In September 1942, a member of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) codenamed Odile landed by parachute in the Loire and Cher region of France, near the town of Chambord. Odile, otherwise known as Lise de Boucherville Baissac, who has died aged 98, was the first woman to be parachuted into occupied France, alongside another agent, codenamed Denise.
Lise established a small resistance network in Poitiers and sought out suitable landing strips and drop zones, where she could receive parachuted containers of weapons, which she left under the guard of local farmers to be used for sabotage. She also received other agents, landing by Lysander aircraft on the fields she had picked out, or by parachute drop elsewhere, and helped them with their first steps in occupied territory.
This mission lasted 11 months until Lise was ordered back to London, because it was known the Gestapo were on to her. She was successfully picked up and brought home by Lysander in August 1943.
Back in England, she broke her ankle, and had to wait until it was healed before going back to France, in April 1944. This time, she joined her brother Claude de Baissac in Normandy, using the cover of being a refugee from Paris, living in the house of a schoolmaster near Mayenne. There, she helped set up several more resistance groups and maintained contact between them, passing on orders and communicating messages by bicycle.
During this time, Lise passed twice through German lines and under allied bombing, and cycled to Paris - her cover was that she was cycling to Mans to see her cousin - to transmit and receive orders. Her actions, in organising sabotages and attacks with Claude de Baissac, greatly delayed the arrival of German reinforcements to the Normandy front, and continued until the Germans left, retreating to the east.
She later described her life as an agent as not being glamorous but consisting of "sheer hard work". She added that "what was needed was cold-blooded efficiency for long, weary months rather than any bursts of heroism".
Lise was born into a well-to-do French family in Mauritius, and, in 1920 as a teenager, moved to Paris, where she went to school. She met her future husband, Gustave Villameur, then a penniless artist, when she was 17, but her mother disapproved of the match and Lise was sent away to Italy. On her return, she took an office job, a rare pursuit for an upper-class young woman of the time.
At the outbreak of the second world war, she made her way, first to the free zone in the Dordogne, and then, in 1941, to Cannes. Through the US consulate there, she obtained her repatriation to England through Spain and Portugal. She then joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (Fany), from where she was recruited into the SOE. For security reasons, female agents belonged to this volunteer corps rather than to the Women's Royal Army Corps.
After the war, Lise worked as a BBC newsreader, translator and announcer for the French service, and, in 1950, married her childhood sweetheart, by then a well-known artist and interior decorator. They lived between Marseille and St Tropez, where they entertained the artists and writers of the day until Gustave's death in 1978. After that, Lise settled in Marseille, where she lived alone in a magnificent apartment overlooking the old port.
Awarded the MBE and the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur Croix de Guerre avec Palme, Lise Villameur was truly a grande dame of the old school: fiercely independent, courageous, elegant and modest. She had no children.
· Lise Villameur, secret agent, born May 11 1905; died March 29 2004