At the Comédie-Fran?aise, Mary Marquet, one of the company’s most revered actresses, was arrested and sent to Fresnes, accused of collaborating. During her trial she admitted contacting Vichy police in 1943 and asking them to prevent her son Fran?ois from joining the resistance; but, in spite of a severe warning, he did enlist and was arrested and deported to Buchenwald where he died. Marquet was acquitted, perhaps because it was recognized that she had suffered enough, that any mother would try to protect her son, or that she had not passed on secret information to the enemy. Nonetheless she could no longer act with the Comédie-Fran?aise and, although she lived until August 1979, her career was destroyed. From then on she was offered roles only in minor films or light comedies and struggled to make a living.
By contrast, Béatrice Bretty had taken the clear decision at the outset that it was not possible to perform in a company which excluded Jewish actors. She had devoted herself to following Georges Mandel where possible and caring for his daughter Claude. Mandel, having declined Bretty’s suggestion that they marry in Buchenwald, was subsequently handed over by the Gestapo to the Milice in Paris and, while being transferred from one prison to another by the latter, was taken out of the car and on 7 July 1944 assassinated by them in Fontainebleau forest. A heartfelt letter which he had written to Bretty a few weeks earlier from Buchenwald arrived after his death in which he told her of his anguish at her suffering as much as his own. ‘Your affairs touch my heart as strongly as my own … Of all the things which I had to suffer before my exile nothing affected me as profoundly as the unprecedented bad behaviour you received at the Comédie-Fran?aise … so rest assured that as long as I have a breath of life I look forward to the reparations you deserve.’ Two months after Mandel’s death, Bretty was reinstated at the theatre and on 18 September she was on stage once again playing one of her best-known roles, Toinette in Molière’s Le Malade Imaginaire. There was rapturous applause at her return.
But as Sadie, or Florence, star of the Bal Tabarin, proved, it was possible to perform without collaborating. Disguised as an attentive, elegant French wife, she had helped escort escapees and Jews past police and soldiers until in the summer of 1944 a German cultural officer warned Frédéric Apcar, her dancing partner and one-time lover, that she was about to be arrested. So she hid in the secluded safe house in the suburbs which Frédéric had used to hide other Jews, such as Dr Gilbert Doukan, a Jewish escapee from Drancy and resistance hero, and Marcel Leibovici, both men Florence had helped. One morning an American tank rolled up, the driver shouting out for directions to Paris. Frédéric and Florence followed the tank to the capital, where they witnessed the final scenes of the Liberation, and with delight saw Doukan now fighting in a French officer’s uniform.
Paris that September was a strange combination of rejoicing and retribution. Once the fighting had ceased, the Americans were handing out chocolate, oranges, chewing gum and bananas – luxuries not seen for four years – and for many women in Paris who had endured those grim years of Occupation it felt like the end. But celebrations were premature while the rest of the world was still fighting and the Germans were far from surrendering. Lee Miller, who had been in France less than a month and reported graphically on the battle for Saint-Malo as well as on the 44th Evacuation Hospital – where, she noted, they used both calvados and penicillin – was disappointed to have been refused permission to continue into Germany with the 83rd Division. ‘It is very bitter for me to go to Paris now that I have a taste for gun powder,’ she told her editor. But she had a scoop because, although she had been allowed only to report on how things were being managed after the St Malo battle, in fact the battle was not yet over. ‘I sheltered in a Kraut dugout squatting under the ramparts. My heel ground into a dead detached hand and I cursed the Germans for the sordid ugly destruction they had conjured up in the once beautiful town,’ she wrote in the unlikely pages of Vogue. ‘I picked up the hand and threw it back the way I had come and ran back, bruising my feet and crashing into the unsteady piles of stone and slipping in the blood. Christ it was awful.’