Alix Marrier d'Unienville, MBE (8 May 1918 – 10 November 2015) was a French-British agent in the Free French (RF) Section of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), during World War II.
[1] D'Unienville was born in Mauritius to a wealthy French aristocratic family who moved back to France when she was six.
After managing to escape to England in 1940, she was employed writing propaganda leaflets at the Free French headquarters at Carlton Gardens, London before the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d'Action recruited her and directed her to the SOE for training.
On 31 March 1944, she parachuted into Loir-et-Cher from a Halifax aircraft with millions in francs for the Gaullist delegate-general to distribute.
[3] Adopting the alias Aline Bavelan, her cover story was she was born on the island of Réunion in 1922, moved to France in 1938 to study and was now the wife of a prisoner of war.
She was successful until 6 June 1944 when she was arrested with "Tristan" (Pierre-Henri Teitgen) outside Le Bon Marché in Paris.
[2] D'Unienville, by once again eating and talking, was able to get herself transferred briefly to Saint-Anne, and then to the prison camp at Romainville, where she and another woman, Annie Hervé, hatched a plan to escape over the walls using a rope they made out of black curtains.