Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking French Resistance Spies

on this podcast. Roland Phillips, wonderful author of Engaging Writer, he has uncovered

this story. He has researched in great detail. It's the story of Matilde Carey, codenamed

the cat later known as Agent of Victoria. It's a fascinating story of espionage, counter

espionage love, betrayal, patriotism, cynicism in the Second World War. It's super interesting

and I'm thrilled to have another wonderful wartime history that reads like a spine novel

on this podcast. If you'll listen to similar podcasts, we got plenty of them. Let me tell

you, get a history hit TV. It's like Netflix for history, but it's audio and video, hundreds

of us, history documentaries, many hundreds of podcasts, and you'll be able to binge on

historical content until you are satisfied. But in the meantime, everybody here is Roland Phillips

talking about the cat.

Roland thank you very much coming on the podcast. Thank you for asking me along. It's another

spy. I mean, I thought we'd knew all the spies and I thought we knew all these extraordinary

stories in the Second World War, but this is just another one. Where did you find this one?

I found this one. I was interested in what it was like because Second World War history,

we, the victors have a lot of heroes, the Germans, the baddies have a lot of villains. So

I was looking for somebody who was more compromised, somebody in France as Matilde Carre, my protagonist

is, who in order to survive had to be both hero and villain. So I was looking at a more

complicated way to look at ordinary people in the war. And I stumbled across her. I think

her situation was made yet more complex as a woman, rather than a man. And she wasn't

anyone who signed up to be a spy. She sort of fell into it through the right motives of

patriotism and the excitement of war and then had to negotiate her way through more than

...