Lee Miller, who loved Paris so much, was now back in England, too. She gave birth in September 1947 to her first and only child, Anthony, son of Roland Penrose; she virtually gave up journalism and tried to settle into a new life. To mark the birth, Man Ray, her erstwhile lover when she first came to Paris and responsible for teaching her photography, sent her a signed, original photograph of Nusch Eluard, modelling a Suzanne Belperron bracelet, with a matching ring and brooch. It was a poignant reminder of their pre-war Paris life together when the beautiful Nusch, a muse for and lover of both Eluard and Picasso, had been a jewellery model and one of Lee’s closest friends. But Nusch, always physically frail, struggled during the war to find enough to eat and lived with constant anxiety and fear as she and Eluard, both in the communist resistance, were regularly moving homes to avoid the Gestapo. On 28 November 1946, alone in Paris while Paul was away in Switzerland, just after she and Dora Maar had been talking on the phone and making plans to meet for lunch, Nusch suddenly collapsed with a fatal cerebral haemorrhage. It was a terrible loss for many, Paul especially of course, but also for Dora, to whom it seemed that she was losing everyone she loved at the same time. For Lee, it underlined that this was the end of a chapter in her life.
One of the best advertisements for Dior’s New Look gowns that year in Paris was Susan Mary Patten, the beautiful and patrician wife of the US diplomat Bill Patten, and Duff Cooper’s lover. She had arrived in the city in 1945 and had taken a while to feel at home but was determined to understand it by travelling around, attending some of the collaboration trials and doing her duty as a hostess. Her high-level social connections coupled with her hourglass figure encouraged Christian Dior to lend or even give her dresses on occasion as he knew she made a wonderful model on whom to display his dramatic creations. As they moved from one diplomatic dinner party to another, Susan Mary was intelligent and interested enough to observe the shifting political scene where distrust was growing over increasing Soviet influence and there was controversy over how that was to be countered. In France communists polled five million votes in October 1945, and in the November 1946 national elections they took 29 per cent of the vote. Churchill, although out of power, had made an influential speech the previous year warning of the ‘Iron Curtain’ that had fallen across Europe, but in general the Americans took the view that German war reparations should not be too heavy and the emphasis should be on rebuilding Germany. But when Susan Mary referred to this one evening at a dinner, Cooper exploded as he, like the French, did not believe that the Germans should be allowed any possibility of rising anew.
In June the US Secretary of State, George C. Marshall, who had been Army Chief of Staff throughout the war, announced a European Recovery Program which would eventually channel $13 billion into Europe to stimulate economic recovery. It was a vital three-year package of aid, if communism was to be countered in Europe. France needed desperately just to improve the daily life of the population, which was suffering serious food shortages once again and an active black market. Nineteen-forty-seven saw yet another severe winter in Paris, this time exacerbated by constant disruption and violence as three million workers went on strike to protest against rising prices and stagnant wages. But there were also communist groups agitating against the Marshall Plan itself. As the disruption spread, telegraph lines were cut and railway lines sabotaged, electricity cut and mail interrupted. One incident involving a train derailment killed sixteen people. However, at the height of the bitter strikes and tension the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail), one of the country’s major unions, called off its strike, enabling dockworkers to return to work just in time to receive the first Marshall Plan shipments from America. Time magazine called this scheme of unprecedented beneficence ‘the D-day of the peace’; others, seeing a weak, vulnerable, insecure continent with little hope of recovery, described it as a lifeline to a drowning man. The veteran journalist Theodore White wrote, ‘Like a whale left gasping on the sand, Europe lay rotting in the sun.’