After the retreat of the Germans from France in World War II, it was revealed that the French Academy of Sciences had a secret repository of scientific materials, including 100 boxes of records of the French chemist, Lavoisier, and sixty cases of rare mineral specimens.
Among his other notable roles were as Olivier, King Louis XI's right-hand man, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), as the real estate agent in Charlie Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and as Journet, a bereaved innkeeper who seeks to avenge his daughter's murder in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes film The Scarlet Claw (1944).