Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

retained an innocent, unworldly quality which was part of her appeal. Christian Bérard designed for her a pair of tartan slacks, trimmed with mink around the ankles. Gréco asked what mink was.
    Her introduction to the
famille Sartre
came through Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a quiet man of great charm whom Boris Vian described as ‘the only one of the philosophers who asked women to dance’. Gréco was amused by the way the waiters in his favourite haunt were used to receiving his silver cigarette lighter until he could pay the bill. One night, at the Bal Nègre in the rue Blomet, he introduced her to Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre she found very accessible. ‘He was agreat one for jokes and talked easily to the young’, and answered any question you put to him. Simone de Beauvoir, on the other hand, had ‘
un aspect plus difficile
’. Also sitting at Sartre and Beauvoir’s table was a red-haired girl in black velvet called Anne-Marie Cazalis.
    Cazalis was a poet. She was also tough and ambitious, and reminded Boris Vian of a goat ‘in her laugh, her malicious expression, a little obstinate but always diabolic’. Simone de Beauvoir distrusted her deeply and said that ‘she pushed gossip to indecent extremes’. Gréco, whom Cazalis took under her wing, described her as ‘full of inventive ideas, full of fantastic imagination, but machiavellian’. Soon the two young women were sharing a room in the Hotel Louisiane, and they became known as ‘the muses of Saint-Germain-des-Prés’. Gréco said of their life in those days, ‘
C’était une période nocturne mais lumineuse
.’
    The best live jazz in Paris was played by Claude Luter’s band, known as Les Lorientais, at a club of the same name in the cellar of the Hotel des Carmes. They had begun by playing at illicit ‘surprise-parties’ during the Occupation, and moved to the Hotel des Carmes in June 1946 as little more than amateur enthusiasts, playing only between five and seven in the evening.
    Even after they became famous, Luter and his band still played for parties given by friends, such as the one to celebrate Simone de Beauvoir’s return from America in February 1947. This was what Michel Leiris and Sartre liked to call a ‘fiesta’. Boris Vian organized the bar, which served infernal alcoholic mixtures. Giacometti fell asleep, perhaps as a result, and when the organizers cleared up afterwards somebody found a glass eye in the piano.
    Vian was perhaps the most talented of the young
Germano-pratins
. Trained as an engineer, he was also a writer, novelist, poet, car enthusiast and jazz trumpeter, whose work – both musical and literary – was admired by Sartre, Prévert and Queneau. The years 1946 and 1947 were ones of tremendous activity for him. As well as playing the trumpet in Claude Abadie’s jazz band, he had a regular column in
Jazz Hot,
where he wrote not only about music but about ignorance, injustice, racism and the horror of war. Vian was not an intellectual (he pretended that Heidegger was a new brand of Austrian tractor), but Sartre immediately recognized him as an ‘
écrivain engagé
’ and for a brief time he also wrote a column for
Les Temps modernes
called ‘
Chronique du Menteur
’. Theirfriendship soured when Sartre began what was to be a long affair with Vian’s wife, Michelle – although by then the Vian marriage was almost over.
    J’irai cracher sur vos tombes,
Vian’s third and most scandalous novel, was published in November 1946. It appeared under the pseudonymof Vernon Sullivan, supposedly a young American writer whose book Vian had merely translated. Written in fifteen days, it is a hard, angry, iconoclastic book about a black man’s erotic revenge on the white race – complete with murder and explicit sex scenes. The press was outraged, the book became a bestseller and Vian kept his anonymity for as long as he could; but in April 1947, the campaign against the book became serious. A man murdered his mistress in a scene copied from
J’irai cracher sur vos tombes
; not only that, but he left the book open at the relevant page, with the murder scene underlined, before turning the gun on himself. Vian was eventually forced to admit authorship. He was fined 100,000 francs and the book was banned.
    Late at night in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, there was nowhere to go but the cafés. Gréco and Cazalis would hang out with their friends in the Bar Vert in the rue Jacob until about one in the morning, when it