Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [47]
A group of FFI burst into the apartment of the writer Alfred Fabre-Luce to arrest him, but he managed to slip out of the service entrance. (Fabre-Luce was doubly unfortunate: although a Pétainist, he had been imprisoned by the Germans for an anti-Nazi book he wrote.) The fifis, not finding their intended captive, took his old butler away instead.
Fabre-Luce’s wife, Charlotte, rang her brother, Prince Jean-Louis de Faucigny-Lucinge. He rushed round to 42 rue de Bassano, where an impromptu revolutionary tribunal had been established. He spotted the butler through a glass-panelled door, and also the Duchesse de Brissac, her hair dishevelled, wearing a fur coat which had been thrown on over her underclothes.
As soon as Alfred Fabre-Luce heard that his butler had been taken in his stead, he went straight to the rue Bassano to give himself up. The duchess, whose romantic friendships with German officers had become too well known, was taken off to the Conciergerie ‘like Marie Antoinette’. Lucinge telephoned her husband to warn himwhat had happened. The duke thanked him, but never mentioned the episode again. Most of those accused, however, were taken to police stations or the town hall of the arrondissement. The pianist Alfred Cortot was released after three days and three nights on a police-station bench.
The next step was transfer to the Prefecture of Police on the Île de la Cité. Many arrived at the Prefecture literally shaking with fear. Others were unbowed. Comte Jean de Castellane, younger brother of Boni de Castellane, the great fin-de-siècle swell described in his heyday as ‘rotten with chic’, proved worthy of his family’s traditions. One of the guards told Castellane to remove his shoelaces and braces, the normal procedure to stop prisoners hanging themselves. He regarded the man with a thunderstruck expression: ‘If you take away my braces, I will leave immediately.’
After a length of time which could vary from a couple of hours to a few days, prisoners were taken across to the ancient Conciergerie of blackened stone and pepperpot towers on the Quai de l’Horloge. From the Conciergerie, after a few hours, days or even weeks, some prisoners were transferred to the holding camp at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, that stadium of dreadful memory where the Jews had been taken after the ‘Great Round-up’. Then they would be sent either to Fresnes prison or to the camp at Drancy, the former staging post for Jews before they were forced on to cattle trucks bound for Germany. A number of women prisoners were sent to the fort of Noisy-le-Sec. Many prisoners were also held at the Santé prison – ill-named, since it possessed only twelve showers for a population which now numbered nearly 3,000 prisoners.
Drancy was completely run by the FFI for the first few weeks after the Liberation, to the frustration of the authorities. The Prefect of Police had no control at all and visitors were not welcome. Pastor Boegner, who finally managed to gain entry to Drancy on 15 September, discovered cells that measured three and a half metres by one and three-quarters, holding six people, with only two mattresses between them. Luizet at least achieved one objective, quite rapidly. On 20 September, Drancy was ‘liberated’ from the fifis and returned to the regular prison service.
The main prison for those accused of collaboration was Fresnes. It held so many celebrities that one inmate, a ‘trustie’ who helped with the catering, used to take his autograph book with him on meal rounds. There were many members of ‘le Tout-Paris de la collaboration’, like the film star Arletty and the actor-playwright Sacha Guitry, who had met either at the receptions of the Luftwaffe General Hanesse or in Otto Abetz’s salon. Albert Blaser, the head waiter at Maxim’s, was also briefly in Fresnes, as were the singer Tino Rossi and the publisher Bernard Grasset. Rossi was never in danger of execution, but that did not stop one of his female fans from offering to be shot in his place.
In Fresnes, Jean de Castellane was pleased to see Sacha Guitry. Castellane was something of