Miller’s ability to look horror in the face, not to shirk the unmentionable, gave her photographs and her writing a raw power shared by few of her colleagues, male or female. It may also have contributed ultimately to her breakdown and her inability to continue with her work once she had had her own child. In the short term it landed her in trouble with the authorities for a couple of days, for going beyond her agreed zone, but then she moved into Paris, the Paris which she knew so well, the Paris of her youthful love affairs. She soon realized that, as well as a comfortable room at the H?tel Scribe, the international HQ for all journalists, there were endless stories there for her to write.
Also at the Scribe for a short time was Mary Welsh, the journalist from Chicago, accredited to Time magazine, who was now in love with Ernest Hemingway. Welsh had been commissioned to write stories of how fashion in Paris was coming back to life and what displays were in the boutique windows already, tame stuff for a war correspondent in Paris that August. But she soon moved into the Ritz with Hemingway, who she found sitting on the bare floor of his bedroom there with some resistance friends, ‘intermittently cleaning rifles and sipping champagne’. Hemingway and his small band of irregular fighters which he called the ‘Hem Division’ – as a war correspondent he knew he was forbidden to command troops – had made their way on the afternoon of 26 August, the day of de Gaulle’s triumphal walk, directly to Sylvia Beach’s bookshop Shakespeare and Company in the Rue de L’Odèon, which he had known so well from his pre-war days of living in Paris. Sylvia, who had endured six harsh months at the Vittel camp before being released in 1942, dramatically recalled: ‘I flew downstairs; we met with a crash; he picked me up and swung me around and kissed me while people on the street and in the windows cheered.’ Sylvia and her French librarian lover, Adrienne Monnier, overjoyed after the tense months when their shop had been closed, the precious books hidden from the Nazis upstairs, invited their old friend and liberator up to their apartment to drink with them. Hemingway, however, thought it more important to check for snipers from the roof before moving on with his men to liberate the wine cellars of the Ritz, as he was fond of recalling later.
Lee Miller was more interested in seeing her old friends Paul and Nusch Eluard, as well as Picasso, still in Rue des Grands Augustins. With her sharp eye she noticed bullet holes in buildings, and girls with flowers in their hair, girls offering kisses or riding bicycles or drinking wine – she saw how Parisian girls dazzled. ‘Their silhouette was very queer and fascinating to me after utility and austerity England. Full floating skirts, tiny waistlines. They were top heavy with built up, pompadour front hairdos and waving tresses; weighted to the ground with clumsy, fancy thick-soled wedge shoes. The entire gait of the Frenchwoman has changed with her footwear. Instead of the bouncing buttocks and mincing steps of “pre-war” there is a hot-foot long stride, picking up the whole foot at once.’ When she asked American soldiers what they thought of Paris they became starry-eyed and told her it was ‘the most beautiful place in the world and the people smell so wonderful’. Most were pleased and surprised that Parisiennes ‘were so beautifully dressed and amiable instead of lean and hungry and sour’.
Plenty, however, were lean and hungry and sour but, as Miller rightly observed, they were not out on the streets. Those out on the streets celebrating were the dazzling, joyful young girls ‘hilarious at their victory in Paris and proud of their battle scars’. These were the Parisians determined to celebrate ‘the world’s most gigantic party’ even if there wasn’t any food.
Yet, in the chaos of the Liberation, the Germans were keen to take a final load of looted treasures with them and, as railway workers went on strike, it was not unusual to see German civilians dragging huge bags to train stations only to find no porters. As some dealers tried frantically to escape with one last haul of paintings, it was once more the indefatigable Rose Valland at the Jeu de Paume who rescued five railway wagons of priceless paintings and other works of art. Valland, the woman who had risked her life day after day spying on the Nazi thefts, knew that whatever was left at the Jeu de Paume, some of it even classified as ‘degenerate’, including much of Paul Rosenberg’s collection, had been hastily packed by the ERR into 148 crates, taken on 1 August to the sidings to be loaded on to waiting train number 40044. Five wagons contained some 967 paintings, including works by Picasso, Dufy, Utrillo, Braque, Degas, Modigliani, Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec; another fifty trucks held miscellaneous belongings confiscated from Jews. She immediately notified Jaujard, her boss, who gave details to the resistance who, through sabotage and various ruses, prevented the fully loaded train waiting in a siding at Aubervilliers to the north of Paris from departing for Germany.