By August 1949, recognizing how enraptured she had become by French cuisine, her husband bought for her thirty-seventh birthday the 1,000-page Larousse Gastronomique. Two months later she enrolled at the prestigious Ecole le Cordon Bleu in Paris for a year-long course, designed for potential restaurateurs, where most of her fellow trainee chefs were former GIs funded to study cooking by the United States government. Julia Child thrived and, for the remainder of her time in Paris, studied the secrets of good French food until she was ready, with two friends, to set up her own cooking school in France. Later, in 1961, they completed their groundbreaking cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which became a bestseller and even today is often considered a must-have for newly-wed American girls. The book, along with the later hugely popular television show, demystified fancy French cuisine for generations of Americans and probably contributed as much as any diplomat to fostering good relations between France and America and to helping Americans to understand French culture.
But it was not only Americans flocking to Paris. In May 1948 the newly-wed Princess Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip paid a three-day official visit, which generated enormous crowds cheering them along the Champs-Elysées. Elizabeth was twenty-two and pregnant with the future Prince Charles. It was the first time in her life that she had left British soil. Some Parisiennes, unsure whether to believe rumours that all English women always wore heavy tweeds and carried shooting sticks, wanted to inspect her clothes. They were not disappointed. Her wardrobe had been chosen with enormous care and her jewellery too was admired because the previous year Philip had bought his bride a magnificent diamond bracelet from Boucheron in Paris, which she chose to wear outside her glove on her waving hand. Boucheron had been the favourite of Edward, Prince of Wales, when he was buying for his mistress Freda Dudley Ward in the early 1930s. But Wallis, wanting nothing that was reminiscent of Freda, instructed him to buy her jewellery elsewhere, so Cartier and Van Cleef were patronized. Now Boucheron were back in royal favour once again. Princess Elizabeth laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe and then, opening an exhibition devoted to displaying the cultural links between France and Britain over the centuries, delivered her speech impressively in fluent French. One evening she listened to Edith Piaf performing, another evening the Comédie-Fran?aise actress Béatrice Bretty was presented to her at a British Embassy reception. Bretty, now the darling of the company, reminded the Princess of a pre-war meeting in London and the Princess was polite enough to respond that she remembered it well. The only tension during the visit arose from Elizabeth’s express wish to attend a performance of Jean-Paul Sartre’s current play, Les Mains sales, but Embassy officials overrode her wishes, deeming so overtly political a play to be unsuitable.
‘Who can resist the legendary lure of Paris – Paris! – with the romantic appeal of its boulevards and buildings, its cafés and squares and bridges over the Seine …’ exclaimed the writer Emma Smith, who decided to spend the summer of 1948 living on the Left Bank of Paris in a cheap hotel on a corner of the Rue Saint-Sulpice writing her second novel. ‘I was totally in love with Paris and France and wanted to go back and impress Jean-Pierre [Geoffroy-Dechaume] with my success,’ she explained in 2014, by then in her nineties and very definitely a successful writer. However, Jean-Pierre had fled the city that summer and instead it was Denis who came to take her to the theatre where they listened to a tiny little woman standing in the centre of a bare stage, ‘a chanteuse who stuns her packed audience with the extraordinary, disproportionately loud harsh volume of her voice … singing defiantly, triumphantly’. Denis the resistance hero clearly did not question attending a performance of Edith Piaf even though she had sung to German audiences. Smith would occasionally drink that summer at the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, where she remembers glamorous girls with short cropped hair wearing full-length New Look dresses that contrasted with the little shrines appearing in walls with pots of flowers to mark the spot where a brave resister had been shot. ‘The flowers were always fresh but nobody would talk about the war. This was a new world and the new world had a great sense of excitement about it, a marvellous feeling of now we are going to do new things.’