The bare facts are these. Jacob, who wore the yellow star of a Jew, was arrested on February 24, 1944, by three Gestapo agents at his modest rented lodgings in the village of St. Benoît-sur-Loire where he lived closely connected to the Basilica of St. Benoît; he had just helped to serve the Mass in the chapel early that morning. He was held for four days in the prison at Orléans in a small, stinking room with about sixty other Jewish prisoners. On February 28, he was sent by train to Drancy where he was placed in an icy chamber reserved for those about to be deported. Jacob, who had suffered repeated bouts of pneumonia in his life, quickly contracted the disease again, and died on March 5.

I interviewed his close friend the composer Henri Sauguet about the efforts made to liberate Max Jacob. Jacob’s friends Jean Cocteau, Sacha Guitry, Marcel Jouhandeau, and André Salmon (all of whom entertained cordial relations with the occupying Germans in Paris), along with Pierre Colle, Georges Prade (an ex-municipal counselor of the City of Paris), Sauguet, and others exerted themselves to obtain Jacob’s freedom. Cocteau was especially active, calling Gerhardt Heller, the Nazi special officer for propaganda, who promised to help; Guitry went to Otto Abetz, the Nazi ambassador to Vichy France. Sauguet and Pierre Colle appealed to Picasso. Picasso, who was not a French citizen and had reason to be worried about his own safety in Occupied France, replied: “Max is an angel. He doesn’t need us to help him fly out of prison.” Whether or not Picasso’s intervention could have helped is a real question, but not one that changes the fact of his having refused to try. Prade, for his part, advised Picasso not to sign the letter circulating among Parisian intellectuals asking for Jacob’s release; he thought Picasso’s anxiety, and his status as a non-citizen and as decadent artist, would not help the cause.

On March 11, Jacob’s friends still did not know of his death, and had been assured by German authorities that he was about to be released. Not until March 13 did the death certificate from Drancy reach the town hall of St. Benoît, where the mayor immediately notified Jacob’s supporters. A Mass was held at the Church of Saint-Roch in Paris on March 21; Picasso attended. (Jacob’s early biographer, Pierre Andreu, is mistaken in claiming that he did not). And on March 19 Picasso attended the reading of his own play, “Le Désir attrapé par la queue,” at the apartment of Michel and Louise Leiris, in the ceremonial presence of the artist’s 1915 drawing of Max; the gathering, which included some of the notable artists and intellectuals of Paris, served as an informal memorial tribute to the poet and has been described as an act of intellectual Resistance. Similarly, the efforts to release Jacob tell us much about the intricate layerings of Collaboration in the cultural life of Paris under Vichy.

The relations between Picasso and Jacob were intense and complex from start to finish. But this is not a simple story of betrayal. Reliable accounts of Jacob’s death can be found in Hélène Seckel’s catalogue “Max Jacob et Picasso” (Paris: Réunion des Musées nationaux, 1994) 272-277; and in Patricia Sustrac’s article “La Mort de Max Jacob” on the website of Les Amis de Max Jacob, http://www.max-jacob.com/arrestation.html.

artists were seen as the next thing to gipsies, at best poor senseless fools, by a race determined to make everything sensible and orderly, sweeping away the messiness of “unpure” cultures

the psychosis of “single white woman” but the flat to be tidied to a bare standstill became the wide horrified world.