ONE DAY in 1966, the young Aude Yung-de Pr vaux was confronted in the Biblioth que Nationale by an old man who insisted she must be the daughter of the Resistance heroes Jacques and Lotka de Pr vaux of whom she had never heard. That evening she challenged her mother, who to her amazement confirmed the old man's account. When her father's sea chests arrived from Casablanca, where they had been kepr by her Polish godfather since the war, she started piecing together the lives of her real parents, about whom the de Pr vaux family had kept a tight-lipped silence. Jacques Trolley de Pr vaux was a brilliant and handsome vice-admiral with a gift for diplomacy and a penchant for literature, bohemian company and opium. Charlotte Leitner was a beautiful American-born Polish Jew, who worked as a fashion model in Paris and as a demonstrator for Elizabeth Arden. For more than two years, from 1942 until their betrayal and execution on the orders of Klaus Barbie only days before the allied troops captured Montluc, Jacques and Lotka were key figures in the Resistance in the South of France.