And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (42 page)

Defending the play almost thirty years later, Sartre said that French critics did not understand that Orestes represented the resistance
and his mother and her usurping lover the Germans: “I wrote it to convince the French that, yes, to murder a German is to be guilty of murder, but morally it is the right thing to do, though he who does commit the murder will find no moral solace in the act.”
¹⁷
Evidently, having submitted
Les Mouches
for German approval, Sartre was still eager to suggest that he had outfoxed the censors. Certainly, it is not hard to imagine that some in the audience at the Théâtre de la Cité were moved by Orestes’ discovery of his humanity and his language extolling freedom. Yet it was also apparent that Orestes’ act of freedom—killing his mother and her lover—was rejected by the people of Argos, who preferred the existing order. The real problem, it seems, is that few people saw the play: it closed after fifty performances.

Sartre’s second play of the occupation,
Huis clos
(No Exit), which deals more generically with the despair of the human condition, was also approved by the Propaganda Staffel. And again there were numerous Germans in the audience when it opened at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier on May 27, 1944, less than two weeks before D-Day. Sartre asked Camus to direct and take the male lead in it, but Camus withdrew, arguing that professionals would do a better job. Meanwhile, the two actresses cast in the play, Olga Barbezat and Wanda Kosakiewicz, were arrested—they were not deported and both survived—and substitutes were hurriedly found. Later Sartre explained that, once again, his aim was to demonstrate that “honor and integrity demand resistance to the Germans, no matter the consequences.”
¹⁸

Yet while in
Les Mouches
Orestes saw himself as a liberator, the message of
Huis clos
was one of resignation, not rebellion. The play, which Sartre initially set in an air-raid shelter, opens in a Second Empire sitting room in hell. Three persons newly dead are trapped inside it, forever sleepless and condemned eternally to one another’s company: Garcin, a former journalist and army deserter, has been executed by a firing squad; Estelle, who murdered the baby she had with her lover, has died of pneumonia; and Inès, a sadistic lesbian, was suffocated when her lover switched on the gas that killed them both. As their lives pass before them, they lie, they confess, they judge each other; Inès tries to seduce Estelle, who tries to seduce Garcin, but there is no love left in any of them. In this dance of hate, Garcin concludes, “Hell is—other people!” The response of critics was mixed, with conservatives denouncing the play’s immorality and
Claude Jamet, in
Germinal
, noting that Sartre and Anouilh were the best playwrights of the day. Interestingly, while
Huis clos
had a lasting life in postwar theater, it was not remembered as a resistance play. In the context of Sartre’s oeuvre, it was above all a popular staging of his existentialist philosophy.

Camus, who was embarked on his own existentialist journey, also had a play performed for the first time during the occupation (the first play he wrote,
Caligula
, was presented in 1945). Although Camus moved to Paris only in late 1943 and immediately joined the resistance, he had achieved a degree of celebrity with his first novel,
L’Étranger
(The Stranger). His digression into theater with
Le Malentendu
(The Misunderstanding) therefore stirred interest.

Presented at the Théâtre des Mathurins in early June 1944, the play recounts how Jan returns home with his new wife after many years away. His mother and his sister, Martha, run an inn, where, in the hope of saving enough money to leave the region, they drug, rob and murder their overnight guests. Jan’s misfortune is that they do not recognize him until he, too, has been killed. Discovering his identity, his mother also dies, while Martha, distraught over losing her mother, hangs herself. Unsurprisingly, the play was condemned as a fête of pessimism, so inappropriate for the moment that France was living. But, like
Huis clos
, it is more an examination of the human condition than a commentary on the times. Camus himself never claimed it as a resistance play, placing it instead among the works that made up his
cycle de l’absurde
. The play brought one unexpected reward for the author, however: he began a passionate affair with Maria Casarès, the striking Spanish-born actress who played Martha.

