Janet Teissier du Cros was, like most other mothers in this period, worried about adequate food and nutrition for her small children, one of whom, lacking adequate vitamins, was now diagnosed with curvature of the spine. By the winter of 1944 life was an hourly struggle to find enough food.
‘Our fat allowance, and this covered all fats, was ten ounces a month and dwindled to two ounces that winter of 1944. Adults got no milk – we had a very small allowance of fatless cheese.’ Janet kept a note of these figures at the time because it was so little. ‘Our bread ration was six ounces a day but often on some pretext or other, reprisals or what not, it was less.’ It was impossible to subsist on these rations, eked out only by such carrots, Jerusalem artichokes, swedes (rutabaga) or an occasional cabbage as she could wrest from the market by dint of long queuing as everything involved queuing among grumpy women. What she found as distasteful as the swedes was the lying. ‘We were all of us driven to some form of dishonest practice,’ she admitted. The elderly living alone suffered most and of course those in hiding. Fake ration cards were rife; once Janet had an altercation at the fishmonger, when she was loudly accused of using a card twice, which she just as loudly denied only to find out that it was her maid who had purloined it the previous day. Such problems were very real to Parisian women, leading to ‘a dishonest way of life in full view of the children and in contradiction to all we were striving to teach them’. Those who could not quite bring themselves to use the black market might be tempted by the grey market. ‘There were real false cards and false real cards. The first were counterfeits of the real thing, the second and more expensive were genuine bread cards sold in the towns by country people who could obtain wheat illegally and make their own bread.’ And it was not only food in demand on the black market. At one fashionable lunch party the guests left their hats and coats on the banquette in the entrance hall and one also deposited two large bars of soap she had managed to buy. But another guest picked them up on her way out, behaviour unthinkable before the war at such a gathering.
In spite of the bitter cold, with no heating and so little gas or electricity that food could rarely be cooked properly, some sophisticated Parisian women, despite the shortages, took pride in being able to produce miracles with their clothes.
With hardly anything one could still dress well; we turned and remade our dresses and coats; with articulated wooden soles we had magnificent high-heel shoes … Hairstyles and hats were fashioned from tulle scaffoldings, veils, flowers, and recycled feathers. With four or five old handbags, one could have one big one made, very chic.
But although there was no silk for stockings, one new source of fabric was now occasionally available: parachute silk. Downed airmen were instructed where possible to bury their chutes but if they could not, women eagerly seized whatever was not torn or damaged, knowing it might provide enough fabric for a blouse as well as several pairs of luxurious camiknickers.
Young French feminists demonstrating at the Longchamp race course with posters demanding the right to vote.
Germaine Lubin (centre), feted as the first French-born soprano to sing Isolde at Bayreuth, was praised by Hitler himself who told her she was the finest Isolde he had ever heard. Although smiling here, the photograph contributed to her painful postwar punishment.
The circus ball, July 1939: (left) Elsie de Wolfe, Lady Mendl (centre), wearing a heavily embroidered butterfly gown by Mainbocher, the first American designer in Paris, with guests Oliver Messel and Lady Jersey; (above) Brazilian socialite Aimée de Sotomayor in one of the first dresses designed by Christian Dior.
Once general mobilization of all men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five was ordered on 1 September 1939, and war declared two days later, there were many emotional scenes at railway stations.
An elegant Parisienne, wearing soon-to-disappear seamed nylon stockings, examining the notice in a shoe shop indicating a shelter to which customers would be immediately escorted in case of danger. Most shops, worried about losing their clientele, hastily transformed cellars into similar shelters in 1939.
Jeanne Lanvin’s cylindrical bags designed to carry gas masks – one in green felt and the other in red, dotted with small stars – were an immediate success. For several months no one in Paris moved about without a gas mask and designers quickly took advantage of the opportunity.
Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel in her suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris where she lived for the duration of the war, having closed her Rue Cambon boutique.
Irène Némirovsky, novelist born in Kiev into a family of Jewish bankers, who lived most of her life in France and wrote in French but was deported to Auschwitz in 1942, where she died of typhus, leaving behind two small daughters and the unfinished manuscript of Suite Fran?aise.