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Dr Carrel requested the use of a laboratory in the American Hospital for his French Institute for the Study of Human Problems to research workplace injuries and establish standard first aid treatments. Its goal of sending injured men back to work quickly and efficiently would have appealed to Charles Bedaux. De Chambrun accepted Carrel’s proposal and approached the French state railway company, Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer, to send its workers to the American Hospital. In March, the hospital designated forty beds for SNCF labourers suffering industrial accidents or wounded in trains bombed by the Allies or sabotaged by the Resistance. ‘From this time on our 250 beds were nearly always occupied,’ de Chambrun wrote. Occupied beds meant no space for German troops and independence for the hospital. Dr Jackson cared for many of the cheminots, railway-men, who were among the first groups of workers to organize resistance to the occupation.

Along with the other Americans in Paris, Sylvia Beach reported each week to her local police station. ‘There were so few Americans [in the 6th Arrondissement] that our names were in a sort of scrapbook that was always getting mislaid,’ she wrote. ‘I used to find it for the Commissaire. Opposite my name and antecedents was the notation: “has no horse”. I could never find out why.’ From then on, ‘the Gestapo kept track of me, and they’d come to see me all the time’.

In January 1942, freezing weather proved more of a problem than the time-consuming search for food. Adrienne wrote, ‘Hardest to put up with, we are all of the same opinion, is the cold. In the bookshop, where I have had a wood stove installed, it is livable, but my apartment, like those of most people, is glacial; I can neither read nor write.’ Sylvia, in her solitary flat above the now-empty bookshop, was finding winter equally bleak: ‘I shared the strange occupied life of my French friends, without heat and food dwindling. Electricity was limited, we gave up any ration of coal for a little gas an hour at noon, finally none at all as we combined rations with whoever cooked a meal at noon. I took my lunch at Adrienne’s. I had a quarter of a litre of milk a day as I didn’t eat meat, and extra macaroni.’ Women were not given rations for tobacco, as men were, and there was no longer any chocolate, sugar or coffee for anyone–except on the black market. Contraband coffee cost $8 a pound, eggs $2 a dozen, chickens $5 each and cigarettes about $2 a pack–almost ten times their pre-war prices. ‘An average bottle of wine, which before the war cost 8 or 10 cents, now costs 60 cents,’ reported the New York Times in April 1942. When Adrienne realized one day that she had no cooking fat left, Sylvia watched her burst into tears.

Sylvia, Adrienne and the other women of Paris coped with privation and German decrees, but they did not give up everything. ‘Even the electricity restrictions did not prevent women from going to the hairdresser, ’ wrote Ninetta Jucker, an Englishwoman who remained in Paris throughout the occupation and had many American friends, ‘though we often had to come away with damp heads.’ Night was the worst time. Mrs Jucker recalled, ‘After eight o’clock the centre of the city was almost deserted, and though many people risked boarding the last train for the pleasure of a few hours’ “escape” at the theatre or cinema–never have places of entertainment been so full as they were during the Occupation–as soon as the little crowd dispersed from the entrance to the metro, the city recovered its deathly silence, broken only by the occasional tramp of nailed boots.’ She and many other Parisians lived in dread of la botte allemande, the German boot:

No one who has not lived in German-occupied territory can fully realize all that was conveyed by the sound of those five pairs of booted and perfectly synchronized feet: La patrouille allemande [the German patrol]. Ein, zwei, drei. Halt! They never moved but to command. Even the sentries gave each other