Lise de Baissac — as she was before she married — had a special place among the women secret agents sent to France to work for Special Operations Executive (SOE) because she went not as a courier or a wireless operator working under a circuit leader, but to set up her own small circuit. The commandant at SOE’s Beaulieu “finishing school”, which prepared agents for the clandestine life, wrote that she was “quite imperturbable and would remain cool and collected in any situation . . . she was very much ahead of her fellow students”.

De Baissac was one of the first two women agents to be parachuted into France on the night of April 24-25, 1942 — Yvonne Rudellat had arrived by boat two months earlier. She was dropped with the 22-year-old Andrée Borrell south of the Loire. Her mission was to establish a safe house in Poitiers where new agents could be settled into the secret life. Her cover story was that she was a widow, Madame Irene Brisse, seeking refuge from the tension of life in the capital. With characteristic nonchalance, she moved into an apartment on a busy street near the Gestapo HQ, and even became acquainted with the Gestapo chief — Grabowski — “hated by everyone”, she said. In Poitiers she made many friends, entertaining them at her flat, so agents visiting her would not seem unusual. She had presciently chosen a ground-floor apartment in a block without a concierge and even her cleaning lady, there every morning, never suspected her clandestine work. As well as receiving new agents, she organised reception committees for arms drops.

Being without a wireless she had to travel to Paris to send and receive messages and collect funds, or to Bordeaux where her brother Claude was building up the large scientist circuit, organising sabotage and providing copious reports on submarines and shipping.

On August 16, 1943, she returned with her brother by Lysander to London just as her circuit in Poitiers had been penetrated by the Germans. A second one she had established in Ruffec remained intact.

She was dropped back into France on the night of April 9-10, 1944, to work with the active and successful Pimento Circuit run by the SOE agent Anthony Brooks. However, in one of those seismic quarrels that occasionally broke out among agents, she found herself completely at odds with her new colleagues. Brooks thought she was far too smartly dressed to fit in with the railway and industrial workers in his circuit. She thought they were militant socialists with political aims and was not willing to work simply, she said, as their postman.

Instead, “black with rage”, she joined her brother Claude, who had gone to Normandy to reconnoitre large landing grounds that could be held for 48 hours while airborne troops established themselves. Now with the codename Marguerite, de Baissac found herself living in a village beside the Germans. One day she found a German soldier sitting on her sleeping bag — made from a parachute. Fortunately he had no idea what it was.

For her brother she cycled twice to Paris, going through numerous checkpoints and heavy German formations, escaping detection even when frisked, thanks to her sang-froid.

Captain Blackman, the leader of an SAS party that parachuted behind the lines in July 1944, wrote that “she risked her life daily” carrying wireless material and secret documents. He added: “The part she played in aiding the Maquis and the British underground movement in France cannot be too highly stressed and did much to facilitate the Maquis preparations and resistance prior to the American breakthrough in Mayenne.”

She organised several groups in Normandy and continued liaison until liberation, contributing with zeal to the provision of military information for the Allied forces. “She was the inspiration of groups on the Orne and by her initiative caused heavy losses to the Germans with tyre bursters on the roads near St Aubin-le-Desert, St Mars, and as far as Laval, Le Mans and Rennes. She also took part in several armed attacks on enemy columns, ” runs a resumé on her SOE personal file.

Colonel Buckmaster, the head of SOE’s French Section, proposed her in April 1945 for a George Medal. “A very courageous woman, very diplomatic . . . She did everything, sabotage, arms drops,receptions, looking after airmen and wireless operators, even guerrilla work.” Instead a recommendation put forward for an OBE was downgraded in September 1945 to an MBE by the War Office.

The valiant work of SOE’s women agents was first chronicled in M. R. D. Foot’s SOE in France (1966). De Baissac belonged to the impressive group of agents — many like her from old French families — who came from the island of Mauritius, which had been British since 1810.

Before the war she had fallen in love with a dashing young artist, Henri Villameur, but her parents had refused to give their blessing to the match. After the war he married another girl, but they separated and Lise was soon reunited with him. Villameur by this time had become a fashionable decorator and they lived in an apartment he created under the eaves of a block on the Quai de Rive-Neuve overlooking the port of Marseilles.

She quickly settled into normal civilian life after the war, making light of her war work (and never telling the full story of it), continuing to lead an active social life into grand old age.

Nonetheless she was extremely proud to be guest of honour at a parachute drop organised by the FANYs (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) in 2002 to commemorate her original drop 60 years before. She was granted her French parachute wings and entertained at the Château Nanteuil.

She was vice-president of the Association France-Grande Bretagne in Marseilles for many years. She was a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur and awarded the Croix de Guerre avec palme.

Her husband predeceased her. There were no children.

Lise Villameur, wartime SOE agent, was born on May 11, 1905. She died on March 28, 2004, aged 98.