On that day, Odile de Vasselot de Régné felt tired. At 103 years old, that happens. An offer was made to postpone the interview to another time, but she insisted on keeping the appointment on April 17. She had a sense of urgency, no doubt. And the subject was dear to her heart: telling the story of the first time she, like all French women, had the right to vote, on April 29, 1945. It was during that year's municipal elections.

She wanted to tell the details from the room in her nursing home in Paris. But everything was mixed and blurred, having cast her ballot in so many boxes over the past 80 years. Aware and annoyed that her brain was faltering, the centenarian said, "I am sorry," in English, the language she used during the war with Allied aviators when she joined the Comet Line in early 1944. The Resistance group helped evacuate rescued airmen whose planes had been shot down, guiding them through Belgium, France, and Spain to Gibraltar.

On November 11, 1940, at the age of 18, de Vasselot, who was from a family of military officers, took part in a forbidden demonstration in front of the Arc de Triomphe and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, considered one of the first acts of defiance against the Nazi occupiers. She tore down propaganda posters, painted Lorraine crosses on the walls of the capital and by the end of 1942, joined the underground Zero network, which gathered intelligence. She later joined the Comet Line. She escaped being tracked down and arrested, sometimes narrowly, like when the two English aviators she was escorting were discovered during a German police check on the train between Lille and Paris. The smuggler miraculously escaped the trap and its consequences. She recounts all this in her book Tombés du ciel. Histoire d'une ligne d'évasion ("Fallen from the sky. The story of an escape route").

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