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dramatist whom the Théâtre de l’Odéon had just appointed as its director, invited Clara to translate Shakespeare’s The Life and Death of King John. Rocher had already produced and acted in many Shakespearean plays, but King John had yet to appear on a French stage. Clara, as translator of Hamlet and author of many Shakespearean studies in French, was an obvious choice. She, however, declined. ‘The Life and Death of King John was no favorite of mine, and I did not see that it held any elements of success at the theater.’ When Rocher somehow convinced Clara to attempt an original translation, she spent months going over the text and thinking about the play’s meaning. Once she began, she completed the translation in three weeks. King John had obvious advantages, she came to see, for a wartime Paris audience: ‘The play is short, demanded no cuts, and could be produced even during the brief playing-time which was allowed, for curtains had to be down and lights extinguished by ten-fifty. ’ For four weeks, Clara attended rehearsals. This led to an amusing exchange with one of the actors. When Rocher instructed him to begin reading his part aloud, the actor asked, ‘How can we begin? We don’t understand how the lines should be read.’ The actor demanded to see the author. Clara, from the stalls, said he was not there. ‘Why the devil isn’t he here? Does he think he can get us all out and not take the trouble to come himself?’ Clara replied, ‘I am afraid you will have to excuse the author as he has been dead for more than three hundred years.’

King John opened on 3 May 1943 to good reviews, including praise for Clara’s ‘miracle of translation’. In the first night’s full house were Clara’s son, René, and his wife, Josée. They had dinner with Pierre Laval afterwards. A week later, someone hurled a grenade at German soldiers outside the Théâtre de l’Odéon. The show, however, went on.

THIRTY-FIVE

The Adolescent Spy

GERMAN U-BOATS TRAWLED THE NORTH ATLANTIC, sinking American troop carriers and merchant ships delivering vital supplies to Britain. Allied aircraft could not bomb them underwater, but they could attack the bases where submarines returned for maintenance on the Bay of Biscay at Lorient and Saint-Nazaire. Of the two, Lorient was larger, but Saint-Nazaire with its sixty-two torpedo workshops and twenty-one submarine pens was better protected. A picturesque town on the northern bank of the Loire estuary, Saint-Nazaire endured regular bombing missions by the Royal Air Force and a suicidal raid by British commandos on 28 March 1942. Although the raiders did considerable damage, almost all of them were killed or captured. The result of their sacrifice, in which five won Victoria Crosses for gallantry, was that the Germans reinforced the work bays with ten feet of solid concrete. During one raid on 28 February 1943, the American Eighth Air Force destroyed half of the town of Saint-Nazaire but lost six Flying Fortresses with all their crews. The New York Times called Saint-Nazaire ‘the toughest target of the American and British Air Forces’. German air defences took a large toll of British and American bombers, and Allied intelligence could not tell what effect their bombs made on German naval operations. Aerial photographs taken from the bombers were often obscured by cloud cover and revealed only the damage to the surface of the concrete over the submarine pens. They did not show how deep the bombs went or the exact dispositions of the German anti-aircraft guns. Meanwhile, the U-boats continued cruising out to sea from Saint-Nazaire to disrupt supplies to American troops in Britain and North Africa.

By the summer of 1943, the Allies needed reliable information from Saint-Nazaire more than ever. General Charles de Gaulle’s French Committee of National Liberation instructed the Resistance in France to get it. This delicate mission was given to a 38-year-old former gendarme named Paul Kinderfreund. His code name was ‘R’ for Renaudot, a common French name. R, the operational chief in Paris of the Goélette-Frégate network,