Simone insists she was little more than a glorified office girl who, with her notebook in hand, followed Luchaire around, organized flowers for famous actresses such as Zarah Leander who were passing through Paris, and answered the phone. More than once she took a worrisome call which announced: ‘I’m a friend of his sister’s.’ Simone understood what that meant as Luchaire’s sister had a Jewish husband, Théodore Fraenkel. Simone saw many women – ‘a whole raft of ladies’ – who called in person begging for a personal favour, usually to arrange the release of their prisoner husbands. Simone survived working for this collaborationist paper for eight months, but feared that before long everyone in the office would know about her Jewish father. Her position was therefore dangerous and may also have lost her friends, but crucially it helped her family – so poor that their phone had been cut off after her mother failed to pay the bill – to get through another harsh winter without starving. In September food-ration cards were introduced and everyone had to queue for hours to be given one. But often there was little to queue for other than mangel-wurzels, the dreaded root vegetables. Simone frequently saw her famous friend Corinne breeze into the office on her way to a party, always superbly dressed by Jacques Fath; she ‘never failed to remember a kiss for her poor friend relegated to her cubbyhole’.
Slowly, the terms of the armistice began to sink in. The French had to pay for the 300,000-strong German Army of Occupation, amounting to twenty million Reichsmarks per day, paid at the artificial exchange rate. This was fifty times the actual costs of the occupation garrison. The French government was also made responsible for preventing citizens from fleeing into exile. Germany took almost two million French soldiers as prisoners of war – one of whom was Jean Herz, son of Bernard – and sent them to work in Germany. In Paris itself it took little time for new, bold black German signage to appear, with enormous swastikas displayed on the grand boulevards as well as flying from key public buildings such as the Chambre des Députés and the Sénat. On the streets German soldiers patrolling with bulldogs replaced elegant ladies window-shopping with poodles, while the best hotels and houses were swiftly requisitioned and thousands of hotel and restaurant staff were suddenly required to serve Germans.
The Musée du Louvre, which had closed in September 1939 after transporting 3,691 paintings to pre-arranged destinations (mostly chateaux in the Loire), for fear that they might be destroyed by bombs, was now ordered to reopen to give a semblance of normality to the city. But it was only a partial reopening, as few treasures remained and many galleries were entirely empty. Nonetheless the Germans produced itineraries which occasionally led the new visitors to stare at blank walls.