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The most important omission, however, was unavoidable. Paris-Underground was published in September 1943, nearly two years before the end of the Second World War. In publishing the book when she did, at a time when the war's outcome was still far from certain, Etta Shiber hoped that it would help raise American morale and solidify public support for the war effort; in this worthy goal it manifestly succeeded. At the time of the book's publication, however, Etta did not know—and indeed never did fully discover—what had become of Kitty: That story remained to be told.

PART ONE

Paris Is a Dead Planet

C'est la nuit qu'il est beau de croire à la lumière. 

[It is at night that it is beautiful to believe in the light.]

—EDMOND ROSTAND, as inscribed on the wall of cell number 144 in Fresnes prison, 1941

CHAPTER ONE

For so long Etta Shiber had lived the most circumscribed of lives: Until the age of fifty-nine she had lived in four apartments, none of them outside a radius of sixteen streets and three avenues on the Upper East Side of New York. She had married William Noyes Shiber, manager of the telegraph department for William Randolph Hearst's New York newspapers, in 1901, when she was twenty-three; she stopped teaching kindergarten three years later and didn't hold a paying job ever again. She had never learned to drive, had never registered to vote, had never appeared in the pages of a newspaper. Most days she cooked and kept house, did her marketing among the  bakeries and fruit stands and German butcher shops around the neighborhood; almost nightly she accompanied her cousin Irving Weil, one of New York's most prominent music critics, to the symphony or the opera, or otherwise stayed home to knit and listen to the radio, or perhaps read a novel by Dickens or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. "For almost thirty-five years," a reporter would later write, in some wonderment, "this quiet pattern comprised Mrs. Shiber's daily existence."

Hers was an exceedingly comfortable, predictable routine, one almost medicinal in its regularity—for it was that very predictability, Etta found, that best held at bay her true constant companion: the nervousness that had afflicted her since she was a girl. Most of the time the feeling was like the low, persistent call of a fire alarm in the distance; it was always there, but she did what she could to ignore it and focus on whatever was in front of her. On other days, though, the bad ones, the alarm was close and loud in her ears, as if the fire were right outside her door, and she could feel herself growing hot and her heart quickened and sometimes, more worrisomely, it pounded out an irregular rhythm, and there was nothing she could do to concentrate on anything else and she had to lie down. By the time she was in her middle years Etta was suffering from hypertension, a condition that the doctors of the time still found maddeningly difficult to treat; she knew she should lose some weight, but she found that hard to do, which only increased her anxiety.

Etta had been prone to anxiety for as long as she could remember, had always been very shy, self-conscious about her appearance, and almost reflexively self-effacing; she recoiled at the notion of ever calling attention to herself. "One thing I have learned," she once observed, "is not to be a fussmaker." Early on she seems to have decided that the best path lay in being unfailingly polite and always following the rules—at Grammar School No. 1 she won medals not only for scholarship but also for "deportment"— and while she was a kind and sympathetic listener and was liked by everyone, she still found it painfully difficult to socialize with people she did not know well. At the Normal College of the City of New York, [*1] where like many smart young women of her time she studied to become a teacher, she did not belong to a single club or fraternity (as they were called, even though all of the students were female); she did not read Shakespeare and Swift with the Phoebean Literary Society, did not observe robins and warblers and wrens in Central Park with the Bird Club, nor sing with the Glee Club, nor help organize the annual "pink tea," in which pink chrysanthemums were strewn over the top of each brewing pot—which actually contained hot cocoa, as tea was considered too mature a drink for college girls.

In the photograph of the graduating class of 1901, which shows several rows of young women in white shirtwaists and black velvet neck ribbons, their long hair swirled into pompadours in the "Gibson Girl" style of the time, Etta stands at the edge, ever so slightly apart from the rest of the group, like an island just off the mainland; in the Normal College Echo for 1901, the sole reference to her is the description provided by the yearbook staff: "Rather inclined to be good."

In the yearbook, as in the college's grading books, she is identified as "Henrietta" Kahn, a name that seems to have been a kind of way station on the path to Americanization; four years later, in 1905, she gave her name to census officials as Etta, and that is how she would be known for the rest of her life. Her parents had named her Jennett, after her father's late mother Jeanette Lowe Kahn, in accordance with the Jewish tradition of naming children for deceased ancestors. The Kahns were immigrants from the Alsatian town of Eguisheim, where a Jewish community can be traced as far back as the early eighteenth century. Etta's grandfather Benoit Kahn had arrived in New York in 1845, among the small percentage of Alsatian Jews who emigrated to a foreign country after they were granted the right of mobility; likely he sensed an opportunity in the United States, for he had been trained as an optician in Alsace and when he opened B. Kahn & Co. on lower Broadway in 1850, he was only the second optician in the city.