“One day when I was in the prefecture archives in Eure, I stumbled across Ephraïm’s letter. It was overwhelming. I held in my hands the very envelope he had enclosed, with its 1.5-franc stamp bearing the likeness of Marshal Pétain. No one had ever bothered to reply.” “I thought the local authority archives had been destroyed after the war.” “Not really. It’s true that the French government had a major cleanout of its regional archives, particularly anything incriminating—but three departments refused to comply, and lucky for us, Eure was one of them.
