The cenotaph in the Panthéon — the tomb filled with soil from the places she had lived rather than her actual remains, which remain in Monaco — is a specifically French resolution of a specifically French problem. France’s honors system is both formal and flexible; it can accommodate a person who was real, who served genuinely, whose remains are elsewhere, and whose memory belongs to multiple places simultaneously. The soil from St. Louis, from Paris, from Monaco, from the Dordogne, represents the multiple claims on her life: the American origin, the French citizenship, the Monégasque final years, the wartime estate in southwest France.
Macron’s words at the ceremony — “there is no one more French than you” — acknowledged the complexity without resolving it. She was American, and she was French, and both of those things were true, and France was choosing to honor the French side of the account without pretending the other side did not exist.
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## The Specific Woman in the Room
It is worth returning, at the end, to the beginning: to the embassy parties in Paris in 1939 and 1940, to the woman at those parties who was writing on her skin.
The specific mechanics of what Baker did at those events — the information she gathered, the way she gathered it, the way she transcribed it and passed it on — were the application of professional skills she had been developing since childhood. Reading an audience, understanding what people want to show you, finding the angle from which a person will tell you more than they intended: these are performance skills and they are intelligence skills, and in Baker’s case they had been cultivated through decades of professional performance before they were applied in wartime.