In 1948 Wallis bought the star item in Dior’s autumn–winter collection, a blue silk velvet gown called Lahore because of its heavy Punjabi-style pearl embroidery. And Cartier’s Jeanne Toussaint was busy making jewellery that she knew the Duchess would wear with great panache. In 1948 Wallis bought a panther brooch made of gold and black enamel created around a large emerald. More panthers would follow, including one just a year later; this time the big cat was perched atop an enormous cabochon sapphire. But these were difficult years for Chanel, Toussaint’s close friend, who did not show a new collection until 1954, when she staged a comeback of sorts. With her friend Misia Sert, Chanel was by 1949 making regular trips to Switzerland to replenish their drug supplies, journeys they had been undertaking since the 1930s for morphine, relatively easy to obtain in Switzerland.*
But better food and plentiful material conditions failed to hide a sense of foreboding, because much was still not spoken aloud in the continuing battle to decide on the legacy of the war. The overriding establishment view was that in order to preserve unity and keep communism at bay, France had to be seen as a nation of resisters, where resisters were in de Gaulle’s phrases ‘l’immense majorité’ and collaborators a small minority, ‘une poignée de misérables et d’indignes’. But the Communist Party was no monolith, as Agnès Humbert, the early resister who had spent the war in German camps, discovered when in 1949 she was awarded the Croix de guerre. Later that year she travelled to Yugoslavia, publishing her impressions and voicing her admiration for its leader, Josip Broz Tito, then estranged from the Soviet Union. As a result she was not only expelled from the women’s organization of which she had been President, Les Amies de la Paix (Friends of Peace), but also denounced in the French Communist daily L’Humanité.*
Lisette and Johann, the forbidden lovers who had both had to face up to punishment, were now trying to rebuild their lives in a postwar world. They were still young, and believed, as they wrote in their passionate love letters, that they were ‘entitled’ to find happiness after all they had been through.
After her head-shaving, Lisette had been sent briefly to Drancy but was released when she showed the authorities that she had also helped the resistance by providing some useful lists. Johann, having deserted in 1944, had been handed over to the Americans who sent him to Laon, in Picardy, where he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp for German soldiers in France, and then transferred to another camp at Baden-Baden in Germany. Lisette could not bear to remain in Paris alone, ‘full of anguish’, so she first pursued him to Laon and then, enterprisingly, succeeded in getting herself a secretarial job with the Army of Occupation in Baden-Baden. Finally, in February 1949, Johann won a bitter divorce from his wife and married Lisette, and the couple lived in Germany, trying to earn a living as hoteliers for the next thirty or so years. But his children did not want to see him nor meet their new French stepmother and, according to relatives, life was hard, a far cry far from the wartime dream Lisette had nurtured.