By Brian Maher
This post Memorializing a Real-life James Bond appeared first on Daily Reckoning.
It was April 1945 and the German SS had just captured French agent Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld…
The Gallic saboteur was coming off another mission of derring-do when the hated German occupiers collared him.
Monsieur Rochefoucauld was a man used to seeing off long odds. But Lady Fortune turns a cold cheek to every man eventually.
At least he would die a proud man.
He had sold himself dearly — he left a path of lifeless Germans behind him — and covered his name in glory.
Nazi justice would be swift… and it would be severe.
German soldiers seized the condemned by the scruff and hauled him into a nearby field.
They fell in, line abreast… readied their weapons… and awaited the order…
“Feuer!”
A belch of machine gun fire tore the early spring air. Then silence.
But something was wrong. Cosmically wrong. The Frenchman was… alive. No, alive doesn’t describe it. He was unscratched.
What happened? How could they miss from point blank range?
The Frenchman was now living a moment of pure adrenaline, a moment beyond description. Then suddenly his disbelieving eyes solved the mystery.
The bullets weren’t for him.
Rochefoucauld’s French Resistance confreres saw the proceedings and opened up on the SS men just in time. The timing was a thing of Hollywood — only more so.
Survival trumps justice, so the Germans wheeled to their immediate source of anxiety. The Germans would deal with their prisoner later. Streams of molten 7.92 millimeter arced their way downrange.
That’s when Rochefoucauld seized his chance…
His heart pounding to ¾ time, the galloping frog dashed out of sight — unexecuted, unbroken and unbowed.
Rochefoucauld had cheated death… again…
Count Robert de La Rochefoucauld was born in 1923 to a family of Paris aristocrats. They could trace their roots to the time of Charlemagne. One of his ancestors, Francois de La Rochefoucauld, often drank with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin while they were in France.
Before the war Robert attended Europe’s most elite schools. High society was his natural habitat. The young Count knew this one and that one, went to all the parties — as one would expect from a young aristo. He had life by its tail.
And believe it or no, the young man actually met Herr Hitler in 1938. The German chancellor even pinched the young 15-year old’s cheek. But that was before Hitler was Hitler. And before the Germans invaded France two years later.
The Germans settled into the rough business of occupation after their lightning victory in June 1940.
Rochefoucauld’s father was dragged off. Other relatives weren’t as fortunate. But young Robert managed to slip through the dragnet.
He tried to piece a resistance group. But he soon learned that his efforts attracted the Gestapo’s worried interest. It was time to quit Paris. He’d take his chances in the French countryside…
Rochefoucauld shed his aristocratic title, assumed a false name and went as a commoner. It was life at the other end.
He soon fell in with two downed British pilots who needed out …read more
Source:: Daily Reckoning feed
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