‘It was a great injustice,’ commented Charles-Roux. ‘Without her, it would have been a different story.’ Dussurget now became sole director and ended the sponsorship from the Countess. He disliked her amateurism, the amateurism – or enthusiasm – that had made her chateau at Montredon such an extraordinary artistic haven during the war. He now dismissed her contribution as supplying the ‘house party’ atmosphere of the festival and was cruel in his criticisms of her, as his memoirs later revealed. Determined to make the postwar festival more professional, Dussurget secured funding from Aix-based institutions and today the event is considered one of the world’s top music festivals. His efforts are commemorated with a Dussurget prize, a Dussurget street in Aix and a marble bas-relief of his face. But, however successful, the festival lost some of the quirky charm and spirit of Lily Pastré herself. From then on, although she continued to visit each summer, the Countess appeared either imperious or eccentric to those who did not know her, occasionally even comic. Mostly her name was forgotten and none of her brave wartime deeds publicly recognized, even in her local area, until very recently.* Her last few years were difficult and lonely. She died in August 1974 and, generous to the last, donated a parcel of land next to her chateau to Emmaus, a Catholic organization for the homeless.
But in November 1949 Colette, today a controversial figure who had remained in Paris writing throughout the Occupation, was elected President of the prestigious literary institution, L’Académie Goncourt, the first woman ever to receive this honour. At the opening night of Chéri, her own dramatization of her famous novel, she was rewarded with a long and loud round of applause and cheering from the audience. ‘Elderly, arthritic, ensconced in a stage box from which only her head was visible – her still mordantly witty face surrounded by its nimbus of radiant hair – she received the acclaim of what is left of the three generations of Tout Paris,’ wrote Janet Flanner.
For those who were judged guilty of collaborating, appearing on stage was still considered risky. Mary Marquet, who had not been allowed to return to the Comédie-Fran?aise, found it hard to get work. Finally in 1949 she appeared onscreen in a mediocre comedy, but was offered little more than bit parts in second-rate television series. By contrast, her colleague Béatrice Bretty was more popular than ever. One of the longest-serving and best-loved actors in the company, she continued to work there until 1959. But in September 1949, learning that the former French leader Charles de Gaulle was due to speak at the dedication of a monument to her former lover, the assassinated politician Georges Mandel, in Lesparre, north of Bordeaux, she was roused to action. She now released her pent-up feelings of the previous five years and wrote angrily to the député, Emile Liquard, who had arranged the ceremony. ‘You are disturbing the dead to make of his tomb a political springboard,’ she began. Her heartfelt letter was published in full by the local newspaper Les Nouvelles de Bordeaux et du Sud-Ouest.
I am astonished that Gen. de Gaulle is associated with your plans, a man who did not feel obliged to bring from England the necessary aid for Georges Mandel’s escape; a man who since his return to France has never under any circumstances spoken the name of this martyr of the Republic; who never on any occasion felt it his duty to pay his respects at his tomb; who never in any fashion has interested himself in his orphan child of fourteen; in short, a man who, by his persistence in this attitude, has clearly shown a total indifference both to the life and to the memory of Georges Mandel. Besides, did he not declare in Algiers that he was not working to whiten sepulchres? Well truly here is one that has no need of it.
Bretty, having fought to support Mandel during the war, was now courageously fighting for his postwar reputation. Yet in his 1994 biography of Mandel, Nicolas Sarkozy criticized Bretty for not doing more, adding that, as she was not Jewish, she had not been in danger. What more could she have done beyond giving up her own career, begging to marry him and share his fate in a concentration camp, looking after his orphan child and writing letters to newspapers pointing out what little effort de Gaulle had made to rescue him? Few women did half as much.
By the end of the 1940s, material conditions in Paris and the rest of France had improved dramatically thanks to the success of the Marshall Plan. According to the renowned Yorkshire-born American journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick, ‘anyone who compares the picture today with that of 1947 can hardly believe that such progress could be made … a miracle of recovery has been performed’. Her views were echoed by the New Yorker journalist Joseph Wechsberg, who wrote in September 1949 that he was pleased to find for the first time since the end of the war that ‘my Parisian friends had stopped griping about the black market and rationing and were again discussing passionately and at great length the heady mysteries of La Grande Cuisine which, next to women, has always been their favourite topic of conversation’. Not only were Parisians eating well again, but Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, and her friends were buying jewels and couture clothes once more.