And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (41 page)

Despite these setbacks, Guitry remained an irrepressible showman. At the same time as he was being insulted by Rebatet and Laubreaux, he was the life of the party at German dinners and receptions. While he was being condemned to death by the Free French Forces, he published a paean to Pétain in the form of a luxurious art book—which had Cocteau, Colette, Cortot and Giraudoux among contributors—and then followed it up with a documentary,
De 1429 à 1942 (de Jeanne d’Arc à Philippe Pétain)
, which had its premiere at the Paris Opera in May 1944, a time when even loyal
pétainistes
had given up on Vichy.

But Guitry could not have ignored the fact that he was fast losing friends. In April 1944,
La Scène Française
, the clandestine newspaper of the resistance organization Front National du Théâtre, turned its guns on him in an article headlined “In the Filth of Collaboration,” noting, “Sacha Guitry sees only himself. And since he is very satisfied with himself, he is a happy man. Outside events barely touch him.”
¹³
When called on for help, though, Guitry came through. In May 1941, he organized a fund-raising gala in the Comédie Française, called
Le Triomphe d’Antoine
, to support the revered theater director André Antoine, in his early eighties, ailing and living in poverty. In October 1943, he and the actress Arletty also used their friendship with Abetz to obtain the release of the seventy-seven-year-old Jewish playwright Tristan Bernard
^*
and his wife from Drancy.

If Guitry behaved as if he were larger than life, it was partly because he was richer than most. His elegant home on avenue Élisée-Reclus, which he inherited from his actor father, Lucien, resembled a small museum. On display were paintings by Monet, sculptures by Rodin, Baroque decorative art, books in the thousands and valuable manuscripts. He also collected theater souvenirs, such as a diadem worn by Sarah Bernhardt and large floppy shoes worn by a famous circus comedian. This was the setting for sumptuous lunches and dinners for guests from both political and artistic worlds. Ernst Jünger, the German novelist, was not alone in being impressed. Upon his arrival for lunch on October 15, 1941, Guitry offered him the gift of signed letters by the playwright Octave Mirbeau, the novelist Léon Bloy and the composer Debussy for his autograph collection. Salad was served in a silver bowl and ice cream in a golden bowl once owned by Bernhardt. Jünger recorded his impressions of Guitry in his journal: “Once again, I was astonished by his tropical individuality which blossomed above all when telling anecdotes in which his meetings with kings played a remarkable role. The various people in question were also depicted in mime to illustrate his words. Also excellent, from a theatrical point of view, was how he played with his thick tortoise-shell glass throughout the conversation.”
¹⁴

While Guitry could not resist being part of
le tout Paris
, Giraudoux had withdrawn from public view after his unhappy experience as information minister during the phony war. Nonetheless, he was France’s leading playwright of the interwar years, and his prestige was immense. Like that of many intellectuals, his political position following France’s defeat also evolved. As early as July 1940, his son Jean-Pierre joined de Gaulle in London, although it would be another year before Giraudoux lost all faith in Pétain. By 1943, it is said, he was sending secret reports on intellectual life in Paris to London. His first writing projects during the occupation were screenplays—for
La Duchesse de Langeais
, adapted from Balzac, and for
Les Anges du péché
. Then, in October 1943, he returned to the stage with
Sodome et Gomorrhe
, a new play that was presented at the Théâtre Hébertot and had Feuillère and Philipe in the lead roles.

Set once again in the past, in this case the biblical past, the play’s story unfolds against the background of God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, but its focus is on a squabbling husband and wife whose inability to love each other brings on the debacle. Although Giraudoux was known for his verbosity, here his language explored
with precision the impossibility of love between a man and a woman, a theme that perhaps mirrored his own oft-broken heart. In
Je suis partout
Robert Brasillach mocked the play as vaudeville on the Dead Sea, and Cocteau compared its solemnity with that of a mass, but Giraudoux’s admirers remained loyal:
Sodome et Gomorrhe
filled the Hébertot for eight months. He wrote one other play during the occupation,
La Folle de Chaillot
(The Madwoman of Chaillot), but he would not see its premiere in December 1945; he died on January 31, 1944, at the age of sixty-one. The official cause of death was food poisoning, but such was his stature that a popular—and unlikely—rumor had him poisoned by the Gestapo.

