Piaf sang all over France, with Germans in the audience or not. But it was her performances at prisoner-of-war camps in Germany which were probably her most useful as well as most controversial acts. Of course the tours boosted Piaf’s popularity with the German occupiers, allowing them to show the world that French entertainers were happy with the Occupation and life was ‘carrying on as normal’. But Andrée Bigard, who went with her on one occasion, maintained that she deliberately had herself photographed with dozens of prisoners during her German trip so that the resistance could use the images to create as many as 120 false identity cards, delivered by Piaf on her next visit, to help those prisoners escape.
And all the while Parisian highbrow cultural life continued alongside the low. In the autumn Vivou Chevrillon was invited to a performance at the Comédie-Fran?aise to make up the numbers and, in the foyer, happened to notice an official book lying open with a signature certifying that the work being performed had been passed by the censor. She gave a knowing look to her companion as it was a familiar signature, that of the Paris Préfet Amédée Bussière, one she knew well as she copied it regularly to make false identity cards. The unaccompanied man in the party noticed her surreptitious look of amusement and a few days later contacted her saying he was working for the resistance in Lyons and could she make him a false carte d’identité. Shocked, she asked how he knew she was in the business of supplying them. He told her that she had given herself away with that look. A few months later the man, Guy de Boysson, became her husband.
The activities of the Comédie-Fran?aise were never far from the mind of Béatrice Bretty, the actress who had gone into ‘voluntary exile’ with her Jewish lover, the politician Georges Mandel and potential post-war leader of France, deciding that her presence and tasks were more necessary elsewhere. In 1943, when the Schiller Theatre of Berlin was imposed twice on the Comédie-Fran?aise stage, she was further disgusted, ‘unable to stomach the German accent … permeating the prose of Molière’. Invitations had been sent to the gratin de la collaboration and other bigwigs in the capital in what the diarist Hervé Le Boterf described as ‘a Franco-German festival’.
Bretty had for months been following Mandel as he was sent from one jail to another. While he was in the Pyrenees, held at Fort du Portalet, the nineteenth-century prison built steeply into a cliff face overlooking the Spanish border, she had been able to cook his lunch almost daily and take it to him, as well as caring for his daughter, Claude. She would hide messages from de Gaulle and others in her bouffant coiffure, then use all her acting talent to get past the guards without being searched. The couple were even allowed brief walks together in one of the fortress yards. It was a surreal existence. Mandel had not been given a public trial and neither the resistance nor the Free French attempted to help him escape, partly because the resistance feared vicious reprisals while Bretty believed that de Gaulle was keen to keep him out of London where he would be a rival for Churchill’s ear. His followers had discussed some vague plans to help him flee, but it was difficult to arrange anything that involved him descending by rope as he was so unfit. Another plan involved him leaving, disguised in Bretty’s cloak, while she waited behind in the cell. But it was not easy to organize an escape for someone so well known and so well guarded. In April 1943 Mandel was taken briefly to a concentration camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, where he was kept in solitary confinement but allowed to write letters. From there he wrote a poignant message to Claude, trying to impart to her his philosophy for life. But later that month he was sent to Buchenwald, albeit kept in a small hut set apart from the rest of the camp. His former political opponent, Léon Blum, was already incarcerated there and had been granted permission while in prison to marry Mme Jeanne Reichenbach, who then lived with him. As soon as Bretty heard this she asked, via Fernand de Brinon in Vichy, for similar permission to marry Mandel. But Mandel himself, although her request was forwarded to him, declined. He would not ask for permission to marry on the grounds that he did not want her to share the harsh winter or his fate. He had books and could meet the Blums, with whom he presumably now made friends, and, although he felt very alone and weak, he tried to believe that his torment would end soon with an Allied victory.
In July 1944 he was moved from Buchenwald back to France, to La Santé prison, and his last words to the Blums were: ‘Tell Béatrice Bretty and my daughter that I regret nothing of what I have done, that I know I have acted well, and that no matter what happens, they will not have to be ashamed of me.’