By August, the city was in the grip of a heatwave, so Smith took to following ‘an undeviatingly simple’ daily routine to cope with the temperature. Immediately after a breakfast of croissants and milk at her hotel, she walked with her typewriter to the Ile de la Cité, where she would sit on the flagstones alongside the Seine ‘for a whole day of concentrated mental labour’. And there one day a wandering photographer snapped her for the weekly news magazine Paris Match. He was Robert Doisneau, and the picture of Smith with her typewriter balanced on her knees appeared on the magazine’s centre spread, an illustration of a Parisienne at work. ‘I never met him,’ Smith says now. ‘I would have loved to, because the photograph appears in all his collections.’ But the most remarkable thing about the portrait, she insists, is that she appears to have been sitting on stone ground for much of the day. ‘I checked the picture recently to see if there was a cushion,’ she says triumphantly. ‘There wasn’t!’
Corinne Luchaire was also writing a book, her self-justificatory memoir published in 1949, which she called Ma dr?le de vie in obvious homage to her father’s newspaper, Toute la Vie. The entire book, written with the help of a journalist, was a none too subtle attempt to exculpate her beloved father, revealing how, blinded by the fairytale reflection of her own success, she had totally failed to understand the situation either during the war or five years afterwards. She was caught up in ‘a whirlwind of pleasure and easy life’, the pinnacle of her success being the opulent wedding, which preceded her ultimately disastrous marriage to Count Guy de Voisins-Lavernière.* Corinne never stopped to question the immense flattery heaped upon her and ‘became the agent of a male-dominated political system that knew how to use ingrained attitudes to perpetuate its power’. There was a time when her story, about how an ordinary Parisienne could become a countess, might have been admirable; no longer. She grew sicker and more fragile throughout 1949 and died on 22 January 1950 in a manner both pathetic and dramatic, after a dinner with friends where she could not swallow and was spitting blood. She collapsed in a taxi before she could get to the Parisian clinic which was treating her. She was twenty-eight, uncomprehending to the last, leaving a young child motherless.
There was little that Corinne’s remaining family could do to help. Her aunt, her dead father’s sister, Ghita Luchaire, married to Théodore Fraenkel, had troubles of her own. She had been in danger during the Occupation because of her Jewish name; now, even though she was Mme Fraenkel, she was scorned because of her despised maiden name. So, as the numbers of young American women visiting Paris grew and grew, in order to make ends meet Ghita Fraenkel, like many, took in American lodgers, one of the few respectable ways to eke out a living.
Reading accounts of the severe culture shock which several of these students experienced in Paris indicates clearly that the city about which Simone de Beauvoir had waxed lyrical when she had lectured in American universities in 1947 did not always measure up, especially so far as public conveniences were concerned. But de Beauvoir had in mind loftier matters, as her groundbreaking feminist work examining the history of female oppression, The Second
Sex – the standard tome on feminism for several years – was first published in 1949. De Beauvoir was encouraging women to throw themselves into lives that were not defined by gender, to challenge the myth of l’éternel féminin, which had predominated before the war, and which so many of them had demonstrably and dramatically destroyed during the war.