The rivalry between two of Paris’s most formidable femmes du monde had many sources, including the leadership of rival salons, but at bottom it was a rivalry about men and power. The marquise’s lover, Édouard Daladier, was the premier of France, and the comtesse’s lover, Paul Reynaud, the minister of finance, wanted to be the premier of France. Of the two women, the comtesse was the more aggressive and controlling. A persistent and intrusive presence at the Ministry of Finance, where a special telephone line had been installed for her use, on at least one occasion the comtesse had been seen presiding over a meeting of ministry officials in Reynaud’s office. There was much speculation about why Reynaud put up with it. The most widely accepted explanation was height; he was barely five feet tall and the comtesse “made him feel tall and grand and powerful.” If Reynaud had been three inches taller, the history of the world might have been changed,” said one Parisian.

For years, the comtesse had been relentless in her efforts to advance Reynaud’s career, and for years those efforts had floundered on the same two objections. A national leader required a political base, and Reynaud, a lawyer and a financial technocrat, lacked a base. The second objection was linked to the first—and perhaps also to Reynaud’s height—he threw off a fume of superiority that was politically toxic. In group photos, Reynaud always seems to stand a foot or so in front of everyone else: his smile full of self-pleasure; his slightly slanted eyes giving his small, handsome face an exotic oriental cast; and his perfectly cut suit suggesting that he was a man who paid more attention to his appearance than a man should. There were two schools of thought about the origins of Reynaud’s nickname. One held that he was called “Mickey Mouse” because of his diminutive stature, the other that the nickname was a backhanded tribute to Reynaud’s tremendous energy. The French, who liked their politicians with a little dirt under their fingernails, found it easy to imagine the earthy Daladier as a resident of the “real France,” that mystical national homeland where men spent their days in a field, back to the sky, face to the black earth; Reynaud, they found impossible to imagine anywhere except where he in fact lived, in one of Paris’s most exclusive districts. Reynaud had much to offer France: intelligence, competency, and determination to wage the war aggressively. Still, it is likely that he would have ended up marooned on the shoals of history had not a political crisis at the end of the Finnish war done what all the Comtesse de Portes’s efforts had failed to do.

In no nation had the “great and glorious” cause of Finland aroused more passion than in France. On February 10, 1940, when Daladier announced that the Allies would send fifty thousand men and a hundred aircraft to Finland, the Chamber of Deputies erupted in applause. Here, at last, was the France the deputies had been waiting for, the France the French people had been waiting for: the France of Verdun, of the Marne, the France who defended the weak and helpless and embodied liberal democracy. Daladier’s popularity soared after the announcement, but then, in early March, Finland surrendered, the Allied Expeditionary Force disbanded, and the languorous rhythms of the drôle de guerre reasserted themselves. The press returned to printing photos of Allied generals pinning medals on one another, while, along the Western Front, Allied and German troops resumed “pranking” one another. In one famous incident, a German unit posted a sign near the French line: “Soldiers of the Northern Army, beware of the English. They are destroying your properties, eating your food, sleeping with your wives, raping your daughters.” The next day the French troops responded: “Who gives a damn? We’re from the South.”

In Paris, the femmes du monde, bored with war work for a nonexistent war, resumed their long champagne lunches, and shopkeepers ignored the boring blackout regulations. “What does the word ‘war’ really mean?” the writer Simone de Beauvior wondered. The previous September, “when all the papers printed it boldly across their headlines, it meant horror, something undefined but very real. Now, it lacks all substance and identity.” As the old malaise reasserted itself, Daladier’s political fortunes fell.

Entering the French Chamber of Deputies on March 19, the premier looked like a man who had been invited to his own funeral. The vote of confidence that afternoon went overwhelmingly against him. “The Bull of Vaucluse has received something more than darts this time,” wrote Elie Bois. “The toreador ha[s] planted the sword firmly between his ribs.” On March 21, Paul Reynaud assumed the premiership, promising to reinvigorate the war effort with a spectacular new plan.

By late March, Prime Minister Chamberlain was also feeling the need to do something spectacular, and for the same reason. Boredom and disaffection were undermining civilian discipline and morale. To many Britons, the war was beginning to feel unreal, as if it was something Whitehall, Westminster, and Downing Street had concocted for their own personal amusement. “Keep out,” declared a cartoon in the Picture Post. “This is a private war. The War Office, the Admiralty, the Air Ministry and the Ministry of Information are engaged in a war against the Nazis.