Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

swell the number of ‘clandestines’ out on the streets, and disease would spread rapidly. But most of those who supported the measure did so because they found the old system – under which ‘
les pouvoirs publics organisaient la prostitution
’ – morally reprehensible and open to police abuse.
    For many traditionalists, the legislation was tantamount to an attack on French culture. Pierre Mac Orlan said, ‘It’s the foundation of a thousand-year-old civilization which is collapsing.’
    Galtier-Boissière was another with a nostalgia for the gossip and banter of brothel life. His favourite
maisons de tolérance
were in the rue Sainte-Apolline and the rue Blondel, and included Aux Belles Poules (one of the ones on the list provided for American troops) and Aux Belles Japonaises. He used to take the painter Jean Oberlé and Claude Blanchard, his great friends and colleagues on the
Crapouillot
magazine, with him. They were much less enchanted than their bear-leader, who was fascinated by Paris’s underworld –
le Milieu
– and used these sorties to gather colour and dialogue for a novel. ‘In most of these brothels,’ wrote Oberlé, ‘the inmates struck me as ghastly in appearance, violently made-up, and their gaudy silk shifts camouflaged what were in most cases sad bodies.’
    Oberlé and Blanchard were much happier accompanying Galtier-Boissière to the rougher
bals musette
– to the As de Coeur in the rue des Vertus, to La Java in the Faubourg du Temple and to the Petit Balcon in the rue de Lappe. The three men would find a table and order one of the staple drinks – a
diabolo-menthe
or a glass of acidic white wine. After the end of each dance, while the musicians rested for a moment, the
patron
would shout out: ‘
Passons la monnaie!
’ and go round to collect the coins, dropping them in a bag round his waist. Once he had made the collection, he would call up to the three musicians in their balcony – accordionist, banjo player and harpist: ‘
Allez, roulez!
’ And off thecouples would go in another waltz or a java. Prostitutes taking a break from their pitch on the street would push past the tables to dance a few circuits of the well-waxed parquet floor purely for pleasure, not to find custom.
    Any illusion in the summer of 1946 that France had come through the worst was shattered a few months later, during a winter often described as the worst of the century. For many, the memory of the cold far outlasted memories of hunger. The disastrous shortages of heating fuel – some areas received only a third or a quarter of their allocation – left schools as well as offices unheated. Children had such bad chilblains that they could not write, and secretaries in the Quai d’Orsay could only type wearing mittens. Nancy Mitford was unable to work at home. She wrote to Gaston Palewski – the telephones were not functioning – begging three or four logs because her hands were so cold she could hardly hold a pen. ‘Every breath is like a sword,’ she wrote to one of her sisters.
    In the need to cut electricity consumption, all illuminated signs were forbidden, shop windows left unlit and streetlights turned off arbitrarily. In fact so little warning was given of power cuts that, in hospitals, surgeons in mid-operation frequently found themselves abandoned in darkness.
    Once again connections helped, even when unintended. Susan Mary Patten was deeply embarrassed when an American general, having noticed a chilblain on one of her fingers during a dinner at the Windsors’ overheated house, sent round the next morning a work party of German prisoners of war to unload a truck of coal for her.
    The vicious circle continued. Blizzards halted coal production and trains bringing fuel. Pipes froze, burst, poured forth and refroze in huge icicles. ‘I never saw anything like the burst pipes in this town,’ wrote Nancy Mitford to her sister Diana, ‘every house a waterfall.’
    Each morning dozens of small children, well wrapped up except for their knees blue above thick socks, set off to buy milk, clutching metal billycans. The threat of tuberculosis meant that the milk was boiled in a huge metal vat set up in the
laiterie,
and the shopkeeper poured the steaming milk ration into the can with a ladle which held exactly one litre.
    *
    Rationing in times of great shortages will always create a black market and there are all too many examples of its counter-productive effects in France. One of the most