Paris, 1944

A sharp and lurid picture of wartime Paris--a city dancing with false gaiety on a rumbling volcano--reached the U.S. last week. It came from the New York Times' former Paris fashion correspondent, Kathleen Cannell, who arrived in Manhattan on the rescue-ship Gripsholm. She alone of all the diplomats, wounded veterans and chichi expatriates aboard, was fresh from the capital city of a captive nation.

Reported Miss Cannell: Paris, 1944 is a city of little bread and many circuses. Sixty percent of its people are underfed and ill-clothed, declining into anemia. Yet Parisian theatres are crowded; in the swank salons, well-dressed matrons applaud two new young pianists--the Paderewskis of tomorrow. The Opera is sold out half an hour after the box office opens. Couturiers put on four splashy fashion shows a year.

Everywhere is the contrast between hunger and extravagance. Thousands eat nothing but dried beans, carrots or potatoes boiled in water. But those who have the money can get black market meat in every butcher shop; eggs at 25 francs apiece; snowy cakes bootlegged by confiseurs. The Flea Market is now a speakeasy for costly groceries.

"The Paris air is more highly charged with menace than at any time since the French Revolution," said Miss Cannell. Women are stripped of their furs in the street. Sometimes this is the act of patriots resentful of profiteers and collaborators. More frequently it is the sign of increasing lawlessness, a growth of gangsterism. Women "defy restrictions with monumental hats that take six meters of fabric to erect. . . . They fight to order 5,000 franc hats at the leading Parisian modistes and roll around the town in horse cabs at 500 francs a course, lest they be mobbed by indignant crowds in the subway. In poorer quarters, eyes have the wolfish glare that must have reflected the guillotine under that other terror."

Concluded Miss Cannell: "Yet it is still Paris, and there's no place quite like it in the world . . . I left it with a contraction of the heart at the thought that soon there may not be even this much left to see."

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