Mathilde Carré

Mathilde Carré (30 June 1908 – 30 May 2007), known as "La Chatte", was a French Resistance agent during World War II who turned double agent.

Carré was born in Le Creusot, Saône-et-Loire. In the 1930s she attended Sorbonne University and became a teacher. After her marriage, she moved to Algeria with her husband Maurice Carré, who was later killed in World War II, during the campaign of Italy.

She returned to France, worked as a nurse and witnessed the country fall to the Germans. In 1940, she met a Polish Air Force Captain named Roman Czerniawski cryptonymed "Walenty" to the Poles and "Armand" or "Victor" to the French. Carré, who had contacts with the Vichy Second Bureau, joined the headquarters section of his Franco-Polish Interallié espionage network based in Paris under the cryptonym "Victoire" (as all the headquarters section staff had "V" initial names, in a network which named its agents and their sectors or areas of coverage for Christian names grouped by the letters of the alphabet) although nicknamed La Chatte, ("The She-cat") for her feline predatory and stealthy propensities.

On 17 November 1941, the Abwehr's Hugo Bleicher arrested Czerniawski, Carré and many other members of Interallié; they had been uncovered when an informant in Normandy had been exposed to the Gestapo. She was interrogated by him, threatened with death and also offered financial reward, she agreed to become a double agent herself and revealed all of the members of the network known to her. She began to work for Germans continuing to use the code name Victoire. She may also have become Bleicher's mistress.

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