Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

Wodehouse, a meeting which stimulated Orwell to write an article in Wodehouse’s defence. It is hard to imagine a more dissimilar pair. Plum thought Orwell ‘a gloomy sort of chap’. Orwell, on the other hand, recognized that Wodehouse, who lived in the fantasy world of his own creation, made an ideal whipping boy in the demagogic atmosphere of war socialism.
    After a brief sojourn near Fontainebleau, the Wodehouses moved back to Paris. They were left undisturbed, feeding their meat ration to Wonder, until they finally left for the United States in 1947.

7
    War Tourists and Ritzkrieg
    In the weeks following the Liberation, Paris experienced an Anglo-Saxon influx which far surpassed the days of the Versailles peace conference. The very first arrivals included intelligence officers, counter-espionage experts and journalists. Within a week or two, the proportion of those simply ‘wangling a joyride’ from London – including the wives, or future wives, of men already there – gathered pace.
    A more permanent population began to assemble during the middle of September, with officers posted to the city on official business, either attached to embassies or to SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force). British staff officers, with red bands round their service dress caps, were sometimes – to their furious embarrassment – mistaken for Soviet officers by French Communists, who acclaimed them with clenched-fist salutes and fervent expressions of admiration for the Red Army.
    One of the first British officers to enter Paris was Lieutenant-Colonel Lord Rothschild. Victor Rothschild had been formally seconded to the United States army after D-Day, to train its officers in the arts of sabotage and counter-sabotage, and on entering Paris he joined General Eisenhower’s supreme headquarters. He was given lodgings in the Young Women’s Christian Association (‘How strange,’ wrote his friend Duff Cooper, ‘since you are neither young nor a woman nor a Christian’), but it was not long before he made his way to the house of his cousin, Baron Robert de Rothschild, on the Avenue de Marigny. He found it occupied by American troops, but turned them out anddeclared the house to be the headquarters of his own anti-sabotage unit.
    His group’s first task was to locate and make safe demolition charges and booby traps left behind by the occupiers. (Some booby traps took the form of exploding horse dung, scattered on the roads by the departing Germans.) The rest of the unit, which included his future wife, Tess Mayor, arrived soon afterwards to work with the French Deuxième Bureau, hunting for arms and caches of explosives which might be used by a fifth column.
    Muggeridge joined Rothschild at the Avenue de Marigny, since the Services Spéciaux to which he was attached had not yet set up shop. After a very good lunch, they decided to make their position official with the British military authorities, and set off for the Roger & Gallet building in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, where they had heard that a British Force Headquarters had been established. The brigadier to whom they reported, immaculate in service dress with red tabs, took this very scruffy pair for impostors. As soon as he realized that he was talking to Lord Rothschild, however, he became positively deferential. It was the sort of behaviour that Rothschild loathed.
    Victor Rothschild was a man of many parts and many paradoxes. Scientist, academic, and government adviser by profession, he was also, in his private capacity, a socialist, a millionaire, a jazz pianist and a peer who both hated privilege and enjoyed it. The servants at the Avenue de Marigny, headed by Monsieur Félix, the
maître d’hôtel,
were well aware of his foibles. They could not believe how meagre British army rations were and, since Victor Rothschild refused to eat better food than his soldiers, Muggeridge had to go off and scrounge K rations from the Americans.
    The German occupiers had looked after the house on the Avenue de Marigny very well. The heavy furniture and decoration in the ‘
style Rothschild
’ of the 1860s were left unlooted. Muggeridge asked Monsieur Félix why he thought the Luftwaffe general who had occupied the house had behaved so well. ‘Hitlers come and go, Monsieur,’ came the reply, ‘but Rothschilds go on for ever.’ The servants had also done all they could to preserve the contents of the house. They had hidden the most valuable china and