Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

of Windsor: ‘I gave them a delicious dinner: consommé, marrow on toast, grilled langouste, tournedos with sauce béarnaise, and chocolate soufflé. Poor starving France.’ Some found such attitudes hard to forgive. Yves Montand, singing in Le Club des Cinq, was so angered when a customer just below the stage ordered a whole lobster, picked at it, then ground out his cigar in the half-eaten carcass, that he punched him.
    Resentment was fuelled because there were three sets of rules, one for the poor, one for the rich and another for the Americans and British. Smart Parisians with places in the country were able to supplement the tiny meat ration by bringing back game to the city. Since few deer had been culled after the surrender of firearms under the Occupation, large supplies of venison were available provided you could lay hands on ammunition. Every shot had to count, since the ration was twenty cartridges a year. A woman in Paris was overjoyed to discover two boxes of pre-war cartridges under a pile of books in her attic. She was able to convert these, via a complicated barter with a friend who was a first-class shot, into ‘two pheasants, a kilo of butter and a roast of veal’.
    The British and Americans were even more privileged in the winter of 1946, with the black-market rate reaching 250 francs to the dollar and 1,000 to the pound sterling. This was at a time when a housekeeper-cum-cook could be found for 2,500 francs a month. A number of diplomats and journalists made honourable attempts to have nothing to do with the black market. The daughter of Cy and Marina Sulzberger was noteven allowed to play with the children of parents who resorted to it. Bill Patten forbade any use of the black market in his household. He explained to their cook, Madame Vallet, how to toast K ration biscuits. As soon as he had left, she went straight to Susan Mary and informed her flatly that they must use the black market, but Monsieur need not know about it.
    The pressure to succumb was overwhelming when almost everybody else accepted that under
le Système D
rules were there to be broken. When Susan Mary Patten went to an employment agency to hire a maid, the
patronne
immediately said with a gleam in her eye, ‘
Naturellement Madame aura les provisions de l’armée américaine
.’ The significance of US army rations had been obvious from the beginning, even though they came in inconvenient quantities once every six weeks – huge cans of processed vegetables, fruit juice, bacon, powdered egg and army powdered milk known as Klim. There was little choice, but for the French it was like treasure at a time when one grapefruit cost the equivalent of four days’ pay for a skilled worker. Susan Mary Patten’s housekeeper ‘caressed the cans, almost crying’.
    In the autumn of 1946, prostitutes had an even greater need to resort to
le Système D
. To the horror of men and most of the medical profession, brothels became illegal.
    Paris brothels were sometimes known as
maisons d’illusions,
the sort of euphemism which foreigners had come to expect of the city. The more technical definitions were
maisons de tolérance,
where the prostitutes lived, ate and worked; and
maisons de rendez-vous,
where ‘the women come to work as prostitutes usually during the afternoon’.
    The police vice squad – the Service des Moeurs – was responsible for enforcing the many regulations. Windows and shutters were to be kept closed; on the ground and first floors, the shutters had to be solid wood, not louvred; each inmate had to be registered with the police and in possession of an up-to-date medical card, or
carnet sanitaire
; and inspections had to be carried out twice a week by a designated doctor.
    On 13 April 1946, the new law outlawing brothels was passed, to take effect on 6 October. One of the principal motives behind this measure had nothing to do with morals or with health. Marthe Ricard, a councillor of the Ville de Paris and one of the MRP candidates elected to theConstituent Assembly, had in fact introduced the bill ordering the expropriation of brothels and their conversion for use by impecunious students. There was a desperate shortage of accommodation for students in Paris, but this only complicated the debate over the advantages and disadvantages of registered brothels.
    The main battle seems to have focused on the medical question. If official brothels were suppressed, then the 7,000 registered prostitutes would simply