By then, the Hébertot was one of the city’s liveliest commercial theaters. Earlier in the occupation, Feuillère had won ovations there as the courtesan Marguerite Gautier in Alexandre Dumas fils’s
La Dame aux camélias
. This was followed in April 1941 by Cocteau’s
La Machine à écrire
(The Typewriter), a thriller about anonymous hate mail in which Marais, his lover, played the two roles of twin brothers. Vichy’s representative in Paris, Fernand de Brinon, immediately ordered the play closed as immoral, but he was overruled on grounds of “artistic freedom” by the Propaganda Staffel.

The
scandale
was not yet over, however. After Rebatet, in
Je suis partout
, denounced Cocteau’s “inverted”—or homosexual—theater, Laubreaux followed up with a campaign of abuse against both Cocteau and Marais. A few weeks later, introduced to Laubreaux at a restaurant, Marais spat in his face; when the critic tried to strike back with a cane, the actor hit him. Marais even followed him into the street, grabbed his cane and threw it away, while Laubreaux cried out for help.

That Cocteau was a favorite target of Fascists became still clearer when he revived
Les Parents terribles
(The Awful Parents), a dark comedy with Marais again in a lead role. It purported to denounce family decadence but was itself pronounced decadent. At the play’s opening at the Théâtre du Gymnase in late 1941, Fascist provocateurs organized a riot, including setting off stink bombs, which led the Paris police hurriedly to ban the play. Marais’s own production of Racine’s
Andromaque
, at the Théâtre Édouard VII in 1944, was in turn closed after Vichy’s paramilitary
milice
threatened to attack the theater.

Given Cocteau’s dissolute reputation, then, the Comédie Française’s Vaudoyer again showed daring in April 1943 when he presented
Cocteau’s new play,
Renaud et Armide
, which the author himself directed. But instead of scandal, Cocteau offered a tragic love story in alexandrine verse inspired by operas of Wagner and Glück and close to the plot of Dvořák’s
Rusalka:
Renaud, the king of France, loves the fairy Armide; she appears to him, but he cannot touch her; finally she begs to become human even knowing that with Renaud’s first kiss she will die; and she does. It was the perfect story for romantic Germans in the audience.

For Jean Anouilh, the occupation was marked by untroubled success. Only thirty when Paris fell, he carefully avoided taking any political position, which served him well until the liberation. After he presented two plays in the fall of 1940,
Bal des voleurs
and
Léocadia
, both Laubreaux and Rebatet proclaimed him to be the best young playwright around. And nothing more controversial followed.
Le Rendez-vous de Senlis
was a satire of bourgeois manners, and
Eurydice
was a modern rendering of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, which ran at the Théâtre de l’Atelier for three months.

However, when Anouilh returned to the same theater in February 1944 with
Antigone
, he dared for the first time to address affairs of state. What led him to this subject was a very political incident. On August 27, 1941, during a ceremony for French Fascists leaving to fight alongside the Germans in Russia, a young man, Paul Collette, shot and wounded Laval, at the time out of office but still a Nazi favorite. Collette, who also wounded the collaborationist journalist Marcel Déat, had a lucky escape: arrested, beaten and condemned to death, he was reprieved by Pétain, deported to Germany and, remarkably, survived the war. What interested Anouilh as a playwright, however, was not the fight against evil as such. Rather, it was his belief that, echoing
Antigone
, Collette’s individual, heroic and futile gesture represented the quintessence of tragedy.

Following the plot of Sophocles’ verse classic, Anouilh’s play opens with Antigone in the court of her uncle, King Creon, who has assumed the throne after her two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, killed each other in a battle for power. Defying Creon’s order that Polynices be left unburied, Antigone is arrested in the act of burying her brother. She defends her action and, even in face of death, she refuses to repent. Creon condemns Antigone to be buried alive, then discovers that his son, Haemon, has chosen to die alongside the woman he loves. What made the play seem topical—what brought the story into the 1940s—was not only its modern dress and its contemporary
prose (which included mention of cigarettes and nightclubs) but also the confrontation between freedom and order personified by Antigone and Creon. Strangely, at the time at least, the play sparked no debate as to whether
Antigone
was a work of resistance or collaboration, although a case could be made for either claim. For those opposed to Germany and Vichy, Antigone challenged the abusive power of the state; for collaborators, Creon demonstrated that strong rulers must be obeyed. Audiences also saw the play under very different circumstances: it had 645 peformances, beginning during the occupation and ending long after the liberation.

