Forgery had become the section’s most important task. As the Resistance became more unified and organized, and the numbers of men and women involved increased, false papers were the essentials without which nothing serious was possible. Combat Étudiant gradually built closer alliances with the intelligence networks of the Auvergne, George Charaudeau’s Alibi network, Colonel Rivet’s Kléber organization, and Christian Pineau’s Phalanx; also with other action commandos, the Ardents whose symbol was the flame of Joan of Arc, the Mithridate and the ORA. This work took Cauchi away from Clermont-Ferrand for long periods and a surly, haughty fellow named George Mathieu deputized for him, actually becoming the acting head of Mithridate. Mathieu was a large man, all bones and teeth. His blue eyes were somewhat bulging and his blond hair was slicked down with macassar oil. He insisted on wearing a beret as a gesture of defiance, and was respected on account of his icy, military manner. His girlfriend Christiane worked in the Vichy offices, as the secretary of a certain Captain Burcez. This seemed like a valuable “inside” connection. At any rate, for a plurality of reasons, nobody questioned Mathieu’s right to lead.
At that time many packages needed to be carried back and forth as the commando attacks grew in frequency and force, and as the German hunt for the Resistance intensified. Max Ophuls decided to stop asking himself what those packages might contain. The couriers needed documents to ensure their safe passage and it was his business to provide them. Then, after the Jews of Paris were rounded up, perhaps one thousand Jewish children escaped the death-trains to Auschwitz; false papers had urgently to be supplied if they were to be brought south to safety. Max Ophuls, whose work was praised by his immediate superior Feuerstein as well as the more exalted, though increasingly remote figures of Cauchi and Ingrand as the best they had seen, created many of these new identities, which he dispatched to their new owners via secret drop points from which they were collected by anonymous go-betweens. But perhaps the greatest contribution Max Ophuls made to the Resistance was sexual; although in order to pull off the feat he had to create yet another phony self and inhabit it fully and, alas, somewhat painfully. He was the man who seduced the Panther, Ursula Brandt.
In November 1942 the Germans invaded the Zone Sud and at once the stakes rose. Until then students at the Strasbourg university-in-exile could play at resistance, but with the Germans established in Clermont-Ferrand it became a far more dangerous game. In all, one hundred and thirty-nine students and faculty members would die as a result of their involvement in Resistance activities. That November, SS captain Hugo Geissler set up a Gestapo “antenna” in Clermont-Ferrand. Its director was Paul Blumenkampf, who pretended to be a hearty, good-natured fellow. His immensely influential assistant made no such pretense. She was known as the Panther because she wore a coat of panther fur which she never removed, even on the hottest days of the year. Her particular expertise was infiltration, demolition from within; and her prize witness, her quisling, her inside man was none other than George Mathieu. Many Resistance groups-the Mithridate, the ORA-were smashed and their leaders seized thanks to Mathieu’s treason. In a series of raids on these organizations, several university students were arrested, and Reichsführer-SS Himmler was finally able to authorize the attack on the university, against which Danjon’s influence with Vichy, and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop’s reluctance to overrule the puppets he had installed, had protected it for so long.
The assault on the university, which became known as the Great Raid, took place on November 25, 1943. The literature professor Paul Collomp, a good friend of Max Ophuls’s, was shot dead trying to bar the attackers from the secretariat where the teachers’ addresses were kept. A theology professor, Robert Eppel, whom Max had also befriended, was shot in the stomach in his own home. The traitor George Mathieu identified many students holding false identity papers. There were over 1,200 arrests. Max Ophuls escaped because of an instinct for self-preservation that had led him to deal with Mathieu on a strict need-to-know basis. Consequently the names Sebastian Brant and Max Ophuls could not be connected by the traitor to the Resistance operative and master forger Niccolò, and Max was safe for the moment. As a precaution, however, he moved out of Zeller’s cottage, moved in with a pretty young law student named Angélique Strauss, one of the lovestruck young women of whom there would never be a shortage in his life, forged himself yet another new identity (“Jacques Wimpfeling,” after yet another medieval humanist) and took a leave of absence from university duties.
The day after the attack André Danjon wrote a powerful letter of protest to the French prime minister Laval, a tirade in which more or less every sentence was a lie. He lied about the number of Jews at the university, and about the students’ and faculty’s involvement with the Resistance. In those years of eclipse his determination was like earthshine; it provided the only available light. As a result of his well-feigned outrage the university was allowed to remain open. Danjon then telephoned Max personally at Strauss’s apartment. “It’s the last act,” he said. “The curtain has already begun to fall. You need to think about leaving France.” During his sojourn in the cottage at Gergovie, Max Ophuls had passed his time discussing military history with Gaston Zeller and writing papers on international relations, which he himself feared were excessively utopian, and in which he speculated about the construction of a more stable world order in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazism, improbable as that sounded at the time. These papers, in which he foresaw the need for entities similar to those that would afterwards come into being as the Council of Europe, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, had been greatly admired by Danjon, who revealed that he had managed to have them smuggled to the Free French headquarters in London, where they had impressed de Gaulle. “You can do more for your country at the Général’s side than you are doing here,” Danjon said. “Get ready and we will prepare the run. I’m afraid you can’t fly this time. Twice would be pushing your luck.”
“Before I go,” Max replied, “there’s something I have to do.”
The second legendary exploit of Max Ophuls during his Resistance years became known as “Biting the Panther.” When people spoke of it their voices fell into the hushed tones reserved for the achievement of the ridiculously, beautifully impossible. Agent Niccolò, by now a senior figure in the unified resistance known as MUR-which had been created by the merging of Combat with the two other large armies of the Resistance, Franc-Tireur and Libération-simply disappeared from view. It was as if he, and Sebastian Brant, and Jacques Wimpfeling, and Maximilian Ophuls had all ceased to exist. In their place arrived a German officer, Sturmbahnführer Pabst, transferred from Strasbourg to assist Ursula Brandt’s team in its investigations, with papers of authorization personally signed by Heinrich Himmler, whose antipathy to the university-in-exile was of long standing. It was a testament to the impostor’s skill that the phony Pabst aroused no suspicion: a tribute to the implacable force of his will, which simply did not permit anyone to entertain the thought that he might not be what he said. He spoke immaculate German, was notable for his utter devotion to the Reich, his papers were perfectly in order, and there could be no questioning the authenticity and force of the Reichsführer-SS’s autograph. He was also, as the Panther noticed when he complimented her on the powerful, feline quality that made her nickname so appropriate, a man of immense personal charm and physical appeal. Ursula Brandt was a short, stocky woman to whom the term pantherlike could not truthfully be said to apply, but she received the compliment without demur. Within the week she and the Sturmbahnführer were lovers.