Americans in Paris
American Paris of the Montparnasse era had ceased to exist after the Wall Street crash of 1929, yet a certain pale
renaissance occurred after February 1948, when the franc was devalued against the dollar. France once again became
affordable for writers and anyone else with artistic pretensions. But the most conspicuous American presence in Paris
at the end of the
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decade consisted of diplomats, soldiers and Marshall Plan executives.
For those cashing cheques at Morgan's Bank in the Place Vendome at the beginning of February, it was `like
Christmas morning, strangers beaming at each other'. A hundred dollars bought over 30,000 francs. For those who
cared about clothes, a Dior dress was within their grasp.
Arthur Miller, who reached Paris in the winter of 1947, formed a very different impression. He found a city which
had been `finished by the war: The sun never seemed to rise over Paris, the winter sky like a lid of iron graying the
skin of one's hands and making faces wan. A doomed and listless silence, few cars on the streets, occasional trucks
running on wood-burning engines, old women on ancient bicycles.'
The Hotel Pont-Royal on the rue du Bac, where Miller stayed, was gloomy but cheap. The concierge wore a tail coat which
was coming to pieces and `his chin always showed little nicks from having shaved with cold water'. Once a day this
prematurely aged man rushed home across Paris to feed his rabbits, the only source of meat for his family, as for much
of the population. The 'hungry-looking' young prostitute who sat in the lobby all night watched passers-by `with a
philosopher's superior curiosity'.
Miller went off in search of Jean-Paul Sartre, having heard that he could be found in the Montana bar. Had he but asked,
the frayed concierge and the philosophical prostitute could have told him that Sartre and his friends now met in the
basement bar of the very hotel in which he was staying. Far more important to Miller's work, however, was an evening
watching Louis Jouvet in Giraudoux's Ondine.
The theatre was freezing, the audience wriggling their feet in their shoes
and blowing on their hands. Jouvet himself was so ill that he sat throughout the play in an armchair, wrapped in sweater
and muffler. Looking at the audience, Miller felt that `there really was such a thing as a defeated people'; Jouvet,
however, managed to connect with them `in a personal way I had never experienced before, speaking to each of
them individually in their beloved tongue. I was bored by the streams of talk and the inaction on stage, but I could
understand that it was the language that was saving their souls, hearing it together and being healed by it, the one
unity left to them and thus their one hope. I was moved by the tenderness of the people towards him, I who came from a
theatre of combat with audiences.'
Truman Capote also stayed in the Hotel Pont-Royal, in a tiny room on the top floor. `Despite the waterfall hangovers
and constantly cascading nausea,' he wrote, `I was under the strange impression that I was having a damn good time,
the kind of educational experience necessary to an artist.'
Simone de Beauvoir was frequently seen in the hotel, since the famille Sartre had moved to its `leathery little
basement bar' after fleeing the tourists in the Cafe de Flore. Capote sensed that he was a figure of fun in their eyes;
according to one friend, he felt `he was the victim of some intangible conspiracy of malediction'.
Beauvoir had not liked
Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms, and had little respect for `fairies'. She compared the tiny American, in
his over-large white jersey and pale-blue velvet trousers, to a `white mushroom'; and laughed with the barmen who
pointed out that his first name was that of the President of the United States, while his surname was the French
slang for condom. Capote replied in kind with his description of the Sartre clan in the Pont-Royal bar: 'Wall-eyed,
pipe-sucking, pasty-hued Sartre and his spinsterish moll, Beauvoir, were usually propped in a corner like an abandoned
pair of ventriloquist's dolls.'
Camus was the only one who was always kind to the young American. Capote, however, later claimed that one night Camus,
the great womanizer, had suddenly succumbed to his attraction and gone to bed with him - a story impossible to deny,
but unlikely.
Capote also visited Colette, who received him from her bed `d la Louis Quatorze at his morning levee'.
He described her `slanted eyes, lucent as the eyes of a Weimaraner dog, rimmed with kohl; a spare and clever face
powdered clown-pale; her lips, for all her considerable years, were a slippery, shiny, exciting show-girl red;
and her hair was red, or reddish, a rosy bush, a kinky spray'. She asked him what he expected from life. He told her
that he did not know what he expected, but he knew what he wanted, which was to be a grown-up person. `Colette's
painted eyelids lifted and lowered like the slowly beating wings of a great blue eagle. "But that," she said, "is the
one thing none of us can ever be."
Extract from “Paris After The Liberation 1944-1949”, Written by Antony Beevor. Penguin Books, United States of America: 2004.
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