Spears observed a touching domestic vignette at this moment of crisis when he realized that Mme Bretty, ‘with her plump pleasant features’, was peeping around the door, a calming presence.
She looked at us both, then I heard her voice for the first and last time, a pleasant, gay, friendly voice which I have not forgotten. Its tone had an inflection of slight urgency and pleading like that of a child asking with arms upheld to be picked up. ‘Les malles sont faites, Georges,’ it said. The trunks are packed. Whether she had heard an echo of our voices in the great silent chamber and hoped Mandel would accept my offer and was thus hinting she would like him to agree to it, I do not know. The door closed. I never saw him again.
Spears, who believed Mandel to be ‘a great man’, departed instead with the little-known Under-Secretary for Defence in the French government, a man newly appointed to the cabinet, Brigadier General Charles de Gaulle, who for the moment left his wife, Yvonne, behind in France.
Marshal Philippe Pétain, in a speech to the nation on 17 June, said loftily that he was ‘giving to France the gift of my person in order to alleviate her suffering’. The eighty-four-year-old veteran of Verdun was now leader of the new government, the last of the Third Republic, which was to be based in the inland spa town of Vichy. With its myriad hotels and phone links, opera house, bandstand, park and air of unreality, Vichy was the antithesis of smart Paris, which Pétain maintained stood for vice, corruption and debauchery. The following day, broadcasting from the BBC in London, de Gaulle called upon French soldiers, engineers and specialized workers from the weapons industry to join him in London to continue the fight. Not many in France, even including his young niece Geneviève, heard his famous appel announcing in dolorous tones that were to become increasingly familiar to those who had access to a radio, ‘Whatever happens, the flame of French Resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished.’ But for those who did, it was like a magic spell.
‘I remember my elder sister, Monique, came running into my room,’ recalled Vivou Chevrillon (as she was then), the excitement still in her voice today. ‘“It’s not over,” she cried. “There is a way we can resist.” She told me all about the appel and we told everyone we could. That’s how it spread,’ explained Vivou, then a seventeen-year-old violin student at the Conservatoire. The girls were both first cousins of Claire Chevrillon – André Chevrillon was their father’s brother – and from now on their life of resistance began.
On 21 June, Mandel, Bretty, the now ten-year-old Claude Mandel and their manservant, Baba Diallo, together with twenty-seven other passengers, mostly députés who hoped to continue the fight from the French colonies, embarked on the packet boat Massilia bound for North Africa. While on board they heard that Pétain had agreed terms for an armistice to be signed on 22 June 1940, at Compiègne, the place chosen deliberately by Hitler because it was the site of the 1918 armistice agreement between a humiliated Germany and a victorious France. There was now a zone of occupation established in most of northern and western France with the bulk of the remainder of the country designated a so-called free zone to be governed by the French. There was also an Italian zone and an Atlantic forbidden zone, as well as a closed zone to the east. An Ausweis (travel pass) was required to travel from occupied to non-occupied zone.
When the Massilia docked at Casablanca after three days at sea, those on board were treated not as patriots trying to fight on but as deserters. They were trapped. Pétain had Mandel stripped of his parliamentary immunity, and, now his long torment of arrest and imprisonment began, Bretty remained constantly with him as well as caring for Claude. As Spears recognized, she displayed ‘the utmost courage and devotion’. They became peripatetic from now on as the Germans seized and looted Mandel’s Paris apartment. Yet, in spite of her deep love for the stage, she never once contemplated returning to the theatre during the Occupation.