Marie-Madeleine Fourcade

Born Marie-Madeleine Bridou in Marseille, in Bouches-du-Rhône, she grew up and attended convent schools in Shanghai where her father had a position with the French Maritime service.

[1] In 1936, Fourcade met and impressed the former French military intelligence officer Major Georges Loustaunau-Lacau, code name "Navarre".

[1] When the Vichy-governed part of France was also occupied by Germany, Fourcade spent months on the run as she moved from city-to-city to avoid detection.

She remarried, was a mother of five children, a commander of the Légion d'honneur, vice president of the International Union of Resistance and Deportation from 1960 and the National Association of Medal-holders from 1947, and a member of the LICRA.

Fourcade wrote a memoire of her wartime experience in the book L'Arche de Noé, published in 1968, later abridged and translated into English as Noah's Ark.

Their assignment was to gather information about German troop and naval movements and logistics inside France, and transmit this intelligence to Britain, using a network of clandestine radio transmitters and couriers.

Her second escape was more harrowing: in the small hours of the morning, she stripped naked and was able to force her petite body between the bars of the cell window.

The Preface to the much-abridged, and poorly-translated, British/US edition was written by Kenneth Cohen who was her wartime (and post-war) "controller" in SIS and the father to her godson.