Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

from domestic affairs. They were focused on what the party believed to be an event for international rejoicing – Joseph Stalin’s seventieth birthday on 21 December. Orders went out from the Central Committee that everyone must contribute towards the event. The run-up to the great day was treated like a presidential campaign, with 30,000 posters depicting the heroic leader and half a million pamphlets printed.
    An exhibition of presents, reminiscent of a royal wedding, was held at the metalworkers’ union building on the rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud. Twenty-three panels illustrating the life of Stalin decorated the hall, where some 4,000 contributions were displayed. They included embroidery and handiwork of all sorts, even a doll’s bonnet by a little girl who had died in Auschwitz, the music score of a specially composed ‘
Chant à Staline
’, scores of poems, including one by Éluard, and works of art almost entirely in the socialist-realist style. One prominent Communist painter was horrified to see that a work which he had proudly presented to Maurice Thorez for his house at Choisy-le-Roi had been included in the pile. This bizarre cargo of bric-à-brac was to be loaded into a railway wagon and dispatched to Moscow. Stalin is unlikely to have bothered to cast an eye over it, or the book of congratulations signed by 40,000 visitors.
    On 19 December, the Bruces gave a dinner party for Ernest Hemingway, the ambassador’s companion-in-arms during the Liberation of Paris just over five years before. With Hemingway they invited Duff Cooper, Marie-Louise Bousquet, Pauline de Rothschild and Christian Dior. The high point of the dinner was woodcock accompanied by Romanée Conti. Heming way boasted of having shot over 8,000 duck with a syndicate of friends near Venice. But this was not a good time for him. He was working on
Across the River and into the Trees
and suffering from a crisis of impotence which the massacre of ducks had failed to relieve. Like the American colonel in his novel, Hemingway could not come to terms with the fact that the war was over.
    The last year of the decade was approaching its end, but Fourth Republic politics continued along the same slippery path. Georges Bidault, who had patched together another ministry at the end of October after the fall of Henri Queuille’s government, wondered what he would find in his Christmas stocking: ‘Some fruit, I expect, an orange, a banana – or its skin.’
    On the left bank there was rejoicing as friends, including Jean-Louis Barrault and Jean Galtier-Boissière, gathered spontaneously to congratulate Jean-Louis Vaudoyer, the belle-lettrist and director of the Comédie-Française during the war, on his election to the ‘Immortals’. Laid out on the sofa were the
habits verts
– the green tail-coatedParis sera toujours Paris uniforms of the Académie Française – which Vaudoyer’s grandfather and great-grandfather had also been privileged to wear.
    For Galtier-Boissière the most memorable night was Christmas Eve, when he gathered all his friends around himin his apartment overlooking the Place de la Sorbonne. This huge, generous man, with his moustache and ‘
gros yeux affectueux
’, and his face red from many vintages of Bouzy rouge, had a great gift for friendship along with his compulsive irreverence. His long-suffering and devoted wife, Charlotte, was continually having to tell him off for some misdemeanour or other. At one book-signing session in the provinces, when very drunk, he had written erotic dedications for the women who came forward with copies. Their outraged husbands had promptly torn out the offending pages.
    Galtier-Boissière’s love for the fast-disappearing Paris of brothel,
bal musette
and old-fashioned restaurant was matched only by his loathing of modern political cant. Stalinists like Aragon once again became a favourite target in his monthly satirical magazine
Le Crapouillot,
which he had relaunched in June 1948 with another all-night party of drinking and his favourite songs, like ‘
Coeur apache
’ and
‘L’Hirondelle du Faubourg
’. Aragon had already returned the insults frombefore the war. In his novel
Aurélien,
published just after the Liberation, he had depicted the immensely tall and brave Galtier-Boissière as the miserable little Fuchs, editor of a magazine called
Le Cagna
– a trench-bunker in
poilu
slang, as opposed to a trench-mortar.
    That night, Galtier-Boissière and his friends laughed,