Madeleine Rayner, known professionally as Madeleine Masson, was a South African-born English-language author of plays, film scripts, novels, memoirs and biographies.
Early life
Madeleine Masson was born Madeleine Levy in 1912 in Johannesburg to a French banker, Emile Levy, and Lili, "a ravishingly beautiful creature with Viennese antecedents". On a trip to Paris with her parents, 18-year-old Madeleine met 40-year-old Baron Renaud Marie de la Minaudière. As she put it in her autobiography, I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, "I was a small-town South African who was being offered Prince Charming on a platter, decked with yachts, châteaux, sable coats, jewels, townhouses and a coat-of-arms equal to that of the Valois." Madeleine took her surname "Masson" from one of the Baron's subsidiary titles. While pregnant with her first child, she was informed by the Baron's mistress – from whom she had mistakenly supposed he had parted – that not only were they still linked, but it was her fortune that paid for the Baron's elegant lifestyle. Any disturbance to their relations, it was made clear, would result in withdrawal of her support.
Career
The shock of this revelation caused Masson to miscarry. She abandoned the aristocratic life and embraced Paris' bohemia, studied history and philosophy at the Sorbonne, art at Munich, wrote for the literary magazine, Les Nouvelles littéraires. She had an affair with a South African, became the lover of the Swiss painter Géa Augsbourg, got to know Pablo Picasso and André Breton, and met writers Colette and André Gide. When World War II came, the Jewish-descended Masson left Géa Augsbourg, intending to return to South Africa. On the train to Bordeaux, she was persuaded to join the French Resistance. She later recalled this period, during which she carried messages and helped escapees, as a time of "total horror". In later years, she helped Tim Buckmaster, son of Maurice Buckmaster, head of SOE's F Section, prepare a biography of his father.
Masson encountered one of her biographees, Krystyna Skarbek, during a voyage on the Winchester Castle in May–June 1952 from Cape Town, South Africa, to England to be reunited with her sea-captain future husband. She was intrigued by her stewardess, who "was polite, efficient and distant.... No warning bell rang... to tell me that twenty years later, waking and sleeping, I should try to recall every word, every intonation and every gesture of this woman." Nevertheless, landing at Southampton on 13 June, Masson inquired about the full name of her stewardess and was told that it was Christine Granville. A few days later, Masson was shocked to read in her morning paper that, on the night of 15 June, Christine Granville had been murdered in a London hotel. Subsequent days brought sensational stories about Krystyna Skarbek's legendary wartime exploits and courage. In subsequent years, as Masson sought to learn the fates of her prewar friends and wartime Resistance comrades-in-arms, she fortuitously met people who had known Skarbek and her partner Andrzej Kowerski. Masson's life story showed similarities to that of her biographee Skarbek. Both were descended from banker's families, had Jewish heritage and a bankrupt aristocrat in the family, and had worked during World War II with the French Resistance—Skarbek, under SOE sponsorship. This created a natural basis for the author's empathy with her subject. Masson sought out anyone who had known Skarbek and found her most complete informant in Kowerski. Her account of the information that she obtained from him is so detailed that it reads like a verbatim transcript of their conversations. To be sure, inaccuracies occasionally creep in, as when the author of the beautiful pastel sketch of Skarbek is identified as "Pavli Kowska" – it was in fact the work of Polish artist Aniela Pawlikowska. But the essential accuracy of Masson's text is attested by collateral sources. Additionally, she sometimes faithfully presents information that she does not fully understand, including some Polish idioms that Skarbek translated metaphrastically – literally – into English.
