Madeleine Masson

Madeleine Rayner (née Levy; 23 April 1912 – 23 August 2007), known professionally as Madeleine Masson, was a South African-born English-language author of plays, film scripts, novels, memoirs and biographies.

Early life Madeleine Masson was born Madeleine Levy in 1912 in Johannesburg to a French banker, Emile Levy, and Lili, "a ravishingly beautiful creature with Viennese antecedents". On a trip to Paris with her parents, 18-year-old Madeleine met 40-year-old Baron Renaud Marie de la Minaudière. As she put it in her autobiography, I Never Kissed Paris Goodbye, "I was a small-town South African who was being offered Prince Charming on a platter, decked with yachts, châteaux, sable coats, jewels, townhouses and a coat-of-arms equal to that of the Valois."

In subsequent years, as Masson sought to learn the fates of her prewar friends and wartime Resistance comrades-in-arms, she fortuitously met people who had known Skarbek and her partner Andrzej Kowerski ("Andrew Kennedy").

One of the strongest impressions I gained from listening to the talk of Christine's friends was that she hated any form of oppression, not only for patriotic reasons, but because she translated her own craving for freedom of thought and action into every human sphere. Anything that threatened her liberty or that of anyone else became a personal issue. But the essential accuracy of Masson's text is attested by collateral sources. Additionally, she sometimes faithfully presents information that she does not fully understand, including some Polish idioms that Skarbek (or Kowerski) translated metaphrastically – literally – into English.