>>9841763
>Mrs. Elisabeth (Robert) Maxwell
Elisabeth Meynard, as she then was, had been working as an interpreter for the Welcome Committee, whose aim was to introduce Allied officers to French people who were eager to meet them. She sent him to some good families, but he kept coming back to the committee until she realised it was herself that he wanted to get to know. She married the man she called her "powerful Adonis" on March 15, 1945.
They were in many respects an unlikely couple. Elisabeth Meynard was a haute-bourgeoise descendant of the old Huguenot aristocracy. She had been born in 1921 in a village in the province of Dauphiné in southeastern France. Her father, Paul Meynard, had inherited a fortune in gold but had lost it in the casinos of Monte Carlo. Her mother, Colombe Petel, was from a humbler background in the Pas-de-Calais but had undoubted courage. As a telephone supervisor during the First World War, she remained at her post to pass on information about the advancing German Army as it marched into Arras, an act which had earned her the Croix de Guerre in 1917.
Maxwell, by contrast, was a penniless Jewish Czech soldier-of-fortune who had lost almost all of his family in the Holocaust. He had looks, charm and potential, however, and while Elisabeth Meynard had an impeccable ancestry, she must have been all too well aware that her family's finances were looking perilous.