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’s great comeback at the Folies Bergère in an extravaganza called Féeries et Folies. In June, the actor Michael MacLiammoir described taking out a friend in Paris for the first time. The experience began with a dish of snails at the Méditerranée. Then they went to see ‘Josephine Baker, appearing in a series of roles that portray the Quest of Love down the ages, from tropical Eve (accompanied by ash-blond Adam, several doves, and misty Jungle of Eden at dawn under gigantic waterfall) through a bevy of startling incarnations that included Greek princesses, Eastern impératrices, and Queens of France. After this she dodges about a good deal as the Empress Josephine and as Mary Queen of Scots. This diversion reaches its height in dark purple cathedral where she is publicly executed (in trailing black velvet), after which the lovely headless thing, now robed in dazzling diamanté, sings Gounoud’s Ave Maria to crashing strains from the organ, and scores of stained-glass saints descend luminously from their windows to celebrate the triumph of Mike over Matter, and execute stately saraband in violet-ray. All this émouvant in the extreme: we find ourselves far too tired for night-club, put poor tired (but pleased) Paul to bed, and drink cocoa at the Dôme to calm our nerves.’

For the more robust, there was always Les Halles – ‘the belly of Paris’, in Zola’s phrase – to go on to for onion soup just before dawn. After the almost solid soup and a petit vin blanc, smartly dressed couples watched beefy-armed and red-nosed porters in blue overalls heaving sides of beef around. Then they would walk slowly through the flower market, buying bunches to take back to the hotel where the night concierge, about to go off-duty, would greet them with an indulgent smile.

At the beginning of July, the municipal council of Paris decided to end the Grande Semaine with a Grande Nuit de Paris as climax. Fountains in the city and at Versailles were turned on and illuminated. The Eiffel Tower was floodlit for the first time and circus elephants performed at its base. A special supper was organized at 3,000 francs a head, where celebrities – including Edward G. Robinson and Ingrid Bergman – watched the entertainments, which ended in a huge firework display from the Pont d’Iéna. Foreigners were, of course, an important audience, but the exercise was also a political demonstration to the people of Paris that better times were returning.

32

Paris sera toujours Paris

France was now starting to see the effects of Marshall aid, which began to fuel economic recovery more rapidly than people had dared hope. Already in 1948 there had been signs of a new attitude emerging. ‘There seems to be a change of heart in my community,’ the Chief Rabbi told Jacques Dumaine. ‘Today fathers no longer choose their sons-in-law from among the ranks of the State civil servants; two years ago the opposite was the case. Is this perhaps a sign that commercial activity is reviving in France?’ Janet Flanner noted that for the first time since before the war the shelves in the shops were no longer bare. ‘The average Frenchman can now find in the shops nearly everything he wants except the means of paying for it.’

In November of that year, General Marshall visited France to see how the plan was developing. Paul Claudel made a speech of welcome in which he said: ‘The word “plan” until now did not sound very good in our ears! It signified for people already exhausted and over-burdened the subjection of the human being to distant objectives. But the Marshall Plan, that we can understand straight away, just as we understand the Red Cross.’

The country was on its way to recovery now that the last wave of strikes had crumbled. Despite all the damage caused to the economy, France was in a better position than Great Britain to take advantage of American aid because the Monnet plan to reshape French industry was in place. Jean Monnet persuaded both the government and David Bruce, then the director in France of the Economic Cooperation Administration responsible for executing the Marshall