Paris After the Liberation_ 1944 - 1949 - Antony Beevor [192]
To greet the invasion of dollar-packing tourists, shops in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré had arranged window displays on the theme of the Seven Deadly Sins. Fresh oranges and bananas symbolized ‘greed’, a point which may have been lost on tourists from a land of plenty, while at Lanvin ‘envy’ was represented by a headless mannequin in formal brocade and weighed down with jewellery. Cartier even laid in ‘gold swizzle sticks at 11,000 francs and a semi-automated version at 21,000’, appliances which horrified the French.
People were drawn to Paris for a combination of reasons, whether shopping, sightseeing, the inspiration and excitement of the place or simply curiosity. For those who had dreamed of the Montparnasse era, the voice of the nightclub singer Jacqueline François singing ‘La Vie en Rose’ was enough to make them feel ‘like a young Scott Fitzgerald character sopping up the romance of Paris’.
The city also symbolized sexual liberty, from the sequinned G-strings of the Folies Bergère to the excitement of seeing the art student revellers from the Quat’zarts Ball. On the night of 5 July, they swarmed across Montparnasse ‘dressed, or rather underdressed,’ noted the American ambassador when his car was good-naturedly overrun, ‘as Indians or Japanese warriors, with smears of paint, the only visible garments being loin cloths’.
But while the younger American longed for such liberty, his stuffier compatriots expressed shock and disapproval. French indiscipline – political, sexual, hygienic and gastronomic – provided subjects for much moral condemnation. In the summer of 1948, the first trickle of tourists criticized the seemingly endless political crisis as one Cabinet after another failed from July to September. And puritanism was outraged by the waste of grande cuisine at a time when France as a whole was supposed to be ‘on welfare handouts’. Even the gastronomic extravagance of the French middle class struck many of them as immoral, and they did not keep their views to themselves. Often their censure was influenced by their own inability to cope with rich and unusual food. Laden with remedies for upset stomachs, they had a horror of squatting over a hole in the floor. Nor was their concern with hygiene helped by the water shortages in the summer drought of 1949.
The French were not the only ones taken aback by opinionated or self-absorbed tourists. In June 1949, a young American woman staying at the Ritz rang David Bruce at the United States Embassy to ask him ‘to have her mattress changed as it was too lumpy’. Later Bruce was accosted at a party by a New York model who demanded to be introduced to some interesting French people because she wanted ‘to increase her vocabulary’.
Bruce, however, was certainly not stand-offish with the swelling American community in Paris. He made an effort to go to every soirée vernissage of exhibitions by young American painters however much he disliked their work. One exhibition which the Bruces attended with more enthusiasm than usual was that of Edward G. Robinson’s wife at the André Weill gallery. She was selling her paintings for charity to help rebuild a French village. Over the next few weeks, while Robinson was filming on the Côte d’Azur, Gladys enjoyed herself in Paris. The Bruces saw her again for lunch at Maxim’s, ‘slightly over-cocktailed but very funny’, before she staggered forth for a fitting with Marcel Rochas.
One feels slightly weak when contemplating the resistance to alcohol required in those days. American influence in Paris had introduced a ‘cocktail hour’ in hotels, a sort of limbering-up session before going out to dinner and a show. But the cocktail hour was in fact two and a half hours long, fromsix to eight-thirty, a bibulous counterpart to the French period of cinq à sept reserved for adultery.
There were half a dozen