Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

silver to keep it out of German hands, and returned it at the Liberation.
    *
    Few of the journalists then starting to pour in knew Paris better than Lee Miller. She had been the muse, lover and apprentice of the Surrealist photographer Man Ray between 1929 and 1932. Now she had come in the splendidly original role of war photographer for
Vogue
. In her US war correspondent’s uniform, she went straight to the Place de l’Odéon. There she found the painter and theatre designer Christian Bérard and his lover, Boris Kochno. They took her to see Picasso in his studio on the rue des Grands Augustins. Picasso, for whom she had sat before the war, embraced her, declaring that she was the first Allied soldier he had seen and that he wanted to paint her again, this time in her uniform. They went to Picasso’s local bistro in the same street, Le Catalan, and Lee handed over her K rations to augment the lunch. Over the next few days she tracked down other friends from Surrealist times, including Jean Cocteau, and Paul Éluard and his wife, Nusch, who was looking skeletal.
    ‘Paris was liberated,’ Picasso later said to his friend Brassaï, the photographer, ‘but I was besieged, and I still am.’ It seemed that everyone wanted to visit him in his studio.
    Cleve Gray, a young American painter serving in the US Army, longed to meet Picasso. Summoning up his courage, he went to the door of Picasso’s studio and knocked. Jaime Sabartès, Picasso’s friend and general factotum, stuck his head out of an upstairs window and peered down. He was very short-sighted. ‘Who’s there?’ he called. ‘I’m an American painter,’ Gray shouted back, ‘and I want to meet Picasso.’
    It was late morning, but Picasso was just getting out of bed, dressed in nothing but his underwear. The room had no pictures on the walls. The scene that followed was a bohemian version of the
lever du roi
. Picasso stood by the side of the bed, holding a copy of the Communist newspaper
L’Humanité
in one hand while he held out the other for Sabartès to thread it through a shirt sleeve, then he transferred the newspaper to the other hand while Sabartès pulled on the other sleeve. Picasso was just about join the Communist Party.
    Then Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Picasso’s dealer, walked in. This was their first meeting for four years. The two men greeted each other with great warmth and effusion, though Kahnweiler was evidently irritated to find somebody else there.
    They all trooped upstairs to the studio, a large, long room with heavyold beams and a floor of well-worn hexagon tiles covered by the odd small rug. Paintings finished during the Occupation were propped against the wall, including all those which Picasso was about to exhibit in the first post-Liberation salon. The collection of frames, easels and a stepladder, with a platform and pulpit for working on large canvases, gave the impression of a lumber room. Almost as fascinating as Picasso’s sculptures was his huge cast-iron stove with bulbous pipes ascending in pillared layers, like a Jain temple.
    Picasso pointed to Gray’s army boots and said: ‘Look at them. Aren’t they extraordinary?’ Gray did not know what to do. Should he follow the Arab custom and take them off immediately to present them as a gift? Picasso might even render them immortal with a study. But if he did, how could he explain their disappearance on return to his unit? They were government property and he might face serious charges for selling them.
    Charles Collingwood, the famously good-looking reporter for CBS radio, toured Montparnasse with Pamela Churchill, who had come to set up a club for British troops on leave. Collingwood, however, was feeling rather bashful, and certainly hoped not to be recognized. To scoop his rivals, he had made a pre-recorded report announcing the liberation of Paris, but this had been broadcast by mistake forty-eight hours before Leclerc’s troops reached the city. Parisians had listened in anger and disbelief to the reports of worldwide celebration while fighting continued all around them.
    Almost everyone in London with a good excuse made sure of a trip to Paris as soon as possible after the Liberation. Like many from the OSS office in London, Evangeline Bruce, a future ambassadress but at that time responsible for creating personal histories for the false papers of secret agents, hiked a pillion ride on the back of an OSS motorbicycle for a tour of central Paris.
    One of