Comédie Française

The Comédie Française, the state theater of France, stands on the Place Colette near the Palais-Royal and the Louvre. In the occupied Paris of 1941, its grand neoclassical façade and the iron bench near its entrance became a carefully chosen rendezvous point for the nascent Resistance. For Isabelle Rossignol, newly arrived in Paris and carrying a forged identity as Juliette Gervaise, this landmark was the stage for her first act of clandestine work.

A Meeting Point for the Resistance

On a bright, hot afternoon, Isabelle pedaled her blue bicycle through the barricaded streets of Paris, past black Mercedes-Benzes with swastika flags and Wehrmacht lorries, until she reached the rue de Rivoli. There, she spotted the iron bench near the entrance to the Comédie Française. She hit the brakes, stepped off her bicycle, and felt her excitement turn sharp with fear. Her handbag, with a thick envelope hidden in its slit lining, suddenly felt heavy. She took a deep, calming breath and walked her bicycle across the busy crosswalk. When she was directly beside the woman seated on the bench, she spoke the prearranged code: "Do you think I'll need an umbrella today?" The woman, Anouk, replied, "I expect it to remain sunny," and then rose quickly, leading Isabelle away from the theater.

A Transition to Deeper Involvement

Anouk led Isabelle across the wide, gravelly expanse of the Cœur Napoléon, with the Louvre rising majestically around them, a place now disfigured by swastika flags and German soldiers sitting on benches in the Tuilleries garden. On a side street, they ducked into a small café. There, beneath the table, Isabelle passed the envelope to Anouk. As a pair of German officers took a nearby table, Anouk leaned close, straightening Isabelle's beret in a strangely intimate gesture, and whispered a warning about collaborators—French men and women who reported to the Gestapo. She then told Isabelle to stand at the corner of boulevard Saint-Germain and rue de Saint-Simon the next day at noon, without her bicycle, and not to be followed. This meeting at the Comédie Française was the threshold; the next day's rendezvous would bring Isabelle into the heart of the network that ran the Nightingale escape route.

The Theater as a Symbol

The Comédie Française, a temple of French culture and language, was an ironic setting for this transaction. Its public, open space, frequented by both Parisians and German soldiers, provided a kind of camouflage. The theater itself, like the city, was a stage where everyone played a role. Isabelle, dressed in a drab gray dress and black beret, was an actress performing the part of an ordinary girl. The iron bench, a fixed point in the occupied city, became a silent witness to the first step of a journey that would lead her across the Pyrenees and into the heart of the war. It was here that the Nightingale began to sing.