Lies, all lies, according to a 2010 French television documentary about Claude. Trying to see the entirety of this program is like trying to crack the Da Vinci Code. The production company that had made it is defunct, and I could not find it in any film archive. It was available, in snippets, on the Internet. It alleged to show proof that père Grudet actually ran a snack cart at the Angers train station, that little Fernande had never been at the convent. As for her time in the concentration camp, ostensibly Ravensbrück, the program explored a story that Claude is said to have told about how she saved the life of Charles de Gaulle’s niece while there (or vice versa) and submitted to an affair with a German doctor in order to survive. A historian in the documentary said that Claude probably made all of this up, and the idea that the madam was ever interned was dismissed as another example of Claude’s talent for self-mythologizing.

But, according to Patrick Terrail, the proprietor of Ma Maison, “she had a camp number tattooed on her wrist. I saw it.”

Taki concurred. “I saw the tattoo,” he said. “She showed it to me and Rubi. She was proud she had survived. We talked about the camp for hours. It was even more fascinating than the girls.” But which camp was it? The myth may have been Ravensbrück, but only Auschwitz used tattoos. Hence the Rashomon quality of Claude’s life. Taki then told me that Claude had been imprisoned not for her role in the French Resistance but for her faith. “She was Jewish,” he said. “I’m certain of that. She was horrified at the Jewish collaborators at the camp who herded their fellow Jews into the gas chambers. That was the greatest betrayal in her life.”

Whether or not she was a convent girl, it was likely that the Bible-saleswoman story Claude had told me was pure fantasy. It has also been suggested that the first thing she sold, in the dislocated postwar era, was herself, working as a street prostitute on Paris’s notorious Rue Godot de Mauroy, an assertion she has denied. I was able to track down one of Claude’s friends, Sylvette Balland, with whom Claude eventually had a falling-out, at a former convent turned artists’ colony in Normandy. She met me in Paris. “Claude showed me pictures of herself as a young woman,” Balland recalled, sitting in the Louvre’s Café Marly. “She was not at all attractive, crooked teeth, big nose. What I saw was all plastic surgery. Which, by the way, she said was done by Pitanguy”—the famous Brazilian surgeon—“which probably wasn’t true. Everything about her had to be the best.”

According to Balland, a pert, brainy 69-year-old blonde (in France blonde-ness is forever) who said she had been a girlfriend of Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky, Claude loved dropping names. But, despite the fact that she had brought a daughter into the world, she hated sex. “She told me that when she was 40 she looked at herself in the mirror and said, ‘Disgusting. People over 40 should not have sex.’ But She Was Clear That She Never Liked It even when she was young. Besides, she saw all the street business go to the tall, beautiful girls. She thought she never had a chance competing against them. Instead, she would take their money by managing them.”

While Madame Claude would in time turn many of her girls into titled wives, not every beauty in Paris was willing to fall under her Pygmalion spell. Susi Wyss, a rival madam and former call girl with a star clientele, told me that in the 70s Claude contacted her about working for her. Wyss turned her down. She didn’t want to work for Claude; she wanted to be Claude. Both women told me the same story of sending a famous model who later married a famous musician as a “CARE package” to the Shah of Iran, who rewarded the model with lavish jewels. Claude complained that the model stiffed her on a commission on the jewels; Wyss said she accepted a kilo of caviar as recompense. It’s possible there were two madams and two assignments, though Wyss insisted the model was her friend and would never have tolerated the all-controlling Claude.