Picardie explains the role Christian played in preventing the movement of the fashion industry from Paris to Berlin. They had married in 1898, when Madeleine was a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl; Maurice Dior, at twenty-six, was already an ambitious young man, intent on expanding the fertiliser manufacturing business that his grandfather had set up in 1832. Justine Picardie’s journey takes her to wartime Paris, where Christian honed his couture skills while Catherine dedicated herself to the French Resistance and the battle against the Nazis, until she was captured by the Gestapo and deported to the German concentration camp of Ravensbrück.

At first, as I began to explore Catherine’s history, and realized that she was more or less invisible to Christian’s acolytes, I felt angry on her behalf. A fighter in the French Resistance, a survivor of the Ravensbrück death camp, and a creator of the rose gardens that inspired the fragrance Miss Dior, she is an inspiring, unforgettable figure, worthy of Picardie’s inspiring, unforgettable prose. Their lives diverged even more sharply when she was cap­tured by the Gestapo and impris­oned in Ravens­bruck and then a series of labor camps and final­ly forced to endure one of the infa­mous death march­es of 1945. But she gave nothing away of her wartime experiences, and he said that he felt it would have been impolite to press her for more information. Her name is Catherine Dior, and she arrived as I wandered through the garden of La Colle Noire, her brother Christian’s graceful château in the hills of rural Provence; a place she often visited, and a house where she lived for a while, after his sudden death of a heart attack at the age of fifty-two, in 1957.Seeking to trace Catherine’s story as well as her influence on her brother, Picardie traveled to the significant places of Catherine’s life, including Les Rhumbs, the Dior family villa with its magnificent gardens; the House of Dior in Paris; and La Colle Noire, Christian’s chateâu that he bequeathed to his sister. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. That the original Miss Dior was untouched by the horrors of war, remaining safely in the past, an innocent young girl in the rose garden of Granville? Upon her repatriation to France, she lived a quiet life but did testify at one of the many war crimes tribunals held in France.

After my tour of the exhibition, I have been granted permission to spend the remainder of the day writing in what was the Dior children’s playroom in the garden. This, though, was not the case, and while her extreme bravery during the war is not in doubt, there’s little for Picardie to go on even in that period: no diaries, no letters, few eyewitness accounts. If the Dior children regarded their parents as distant figures of authority – as is suggested by Christian’s biographer, Marie-France Pochna, who noted that they were raised in an era ‘when open demonstrations of affection were considered likely to weaken the character and strictness was the norm’ – it might also be possible that the way to their mother’s heart was through her cherished garden.The book is full of things like this: unlikely, even bizarre, shafts of light that have you blinking, given the darkness all around. The juxtaposition of terrible shadows and dazzling light is one of the great strengths of this book . She had been a loyal and loving sister throughout her brother’s life, and continued to be so after his death, honouring his legacy in many ways, including her consistent support for the Christian Dior museum that was eventually established in Granville. And if so, what message might Catherine Dior have for us today, even if she never said another word. But the scent of the roses seemed to contain within it a question: was it conceivable that so much beauty had arisen from the ashes of the Second World War?

But as her biographer Justine Picardie admits, she would only ever be an “intangible presence” at the house. Picardie skilfully interweaves what she has learned about Catherine's experiences in 1944-5 with more general and often illuminating details about the Resistance, the camps, the world of fashion, and the postwar trials . As I reread his words in my well-thumbed copy of his memoir, I am struck, for the first time, by the reference to German governesses, and wonder what became of them during the First World War. on July 6, 1944, a young Frenchwoman, a member of the Resistance, was arrested by four armed Gestapo officers on the Place du Trocadéro in Paris. Lucien Dior would become a politician, and remained in parliament until his death in 1932, while a rivalry developed between his wife Charlotte and Madeleine, apparently arising from their competitive aspirations to be the most fashionably dressed chatelaines of the wealthiest households.It had been built by a ship-owner, and its name comes from a nautical term referring to the points on the face of a compass, traditionally known as the ‘rose of the winds’, which is itself a symbol that appears on an original mosaic floor inside the villa.