not know that the network had already been uncovered, or that the woman helping him was working for the other side.
Bleicher introduced himself to him as a Belgian resistance leader named Jean Gustave. Vomécourt's suspicions returned in January 1942 when he asked Carré to obtain forged identity papers, and she produced them too quickly and of too high a quality. When he confronted her, she admitted she had been working for the Germans. By then she had become his lover, and instead of exposing or killing her, Vomécourt devised a more ambitious plan. He convinced her to take on a third role, persuading the Germans that she needed to travel to London with him in order to spy on the British. In reality, he intended to hand her over to the British.
The Abwehr agreed, expecting her to report back after returning from London. On the night of February 27, 1942, after several failed attempts, the two crossed to England aboard a British naval vessel. That was the end of Carré's career as an agent for either side.
In London, she was questioned closely by British intelligence about Abwehr methods, and her radio link was operated for a time to deceive the Germans until it ran out of usefulness. Then, at the request of the French authorities and in light of the role she had played, she was arrested in the summer of 1942 and held for the rest of the war, first in Holloway Prison in London and then in the women's prison at Aylesbury, where at one point she went on a hunger strike to protest her conditions. She remained in British custody for about three years.
After World War II ended in 1945 and the liberation of France was complete, Mathilde Carré was flown to Paris and handed over to the French authorities. She spent the following years in detention in La Santé and in Rennes while her case was prepared. Her trial began on January 3, 1949, and lasted four days. The prosecution read aloud from her wartime memoirs a sentence that would define her image in the public mind: that she longed more than anything for a good meal, a man, and to hear Mozart's Requiem once more.
Her defense team did not deny that she had betrayed the network, but argued that the situation she had been placed in made resistance impossible, and reminded the court that she had begun the war as a genuine member of the Resistance. On January 7, 1949, she was sentenced to death. But the sentence was not carried out. Three months later it was commuted to life imprisonment with hard labor, and later reduced again. She was released in 1954 after spending a total of about 12 years in detention in two countries.
In 1959, she published her memoirs under the title "J'étais la chatte," meaning "I Was the Cat." The book was revised and republished in 1975 as "On m'appelait la chatte," or "They Called Me the Cat." In those memoirs, she asserted her innocence and sought to minimize her guilt, presenting herself as a woman trapped by circumstance rather than a traitor who chose her own survival over the lives of her comrades.
After her release, Carré withdrew almost entirely from public life. Her isolation was so complete that for decades reference works recorded her death around 1970, and her true fate was not revealed until much later. In fact, she lived quietly in France for more than half a century after her wartime betrayal. Mathilde Carré died in Paris on May 30, 2007. She was 98 years old.
Carré's story illustrates the complexities of human life during the greatest conflict in human history. For a time, she was exactly as her comrades believed her to be: courageous and trusted with the secrets of one of the Allies' networks in occupied France. But after a single night in a cell, everything changed. Forced to choose between loyalty and survival, she betrayed the network she had helped build. Dozens of people who trusted her were arrested, deported to concentration camps, or killed.
For some, her betrayal made her worse than the Nazis themselves. The Resistance expected treachery from the occupiers, not from a trusted member of their own network. In spite of everything, the former Cat served her punishment and then lived a long life in the country she had once betrayed.