From France
1. rrPas de Marchandise"
EDITORS' NoTE:
The autlwr of this letter,
wlw
for obvious
reasons prefers to remain anonyrnous, lived in Paris until the
beginning of this year.
The editors of PARTISAN
REviEW
have asked me to describe cultural
and political tendencies in Paris up to the time I left the city, two months
ago. This is a difficult task because life in Paris has steadily narrowed
down to the brute problems of how to get enough to eat and how to keep
from freezing. In a city where housewives make .their own soap and stand
in line two to four hours a day to buy food, where the windows in all but
the most expensive apartment houses are coated with icicles, where people
read the newspapers largely for their daily treatment of such matters as
how to make use of cigarette ashes-in such a city
t~ere
can be little
serious concern with arts and letters, while politics take on a-temporary
-unreality. However, I shall do my best.
Outwardly, Paris has changed less under the German occupation than
one might expect. Certain changes, it is true, are immediately evident:
the long queues in front of food stores, the absence of automobiles on
the streets, the groups of German soldiers one meets everywhere, with
their purchases dangling from the bomb-hooks on their belts. But that is
about all. The Germans have taken down the sandbags from the churches
and museums and have cleaned up and replanted .the
park:~,
which were
neglected during the war. The cafe sidewalks are still crowded with
Parisians apparently enjoying their coffee or aperitifs. The shop windows
on the Champs Elysees and the Rue de la Paix present a fine show of
merchandise. Theatres, concerts, cinemas are all open again, and night
life flourishes in Montmartre and Montparnasse in pre-war style. Except
for this last item, however, this is all appearance rather than reality.
The Louvre has emerged from its sandbags, but if you go inside, you find
that all the painting collections are closed, and that the more famous
pieces of sculpture, such as the Winged Victory and the Venus de Milo,
are now ersatz, replaced by plaster casts. It isn't hard to guess what has
become of the originals. The displays in the shop !windows are mostly
for show, not for sale. And innumerable small shop\! are closed most of
the time, with a simple card in the window: "PAS DE MARCHANDISE."
The cafe-sitters are enjoying neither coffee-the "national coffee," offi–
cially decreed, is one-third coffee and two-thirds roasted wheat or barley
grains, with a bottle of saccharine instead of sugar-nor aperitifs, which
were prohibited to keep the German soldiers out of temptation.
162
