1. “Despite her age”: Paul Morand, The Allure of Chanel, p. 181.

2. Gabrielle Chanel had barely been laid to rest: Hebe Dorsey, “Looking Back,” International Herald Tribune, September 26, 1972.

3. “a dangerous agent”: Ibid.

4. “… to hell with politics”: A comment by Knopf senior editor and V.P., Victoria Wilson, December 2010.

5. Paxton’s book proved: Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France, Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944.

6. “was not in the Gestapo”: Milt Frudenheim, “Chanel’s Past Haunts Exhibit,” The Salt Lake Tribune, September 29, 1972.

7. “loved eating”: Dorsey, International Herald Tribune, September 26, 1972.

8. “He is not German”: Ibid.

9. Years later: When I briefed Chanel biographer Edmonde Charles-Roux on my findings and showed her French counterintelligence documents in the spring of 2009, she admitted that in 1974, when she was finishing the Chanel biography (L’Irrégulière), she had been manipulated into believing Dincklage was a playboy by Chanel’s lawyer, René de Chambrun.

10. Boches: “Boches” was a pejorative term for Germans used by the French in World Wars I and II.

11. Chanel was released: Gabrielle Palasse Labrunie, telephone interview with author, Yermenonville, France, November 8, 2009.

12. During the postwar process: Ousby, Occupation, p. 310.

13. French police had identified: CARAN Z/6/672 greffe 5559. German Abwehr personnel document: Personalalbogen, 159, Paris, den 9. Juni 1941. Also Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 1044.

14. Serre, forty-eight years old: Annuaire de la Magistrature, n.p.

15. Slowly, Serre, a painstaking investigator: CARAN Z/6/672 greffe 5559. APP BA 1990. SSF. CARAN: An index card, inscribed “Gabrielle Chanel” with the mention art. 75 I 4787 signifying: “an investigation of Chanel is opened under the French penal code, article 75: dealing with the enemy.”

16. But French police and court documents: CARAN Z/6/672 greffe 5559.

17. Serre would never learn: SSF document.

18. Nor did he know that Dincklage: Ibid; BNA, KV2/159, Ledebur file.