It was scarcely oppression, but some of the female students wrote home to express their horror at finding ‘squat toilets’ in restaurants where you had to carefully place your feet on two pads either side of a porcelain base sunk into the floor, and toilet paper was often nonexistent. Yet even middle-class apartments might have only one shared WC per floor at this time. It was not just that basic foodstuffs were still in short supply, but the city looked shabby and even the grandest buildings were dirty on the outside and dark inside. Almost all the young Americans, while they did not starve, experienced a sense of severe deprivation in Paris alongside the excitement, as well as frequent reminders of the recent war. According to Henriette Nizan, a Jewish writer and teacher who had fled to the US during the war, most American students in Paris tried to be more French than the French. They were the ones who ordered picon citron to drink (orange bitters with lemonade) while the natives drank Coca-Cola. ‘It was young American girls who influenced young French girls with the fashion for laced sandals and long straight hair, which no one had worn since 1900,’ wrote Nizan.
One unknown American who took lodgings with a French family in Paris that year was the twenty-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier, in her junior year at Vassar College and extremely pretty. Finding that Vassar had no study-abroad programme, Jacqueline applied for one run by Smith College, and was accepted.* She was in a group of thirty-five students, several of whom lived in dormitories, but Jacqueline’s mother, Mrs Auchincloss, ‘being a terrible snob’, was delighted to discover that, following an introduction from a mutual friend, her daughter could stay in the home of a countess. Germaine de Renty lived in a large apartment with four bedrooms and one bathroom in the Avenue Mozart in the 16th arrondissement and, although she took two other American students at the same time, Jackie was given the largest bedroom. The de Rentys lived simply and Claude, the youngest daughter, who spoke excellent English as she had just returned from a year in the United States, became a close friend. It was, however, an absolute rule that French must be spoken. Claude was now completing her studies at the Institute of Political Studies and Jackie attended lectures at the Sorbonne. Several of the other Smith girls were staying in homes where strict rules about midnight curfews and no men applied, but in this respect Germaine de Renty was far more relaxed, perhaps because of all she had experienced in Ravensbrück. And she took Jackie everywhere, keen to show her the best of French culture. Jackie remained in Paris until early 1950, perfecting her French and allowing the culture to seep in so deeply that, for the rest of her life, her style in décor and clothes was always considered French.
At the end of the 1940s all branches of the arts were struggling to regain their wartime popularity and funds were scarce. The immediate postwar period was hard for Lily Pastré, the Noilly Prat heiress who had used her chateau to hide Jewish musicians from Paris, and she felt she had lost her sense of purpose. But in 1948, remembering the success of her Midsummer Night’s Dream extravaganza, she conceived the idea of a music festival near Marseilles, believing that opera lovers should not have to travel to Bayreuth and Salzburg where, in her view, the seats were in any case overpriced.
The first challenge was to find a suitable venue. Working with the impresario and pianist Gabriel Dussurget, she discovered the courtyard of the former Archbishop’s Palace in Aix-en-Provence, which they decided would be ideal. Lily funded everything out of her own pocket that first year, spending lavishly and working tirelessly to pull it off. Her inspiration was to engage conductor Hans Rosbaud and his South-West German Radio orchestra, Mozart specialists. ‘Three years after the end of the war! The teeth were gritted,’ remembered her friend Edmonde Charles-Roux, the journalist and resister descended, like Lily, from a distinguished Marseilles shipping family. But although this virtuoso idea was a success, one year later Lily Pastré stepped down from the Board of Trustees following disagreements with Dussurget, and from then on she had nothing more to do with the Aix Music Festival.