Few people—certainly not the Germans—were yet aware that on August 18, with the invaders still two hundred miles away in Brussels, the Banque de France had already set in motion its emergency plan—Paris, after all, had fallen to foreigners three times in the previous hundred years. Its gold reserves—38,800 gold ingots and innumerable bags of coins valued at $800 million and weighing some 1,300 tons—had been shipped in the utmost secrecy by rail and truck to safety at prearranged sites in the Massif Central and the south of France. The massive logistical operation went off without a hitch until
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