As she put it in her autobiography, I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, "I was a small-town South African who was being offered Prince Charming on a platter, decked with yachts, châteaux, sable coats, jewels, townhouses and a coat-of-arms equal to that of the Valois.
She abandoned the aristocratic life and embraced Paris' bohemia, studied history and philosophy at the Sorbonne, art at Munich, wrote for the literary magazine, Les Nouvelles littéraires.
[1] As late as spring 2007, Masson was busy revising an earlier novel about the German massacre on 10 June 1944 of the villagers of Oradour, near Limoges, France, and working on a biography of Baroness Emma Orczy, author of The Scarlet Pimpernel.
[1] Masson encountered one of her biographees, Krystyna Skarbek, during a voyage on the Winchester Castle in May–June 1952 from Cape Town, South Africa, to England to be reunited with her sea-captain future husband.
[2] In subsequent years, as Masson sought to learn the fates of her prewar friends and wartime Resistance comrades-in-arms, she fortuitously met people who had known Skarbek and her partner Andrzej Kowerski ("Andrew Kennedy").
[3] One of the strongest impressions I gained from listening to the talk of Christine's friends was that she hated any form of oppression, not only for patriotic reasons, but because she translated her own craving for freedom of thought and action into every human sphere.
To be sure, inaccuracies occasionally creep in, as when the author of the beautiful pastel sketch of Skarbek is identified as "Pavli Kowska" – it was in fact the work of Polish artist Aniela Pawlikowska (1901–80).