In her autobiography Toutes fenêtres ouvertes ("All Windows Open", 2017), Georgette Elgey wrote extensively about what she called "one of the last major upper-class scandals of the French Third Republic": her birth out of wedlock.
Her father Georges Lacour-Gayet was an eminent historian, member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, who was, at the time of her birth, 72 years old and a widower.
After Lacour-Gayet refused to marry her, Léon fought for years for Georgette to be officially recognised as his daughter, eventually losing in court but leaving the old man's reputation in shatters.
Madeleine Léon was a convert to Roman Catholicism and Elgey was baptised as a child; yet, because of their Jewish roots, mother and daughter had to flee Paris and live in hiding during the occupation of France by Nazi Germany.
[5] On the advice of Roger Stéphane, she then started working on what was to become her magnum opus, a history of the French Fourth Republic adequately titled Histoire de la IVe République.