Agnès Humbert

“Then, between two sheets of paper, they discovered a third, left there by accident. Clearly written at the top were the words, 'Copy and circulate'. It was the front page of Résistance, mercifully unfinished. Ordered to explain it, I admitted with a suitable degree of reluctance that it was a copy of a tract exhorting the French people to hoard all their nickel coins. I said I had abandoned the project as I was such a bad typist, but that I had made five copies that I had left on seats in the Métro. All in all, it was a plausible story that would only cost me two or three months in prison. I chuckled inwardly as I thought about the Résistance file, with its four hundred names and addresses, lying quietly hidden — together with copies of all the tracts we had published since September 1940 — under the stair carpet between floors. After asking my permission with great ceremony, my gentleman visitors used my telephone to report back to their chief on the success of their mission. Then they hung up, and invited me to leave with them. It was at this point that I remembered the Roosevelt speech that Léo had given me two days before, which was still in my handbag! I asked permission to go to the toilet, which they granted, though not without first snatching my bag from me and ordering me not to shut the door.”
― Agnès Humbert, Resistance: A French Woman's Journal of the War