Other couturiers with a different agenda were equally busy. Comtesse Lily Pastré, two years into the war, was now enjoying her new-found independence. This least political of women, an eccentric who liked to play the saw (much to the consternation of listeners), now relished the opportunity to act as a true and hugely generous patron of the arts. Since 1940 she had poured her money into an organization she had created called Pour Que l’Esprit Vive (May the Spirit Live) to support the artists she had so loved watching and listening to in Paris who were now in difficulty. Among those who benefited from her hospitality were the harpist Lily Laskine, the composers Darius Milhaud and Georges Auric, the pianists Youra Guller and Rudolf Firku?ny and the painters André Masson, Victor Brauner and Rudolf Kundera. Pastré went out of her way to seek out Kundera, living in poverty in Cassis, and persuaded him to come to her chateau at Montredon, telling him that where he was living was unworthy of his art. And she agreed to shelter the Jewish lover of Edith Piaf, Norbert Glanzberg. She started arranging nightly concerts at the chateau, which had also become a refuge for fleeing artists, several of whom were waiting for a boat and a visa for America. Most of the latter were being helped by the Emergency Rescue Committee officer Varian Fry, the American journalist who had been sent by this private relief organization specifically to bring artists and intellectuals out of France. It is estimated that his efforts saved about 2,000 people. Artists looked after by Lily Pastré found not only comfort and stimulation – there was always plenty of food at her table.
One of her most extraordinary actions was in April 1942 when she became aware that the Romanian-born pianist Clara Haskil, often in fragile health, was seriously ill. Clara, approaching fifty, had already survived an emotionally draining escape from Paris, along with other members of the Orchestre National de France. They had taken trains and been forced to walk in the cold and dark until they met a guide, who was paid to lead them through fields and woods to the free zone. But the guide was so frightened himself that he kept warning his musical charges that the prisons in the neighbourhood were full of people like them who had been caught. Once she had arrived at the Chateau de Montredon, Clara started suffering from double vision accompanied by severe headaches. Lily realized that this was more than emotional fragility and quickly summoned a talented resistance doctor, Jean Hamburger, who was in hiding in Marseilles. He diagnosed a pituitary tumour pressing on the optic nerve which would soon lead to blindness unless she underwent immediate surgery. Lily therefore organized and paid for a renowned Parisian brain surgeon, Marcel David, who operated on Clara’s tumour using only local anaesthesia and cocaine in a room at the old H?tel-Dieu hospital. During the operation Haskil mentally played Mozart’s Piano Concerto in E-flat major as a way of ensuring that the surgery was not damaging her memory or mental abilities. Just three months after that operation, a heavily bandaged woman, looking pale and hunched, emerged in the chateau park and gave a magnificent and emotional rendering of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor, thereby earning a reputation as a great Mozart interpreter as well as making medical history by her method of neurological rehabilitation. Everyone who listened that night was moved beyond words by her courage and determination. A few weeks later Lily organized a visa for Haskil to go to Switzerland; there she recuperated with Lily’s friend Charlie Chaplin. But on 27 July Lily Pastré set her sights on producing a defiant musical extravaganza that would combine brilliant originality and Parisian elegance – an open-air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for one night only. She saw it as her way of fighting against the current darkness, against ‘the constants of grief, failure and the disease of the time’, according to her friend Edmonde Charles-Roux.
Christian Bérard and Christian Dior were involved in the set design and costumes for the actors, draping over them whatever was to hand while they were on stage. When stocks of the materials had run out, Lily had the curtains and valuable old wall fabrics taken down inside the chateau. The orchestra comprised twenty exiled Jewish musicians conducted by Manuel Rosenthal, and at the end of the evening all costumes and scenery were burned; this was meant to represent unreality. Only one or two photographs survive to prove it was not just a dream. Lily’s son Pierre commented later that his mother, determined to be beholden to no one, derived the greatest sense of freedom imaginable by keeping a flame of Parisian culture alive in Marseilles. A few months later the Germans occupied the city and destroyed much of the old port area where Jews and resisters were hiding in the narrow windy streets.
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The ramifications of the rafle rumbled on throughout the summer. Only a few people made public protests, among them Pastor André Trocmé, the pacifist Protestant minister who often preached against anti-Semitism at Chambon-sur-Lignon, the mountainous village in the Haute-Loire, south-central France, where many risked their lives to save hundreds of Jewish children. Trocmé protested against the Vél’ d’Hiv round-up in a public sermon on 16 August, declaring that ‘the Christian Church must kneel down and ask God to forgive its present failings and cowardice’.