I agree. I had also not thought of that, and it's interesting that what seemed like an awful blow at the time - losing the Paris Opera job to Lifar - meant that he was out of Europe before the war. He might have departed anyway, but he also might have been trapped or misguidedly refused to leave. Other writers may well have pointed this out previously but I don't remember it.
Unfortunately, for every insight it seems like there's another distracting boo-boo. I haven't encountered such a misuse of fulsome since Gelsey Kirkland's reference to "fulsome breasts."