In May 1943, a young Frenchwoman called Lucie Aubrac engineered the escape of her husband Raymond from the clutches of Klaus Barbie, the feared Gestapo chief later known as the ` Butcher of Lyon`. When Raymond was arrested again that June, Lucie mounted a second astonishing rescue, ambushing the prison van that was transporting him. Spirited out of France with her husband by the RAF, she arrived in London a heroine. However, in 1983 Klaus Barbie made the bombshell claim that the Aubracs had become informers in 1943, betraying their comrades. The French press & the couple themselves furiously denounced this `slander`, but as worrying inconsistencies were spotted in Lucie`s story, doubts emerged that have never quite gone away. Who was Lucie Aubrac? What did she really do in 1943? & was she truly the spirit of la vraie France, or a woman who could not resist casting herself as a heroine, whatever the cost to the truth? Sian Rees` penetrating account is the first full English-language biography of this extraordinary woman.