Most Parisian theatergoers preferred a lighter diet, à la Guitry, and they had much to choose from. As early as July 1940, the Théâtre des Ambassadeurs promised “three hours of uncontrollable laughter” in
Nous ne sommes pas mariés
(We Are Not Married), a comedy exploring a man’s hesitations over whether to cheat on his mistress. The collaborationist weekly
La Gerbe
lamented that “it is this comedy that is meant to show the Germans what the theater of Paris is worth.” But there would be dozens more like it. Soon afterward,
Histoire de rire
(A Chance to Laugh) by Armand Salacrou had crowds applauding Alice Cocéa and Pierre Renoir in another tale of marital fireworks. Marcel Achard and the Comédie Française’s former director Édouard Bourdet were also on safe ground writing romantic comedies: Bourdet’s
Père
(Father) ran for 409 performances
at the Théâtre de la Michodière during the occupation. Brasillach gave these plays the nickname of
comédies sans tickets—
comedies without ration coupons—because they studiously ignored the travails of daily life. In any event, they were quickly approved by the Propaganda Staffel.

Vichy, though, occasionally stepped in. With
La Parisienne
, a popular comedy first produced in 1895, it objected to a heroine who had two lovers. But since much was at stake—it was an expensive production, with Cocéa as the heroine and Balenciaga the costume designer—a simple solution was found: the play was renamed
Clotilde du Mesnil
. Another comedy,
Échec à Don Juan
by Claude-André Puget, was also almost banned, this time because the Germans concluded—erroneously—that its author was Jewish. The problem was resolved when Cocéa—also appearing in this play—turned for help to her friend Suzanne Abetz, the wife of the German ambassador.

No less than in peacetime, theater managers were principally interested in selling tickets and, for this, they covered the walls of Paris with posters advertising their productions and stars. Since conflicts with the Propaganda Staffel could cost them money, they were also careful about what they presented. Along with the lightest of modern comedies, they sought out evergreen French comedies by, say, Molière and Beaumarchais and French translations of plays by “safe” authors like Ibsen, Lope de Vega and Schiller. There were also new translations from English of several Irish plays—Sheridan’s
The School for Scandal
and Synge’s
The Playboy of the Western World
as well as Shaw’s
Saint Joan
. Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies—at least
Hamlet
—were also presented in commercial theaters; his history plays, which frequently involve fighting the French, were not considered appropriate.

New plays, on the other hand, entailed risks, both financial and political. And this was no less true when Vaudoyer programmed Claudel’s massive religious epic
Le Soulier de satin
(The Satin Shoe) for the Comédie Française. Here, though, the principal risk was not political: the Propaganda Staffel approved a production in December 1942.

A far greater complication was Claudel himself. Now in his mid-seventies, retired after a stellar career as a French diplomat, he was a playwright whose writing was shaped by his fervent Catholicism. His poetic language was influenced by Rimbaud and the Symbolists,
while his plays, often set in distant lands in distant times, were unwavering explorations of the challenges of faith. Politically, he was conservative, which led him to oppose the Popular Front in the mid-1930s and to write an “Ode au Maréchal Pétain” in December 1940, reportedly in exchange for a pension. But he had always hated Fascism—he was horrified by Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
when it came out in France in 1934—and he was soon disillusioned with Vichy; in December 1941, he wrote a letter to the chief rabbi of France expressing disgust at the persecution of “our Israelite compatriots.” Settled in the village of Brangues, near Lyon, he viewed the cultural life of Paris with aloof disdain. In fact, among his targets was the Comédie Française, which as recently as October 1940 he had described as a cemetery of forgotten plays, a view no doubt influenced by its reluctance to produce
Le Soulier de satin
, written almost two decades earlier.

Once Vaudoyer decided to present the play, however, financial risks arose. As written, the play ran for close to eleven hours over two evenings—and its grumpy author would not hear of abridging it. At one point Brasillach even accused Claudel of trying to delay the production until the liberation of Paris. Then Barrault became involved. He wanted both to direct and to appear in the play and, after making several visits to Brangues, he finally extracted a five-hour version from the playwright. Honegger agreed to compose accompanying music, but differences arose over a set designer. Claudel rejected Rouault, while Barrault refused Claudel’s choice, the Spanish painter José María Sert. According to one version, Picasso was approached, only to retort: “Me, work for Claudel? I’d rather die!”
¹⁹
Derain and Braque also turned down the commission before the choice eventually fell on Lucien Coutaud, one of the artists in Galerie Braun’s exhibition of young French painters in 1941. With rehearsals under way, the Comédie Française had to make or find costumes and wigs for thirty-seven named roles, plus extras, who appear in no fewer than thirty-three different scenes. The production could at least boast crowd-pulling actors: along with Barrault and Marie Bell, major roles were also given to Yonnel, Pierre Bertin and Renaud.

