Down the dark hallway Faÿ made his shuffling way and never returned. The gullible guard, after waiting a discreet fifteen minutes, found the bathroom empty. An intern later reported that he had glimpsed a young blonde woman leading an elderly man through the side gates of the hospital. “By the time the police in Angers were alerted, ...” Will writes, “Faÿ and his companion were already halfway across the country.” On the morning of October 1, picturesquely disguised in a cassock like a priest on pilgrimage, Faÿ slipped across the border into Switzerland, where he lived for nearly three decades among supporters and fellow collaborators, dreaming of an eventual return to order and the simple values of family, church, and nation.

GERTRUDE STEIN, who described her relationship with Faÿ as “one of the four permanent friendships” of her life, died of cancer on July 27, 1946, too early to help with his escape. But the daring scheme at the Angers hospital was funded by the sale of two works of Picasso—a drawing of a woman on horseback and a gouache—by Stein’s widow, Alice B. Toklas. Such an arrangement might seem a fitting exchange, almost a quid pro quo, since Faÿ, in a letter to a Swiss newspaper published in 1960, claimed to have protected Stein and Toklas from the Nazi occupiers. He had also, at Picasso’s request, preserved their formidable collection of works by Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne, housed in their Paris apartment. According to Will, Faÿ’s claim that he had protected Stein during the war has been “repeated uncritically by every single one of Stein’s subsequent biographers.”

The bad news that Stein collaborated with pro-Nazi authorities—broached in 1996 by Wanda Van Dusen in an article on Stein’s Pétain translation project and given widespread currency in Janet Malcolm’s excellent study Two Lives—will intensify the controversy that has surrounded her work for a very long time. The popular version of her, most recently on display in Woody Allen’s harmless confection Midnight in Paris (in which the source of all evil is a rich American family clueless about art), has not yet been contaminated by her sinister work for Marshal Pétain. “She is much as I would imagine Gertrude Stein,” Roger Ebert remarked of Kathy Bates’s performance, “an American, practical, no-nonsense, possessed with a nose for talent, kind, patient.” No portrait of Stein is more familiar than Picasso’s flat, matte, mask-like painting of 1905-1906. But a more suggestive portrait might be Jo Davidson’s sculpted portrait of Stein as the Buddha (currently on view in the exhibition at the Met called “The Steins Collect”), which captures the ambiguity that surrounds both her literary work and her behavior during the Occupation.

Why did Stein enthusiastically embrace a regime so closely tied to the policies and the predations of the Third Reich? And why was she not arrested after the war, like that other willing propagandist Ezra Pound, and placed, if not in a cage, at least in prison? Instead she was portrayed by the American journalist Eric Sevareid as a rugged survivor and “favored stranger,” who had been protected by affectionate inhabitants of Culoz, the village near the Swiss border and the first foothills of the Alps, where Stein and Toklas waited out the war. When the Nazis demanded, in April 1944, that “all Jews, whatever their nationality, were to go,” Stein and Toklas did not go, and did not wear the yellow star, presumably, Will believes, because of the interventions of Bernard Faÿ.