network. He told her he was hiding English airmen, shot down over Europe, in his home and organizing their escape to Spain. She began to shelter downed airmen in her own apartment and rented a villa in Toulouse to shelter more airmen. She used the code name "Françoise." By December 1942, she was the leader of the O'Leary line in Toulouse. She enlisted guides and found safe houses for airmen on the run from the Germans. She supplied the airmen with food (mostly purchased on the black market due to rationing), civilian clothing, and medicine, running the line out of her small apartment in the shadow of Gestapo headquarters. She arranged escape routes over the Pyrenees to Spain for airmen and sometimes accompanied them for part of their journey. She also organized the escape of six resistance members and two American airmen from a French jail. The occupation of Vichy France by German forces in November 1942 made resistance to the Germans more dangerous as German authorities and the Gestapo stepped up efforts to infiltrate and destroy the escape lines operating in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and funneling downed airmen toward safety in neutral Spain. Conscious of the increased danger to its members, the O'Leary line arranged the escape of founder Ian Garrow from a French prison on 6 December 1942. Garrow stayed in Dissard's apartment until he could be smuggled to Spain and return to Great Britain. On 2 March 1943 the leader of the O'Leary Line, Albert Guérisse, was arrested by the Gestapo. The Françoise Line MI9 officer Airey Neave said that with the arrests of Guérisse and other members of the Pat O'Leary Line, "Dissard and her cat were almost the only survivors of the O'Leary organization." Dissard assumed leadership of the remnants which came to be called the Françoise Line after her code name. Fearing arrest, she fled Toulouse temporarily for Bergerac and relocated nine fugitives to new safe houses, including four airmen and a courier for the O'Leary Line, Nancy Wake, arranging for their passage to Spain. Lacking funds, she then made a clandestine journey to Switzerland and arranged with a British Vice Consul, Victor Farrell, to continue to fund the Line. With regular payments from the British ensured, she reorganized the many safe houses and helpers of the Line scattered all over southern France. She herself escorted airmen by train from various cities