Worse was to follow. Before the year was out she complained of having to share a straw mattress and one blanket with two other women until she was transferred to Drancy, now used for collaborators. Here ‘ugliness, dirt, selfishness, cruelty all mingle … It is very cold … washing with others in freezing water. The indecency of it. Odious people, nauseating smells, coffee tasting like soup from the night before … Drancy is an immense material and moral garbage heap. I live in a state of perpetual nausea.’
The film star Arletty, who had seen her popularity soar during the Occupation, when going to the cinema provided not only a form of escapism but one of the few places that was warm and a useful venue for sexual encounters, much cheaper than renting a hotel bedroom, was also now a focus of attack. In 1938 cinema attendances had been gauged at 220 million but rose to over 300 million in 1943. As American and British films had been banned, the French movie industry flourished and 220 or so films were made between September 1939 and the summer of 1945. It was, paradoxically, a golden age for French cinema and a good time for female stars on the screen. Arletty, leading lady of some seven hit films who earned one of the highest salaries in the business, came to symbolize for many what it meant to be a Parisienne who collaborated. She was not just beautiful but funny and sexy in a nonchalant, devil-may-care Parisian way, and believed she had done nothing wrong. She did her job and fell in love. She was proud of her working-class origins, having started life working in a factory before graduating to modelling and music hall, never losing her trademark parigot, the working-class Parisian accent.
But she had celebrity status and therefore she could not be allowed to walk free. Even though she had made no films with the Germanrun Continental Studios, she was now judged as someone who had, quite literally, embraced France’s acceptance of the German presence, evidenced by her passionate love affair with Hans-Jürgen Soehring. She had attended events both at the German Embassy and at the German Institute. For much of 1943 and early 1944 she had been making the great Marcel Carné film Les Enfants du paradis, in which she starred as the courtesan Garance. When that was finished, Soehring urged her to flee with him, but she refused.
Nonetheless, as the battle for Paris raged, Arletty, now forty-six, was frightened enough to cycle across the city to find refuge with friends in Montmartre. She then moved to a hotel close to the Champs-Elysées where, in October, she was arrested by two policemen. When they asked her how she was feeling that day, she, ever ready with the bon mot, replied: ‘Not very résistante …’ She was taken to the dungeon of La Conciergerie, where Marie Antoinette had spent her last weeks before her execution in 1793, and after eleven miserable nights was transferred to Drancy. Arletty had to be seen to have a spectacular trial, but she escaped being shaven or any other serious punishment. She was released a few weeks later, remembered by posterity for her quip that ‘Mon coeur est fran?ais mais mon cul, lui, est international’ (My heart is French but my arse is international). She was later sentenced to eighteen months under house arrest at the Chateau de la Houssaye in Seine-et-Marne.