She was hidden right under the enemy’s nose, in a hay barn on the estate. She could fly at over five hundred miles an hour, or that, at any rate, was what her designers believed. She was powered by two Bugatti T50B auto-racing engines, had forward-swept wings and a revolutionary system of variable wing geometry, a system of self-adjusting split trailing edge flaps that responded to airspeed and manifold pressure and then automatically set themselves into any of six different positions: takeoff, cruise, high-speed dash, descent, landing, rollout. She was fast, fast, fast, and painted Bugatti blue. Finkenberger brought Max to the barn after darkness made it safe to move again, and the two men worked silently for an hour and a half removing the camouflage of hay and netting and revealing the Bugatti Racer in all her glory. She was still standing on the truck that had brought her out of Paris, like a greyhound in the slips. Finkenberger said he knew a stretch of straight road nearby that would serve as a runway. Max Ophuls marveled at the Racer’s streamlined bullet beauty. “She’ll reach Clermont-Ferrand all right, but don’t go crazy, okay? No need to go for the fucking speed record,” Finkenberger said. “Now look and learn.” So he was more than a horse trainer, Max realized. Finkenberger was explaining the aircraft’s unorthodox engine/power arrangement, its canted engines, its counter-rotating propellers. The cooling system, the tail-fin control system: these, too, were innovations. “Nothing like her ever built,” Finkenberger said. “One of a fucking kind.”
“Can you authorize this?” Max Ophuls asked, his voice heavy with wonder, his thoughts already rushing skywards. “Her maiden flight will be an act of resistance,” Finkenberger replied, the blue language disappearing as he revealed a previously hidden streak of emotional patriotism. “Le Patron would not wish it otherwise. Just take her, okay? Take her before they find her. She needs to escape as well.”
The night flight of the Bugatti Racer from Molsheim to Clermont-Ferrand would become one of the grand myths of the Resistance, and in the whispered retelling it swiftly acquired the supernatural force of a fable: the impossible super-speed of the aircraft bulleting the black sky; the low-altitude streak toward freedom that only the most skillful and fearless pilot could have pulled off; the five-hundred-miles-per-hour barrier broken through for the first time in history as the world record was unofficially but unquestionably shattered, and, more important, reclaimed for France from the Germans, thus becoming a metaphor for the Liberation; the daring takeoff from a country road and the even more dangerous dark-of-the-moon landing on the grassy plain down which Julius Caesar’s legions had marched toward the oppidum of Gergovia, where Vercingetorix, the chief of the Arverni, defeated them.
Some of this was certainly true, but in later years Maximilian Ophuls himself seemed prepared to allow the myths to embellish the truth. Had he really broken the record in spite of Finkenberger’s warnings about fuel? Had he really flown at or near rooftop level all the way, or had he escaped radar detection by luck, and on account of the strong element of the unexpected in his dash? In his own memoir of the war years, Max Ophuls clarified nothing, speaking instead with a hero’s modesty of his great good fortune and of the many helpers without whom, and so on. “I thought of Saint-Exupéry,” he wrote. “In spite of the anxious situation I understood what he meant when he spoke in Vol de nuit of flying as a form of meditation. That profound meditation in which one tastes an inexplicable hope. Yes, yes. It was like that.”
Here, again, an ungenerous reader might perceive a calculated merging of Max’s own story with that of another beloved figure. In 1940 the writer and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry played a heroic part in the battle of France, then left with his squadron for North Africa, and later reached New York. He was already famous as the author of Night Flight, but when Max Ophuls in his memoir went on to reference a later Saint-Exupéry book he was guilty of anachronism. At the time of his own flight to Gergovia, Pilote de guerre, published in English as Flight to Arras, was still being written, and even after its publication a year later and its considerable American success it was banned by the Vichy government and the Gallimard edition of 1942 was suppressed. It was therefore impossible for Max Ophuls in the Bugatti Racer to have had any knowledge of its contents. In spite of these awkward details, Max Ophuls unashamedly set down his airborne reflections on a text of which he could not then have been aware. “War, for us, signified disaster. But was it the case that France, to spare itself a defeat, had refused to fight? I do not believe it.” Max reliving his own vol de nuit added approvingly, “As I whistled over the heads of my sleeping countrymen, I did not believe it either. France would soon awake.” The error wasn’t important. He got away with it. Even those critics who spotted the blunder said it was within the bounds of poetic license. A hero was a hero and deserved to be cut a little slack. Max’s book was highly praised and became a commercial success, notably in America. After all, by the end of the war Saint-Exupéry was dead, lost in action over Corsica, whereas Max Ophuls was a living flying ace and giant of the Resistance, a man of movie-star good looks and polymathic accomplishment, and in addition he had moved to the United States, choosing the burnished attractions of the New World over the damaged gentility of the Old.
Once he had landed, the aircraft was quickly concealed in the nearby forest by a small team of volunteers who were nicknamed the Gergovians and led by the redoubtable Jean-Paul Cauchi, the organizer of Combat Universitaire, also known as Combat Étudiant, the Resistance group based at the Strasbourg university-in-exile and answerable to Henri Ingrand, the Chief for Combat Region Six. Max was taken to the forest cottage where his colleagues vice-chancellor Danjon and the historian Gaston Zeller were waiting with a bottle of wine. As his personally forged papers were in the name of “Sebastian Brant” his arrival as part of the Strasbourgeois faculty would need some explanation. He would be described as a scholar from the south, and Danjon, who exercised an almost hypnotic power over the Nazi fellow travelers of Vichy, would square the paperwork. “But you took a stupid risk by giving yourself a well-known name,” Danjon chided him. “One might almost say you yourself traveled here in an airborne ship of fools.” The real Brant was the fifteenth-century Strasbourg author of Stultifera Navis, or Das Narrenschiff (1494), a satire of human follies illustrated in part by the young Albrecht Dürer. Ophuls spread his hands apologetically: yes, it was true, he had made an idiotic choice.
“It will pass muster,” Zeller reassured him. “Nobody you need to worry about round here does any reading at all.”
Not long after his arrival in Gergovie, Max acquired a second false identity. Hungry for revenge, he joined the Action Section of Combat Étudiant under the work-name “Niccolò” and learned about blowing things up. The first and only bomb he threw was built by an assistant named Guibert in the Institute of Chemistry, and its target was the home of Jacques Doriot, a Vichy stooge who ran the pro-Nazi Doriot Association. The explosion-the gigantic excitement of the moment of power, followed almost immediately by a violent involuntary physical reaction, a parallel explosion of vomit-taught him two lessons he never forgot: that terrorism was thrilling, and that, no matter how profoundly justified its cause, he personally could not get over the moral hurdles required to perform such acts on a regular basis. He was moved to the Propaganda Section and in the two years that followed went back to what he knew: the creation of false identities. “The reinvention of the self, that classic American theme,” he would write in his memoir, “began for me in the nightmare of old Europe’s conquest by evil. That the self can so readily be remade is a dangerous, narcotic discovery. Once you’ve started using that drug, it isn’t easy to stop.”