When the curtain finally went up, on the afternoon of November 26, 1943, everyone of any importance in Paris and beyond—supposedly as many as four hundred German officials and army officers, along with Vichy politicians, poets and intellectuals, even
wealthy businessmen—had found a seat in the theater. What most of them thought of the play is not known, but they could be forgiven for losing their way amid the endless twists and turns of the plot. Set in sixteenth-century Spain,
Le Soulier de satin
takes its name from the satin shoe that the married Dona Prouhèze places before a statue of the Virgin, asking to be crippled if she surrenders to sin. The problem is that she is in love with the handsome Don Rodrigue. The plot itself resembles a geography lesson as it spills out of Iberia into the New World, North Africa and even Japan. And it is rife with the tragedies of love. Prohèze and Rodrigue are separated when he is named viceroy in the Americas. Meanwhile, Prouhèze’s husband dies and she is forced to marry a Spanish rebel in Morocco. Rodrigue returns for a brief and passionate reunion with Prohèze before she is killed when the Spanish navy puts down the Moroccan rebellion. Rodrigue then ends up as a prisoner in Japan and devotes his life to God. Since the play appeared to have no contemporary resonance, it alarmed neither the Nazis nor Vichy. Parisians, on the other hand, seemed delighted by this swashbuckling romance, laced with a touch of morality play.

One who never forgot the opening was Dominique Delouche, much later a film director but only twelve at the time. “I went with my mother,” he recalled. “We queued for three hours to get seats at the very top. I wanted to be an actor, and I lived in a world of fiction. I wasn’t bored for one second. I was fascinated. There were quite a lot of Germans in the audience, but not as many as at the opera or ballet. Claudel was there. At the interval, I went to Marie Bell’s dressing room. I can’t remember how I got there. There were flowers, photographers. I squeezed in. Bell embraced Claudel and she praised his text. ‘It is rare to have a text like this,’ she said. Claudel looked pleased.”
²⁰
Delouche did not remember Claudel appearing on stage at the end, but other accounts had the aged playwright taking as many as fourteen curtain calls, the last few with only German officers still left in the auditorium. The play itself had mixed reviews—criticism from Laubreaux, praise from Brasillach—but that mattered little: it had fifty-seven sold-out performances before the production was suspended by electricity shortages in June 1944; it then returned for a further twenty performances in November 1944; and it was revived for thirty-one performances in April 1949. The play’s success under German occupation was not held against Claudel after liberation. When he died, eleven years later, he took
with him the knowledge that
Le Soulier de satin
had entered theater lore as the most important theatrical event of the war years.

For Vaudoyer, it would be a final triumph. From the moment he had taken over the Comédie Française, he had been under attack from Laubreaux and others in the collaborationist press. More recently, Abel Bonnard, Vichy’s education minister, had also begun undermining him. Finally, on March 23, 1944, Vaudoyer resigned. A battle to succeed him immediately followed. Guitry, Bourdet and even Cocteau were mentioned as possible candidates, while Laubreaux, who had long coveted the job, was blocked when leading actors threatened to resign. Finally, on July 28, Vichy chose the playwright Jean Sarment, who had been head of the theater section of the Groupe Collaboration. But by then the Comédie Française had closed its doors. Elsewhere in the city, only a handful of theaters were still working. “We had no electricity,” recalled Héléna Bossis, whose actress mother, Simone Berriau, was running the Théâtre Antoine, “but we could open the roof. It was strange because the public was in the light and the stage was dark. The theater was almost empty, but we played until mid-August. We closed because some people wanted to take over the theater because we’d worked during the occupation. It was dreadful.”
²¹
On August 25, the city was liberated. A few weeks later, just as they had in the summer of 1940, the theaters of Paris gradually returned to life.