Paris after the Liberation 1944-1949

suddenly recognized among the guests a man who was a notorious collaborator with the Gestapo. He was asked to leave, accompanied by his wife and by the icy silence of the other guests, who lined up in two long rows between which he had to pass in order to reach the door.’
    In such uncharted waters, the British ambassador and his wife relied on their ‘pilot-fish’, Gaston Palewski, for advice as to who could be invited and who could not. But Palewski’s own behaviour was not exactly disinterested. Not long after Johnny de Faucigny-Lucinge had seen the Duchesse de Brissac arrested, he had encountered Palewski, the very man whose name he had used to threaten the
fifis
with so little effect. Faucigny-Lucinge urged Palewski to help her, but Palewski surprised himwith a rather frivolous reaction: ‘Oh! All that’s not very important. She can kick her heels a bit.’ Faucigny-Lucinge, presuming that theremust be ‘some skeleton in the cupboard between them’, did not persist. Then he heard that the duchess had been released without charge.
    Some four months after her arrest, however, she invited Faucigny-Lucinge for a weekend in the country. As their property was some way from Paris and travel was still almost impossible at that time, Faucigny-Lucinge felt obliged to raise the problemof transport. ‘There is somebody,’ she replied, ‘who could easily give you a lift, and that’s Gaston Palewski.’
    Those who had spoken in favour of the Germans, rather than just consorted with them, found it almost impossible to re-enter society. The Marquis Melchior de Polignac, who had been openly in favour of a Franco-German alliance since before the war, was an obvious target for arrest. He was the president of Pommery and became known in Épernay as the ‘Führer of Champagne’. Members of the FFI hauled him out of his sickbed at the Château de Crayères and he was locked up in Fresnes prison. When his case finally came to court, Polignac was able to prove that, thanks to his contacts with the Germans, he had saved a number of people from arrest and deportation. Although freed, he was avoided afterwards by much of Parisian society, a punishment which was probably worse for him than a prison sentence.
    Foreigners mixing in grand circles in Paris were bemused by the contrasts of luxury and dilapidation. The newly arrived American diplomat Bill Patten and his wife, Susan Mary, went to a sumptuous dinner, but ‘the house smelled of the black market, of corruption, of the greatcoats of the generals of the German Wehrmacht, who, we later learned, had been honoured guests during the Occupation’. The next evening could not have been more different. ‘Oh, the wonderful elegant shabbiness of the Mouchys,’ wrote Susan Mary. This dinner consisted only of ‘a very thin watery soup’ and a main course of canned peas. ‘There was no apology about the food, no hardship stories about the war. The china was museum quality and the oldest girl, nineteen, was very pleased with her dress, which was made from some old curtains.’
    The inconveniences and discomforts of daily life seemed endless. Telephones were not the only service out of order. Candles were constantly needed, since the electricity failed at least twice a night. For many, the winter cold was a more terrible memory than the shortagesof food. Susan Mary Patten, staying with friends at a château on the Loire, was asked by their little daughter if it was true that in America people could sit in a drawing room without an overcoat on. In the Louvre, a British officer, seeing a crowd packed close to a picture, marvelled at the French appetite for culture. But when he came closer he saw that they were all trying to stand close to a grille dispensing hot air. Visitors discovered the elderly Comtesse Greffulhe, an original of Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes, huddled over a stove in her salon wearing her fur coat, a feather boa and button boots of grey glacé leather.
    In the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the window displays of leather goods were restricted to one pair of shoes in real leather, marked ‘model’ to emphasize that they were not for sale, and straw scattered around as a sort of window dressing. In cafés, there was only fake coffee or
gazeux,
a sickly carbonated drink with a chemical taste. The
pâtisseries
were empty and in the windows of teashops like Rumpelmayer’s there were cardboard cakes and dummy boxes of chocolates, again with a little sign