Macron spoke at the ceremony. He addressed Baker directly, as the French tradition at Panthéon inductions invites. “There is no one more French than you,” he said.
She was, by any accounting, also irreducibly American — born on the Missouri side of the river from East St. Louis, shaped by the specific violence and possibility of American racial history, carrying within her celebrity the history of Black American performance from the vaudeville circuits to the Harlem Renaissance. The France she chose was real. The America she left was real. Both things were true, and the ceremony in the Panthéon could honor one without erasing the other.
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## What the Sheet Music Was
The image that has attached most persistently to Josephine Baker’s wartime story is the sheet music. It is a specific, legible image: classified intelligence written in invisible ink on the pages of music she actually performed, hidden in plain sight among the legitimate possessions of a touring entertainer, carried across borders that guards examined without finding what was there.
The image works because it encapsulates the fundamental paradox of her wartime service: visibility as concealment, celebrity as cover, the most watched woman in the room as the least suspected one.
The invisible ink technology of the Second World War was not exotic. Various formulations of invisible ink — substances that could be applied to paper without visible trace and later developed by the application of heat, chemical reagents, or ultraviolet light — had been in use by intelligence services since the First World War. The British, French, German, and American intelligence services all used various formulations during the conflict. The specific substance used on Baker’s sheet music is not documented in the publicly available sources consulted for this article.