Revisited today, the play still offers ammunition to both sides. Introducing the drama, the Chorus’s description of the guards would fit that of French police officer working for the Nazis: “At the same time—they are policemen; eternally innocent, no matter what crimes are committed; eternally indifferent, for nothing that happens matters to them. They are quite prepared to arrest anybody at all, including Creon, should the order be given by a new leader.” Antigone, in turn, speaks as someone willing to die for her beliefs: “I can say no to anything I think vile, and I don’t have to count the cost.” And, responding to Creon’s offer of a deal, she elaborates: “I will
not
be moderate. I will
not
be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good girl.”

Creon, in contrast, echoes Pétain’s belief that he is sacrificing himself for France after the disasters of the Third Republic: “There had to be one man who said yes. Somebody had to agree to captain the ship. She had sprung a hundred leaks; she was loaded to the waterline with crime, ignorance, poverty.” He goes on, again using words that Pétain might have chosen to justify creating the Vichy regime: “Was it a time, do you think, for playing with words like yes and no? Was that a time for a man to be weighing the pros and cons, wondering if he wasn’t going to pay too dearly later on?” Even after Antigone and Haemon have died, Creon defends his sense of duty: “They don’t know it, but the truth is the work is there to be done, and a man can’t fold his arms and refuse to do it. They say it’s dirty work. But if we didn’t do it, who would?”

Earlier, inspired by Giraudoux and Cocteau, Sartre also tapped Greek mythology for his first play,
Les Mouches
(The Flies). In it, he reworked the story of Orestes, staying close to the perennial Greek themes of freedom, humanity and revenge. Having left his native city as a child fifteen years earlier, Orestes returns to Argos to find a
pestilent city engulfed by flies, a symbol of its remorse over the murder of King Agamemnon by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus.

Only when Orestes meets his sister Electra, who is a servant of the ruling couple, does he understand his mother’s crime. While Electra begs him to avenge their father’s death, Zeus tells him to leave, since the people of Argos have long accepted Aegisthus as their king. But once Orestes decides to kill Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, even Zeus cannot stop him. “Once freedom lights its beacon in a man’s heart, the gods are powerless against him,” Zeus laments. With Clytemnestra dead, Orestes is abandoned by Electra, whose only reason for living was to hate her mother. At Zeus’s insistence, she repents her role in the double murder, but Orestes stands his ground, telling the god, “You should not have made me free.” He adds, “Suddenly, out of the blue, freedom crashed on me and swept me off my feet.” The people of Argos, though, do not follow him. Instead, by choosing exile, he assumes their sins, fears and remorse and then frees them from the torture of the flies, saying, “Farewell, my people. Try to reshape your lives. All here is new, all must begin anew.”

Was
Les Mouches
a resistance play? Like every other play at the time, its text and cast were subject to approval by the Propaganda Staffel, which also required a pledge that no Jews were involved in the production. The premiere took place on June 3, 1943, in Charles Dullin’s theater, formerly the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, with German officers in the audience and at a reception given by Dullin and Sartre after the play. Writing in
Je suis partout
, Laubreaux was dismissive, making no reference to any political message and simply noting that “Sartre is characterized by an absolute and total absence of dramatic sense.”

Sartre’s friends and admirers thought otherwise. Beauvoir recalled her reaction at the dress rehearsal: “I was moved as soon as the curtain was raised. It was impossible to misunderstand the meaning of the play; falling from Orestes’s mouth, the word Freedom exploded with a blinding clap.”
¹⁵
The writer Jorge Semprun, who at nineteen was already in the resistance, had a similar response. “
Les Mouches
is a song to liberty,” he said many years later. “I went to see it with a group because we had heard it was anti-Nazi. Many barely knew Sartre. He was an important figure only for a minority.”
¹⁶