FRANCE: Food, Fun, Fashions

• Share

> While harried Berlin shopkeepers were weighing out butter, sugar and such treasures on apothecary scales last week, Paris, after the early trade dislocations of mobilization, was almost back on its pre-war standard of gastronomic abundance. Great slabs of butter, vast arrays 'of fowls and meats, luxuriant vegetables and enormous cheeses, plus mounds of grapes and apples decked the counters of Paris food shops and the snail season opened last week with a great smacking of appreciative French lips.

The Government, noting a relative oversupply of pork, mutton .and horse meat, strove to increase their consumption by ordering no beef sold on Tuesdays. Les Halles, the famed central markets to which bored night clubbers used to go at dawn for a bowl of onion soup, last week were open only during the day, and tout Paris chuckled at the story that two brown bears, slaughtered, dressed and on sale at Les Halles, were named "Hitler" and "Stalin."

>The State Opera opened with Thaïs, Paris theatres were again permitted to play until 11 p. m., and in Montparnasse the famed Select reopened, joining the Café de la Rotonde, La Coupole and Dôme, all of which are still half boarded up in vague protection against air raids. Congenital rebels, Paris artists and littérateurs flocked to such nightspots as Café de Flore and Café des Deux Magots near Saint Germain des Prés, complaining loudly that the Government is protecting with sandbags only the most artistically orthodox Paris statues and monuments such as the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. The enormous Arc de Triomphe was not yet fully covered with sandbags last week, but the Eiffel Tower was dirty grey with 90,000 pounds of fresh war paint camouflage. > On the Paris fashion front, Molyneux was the first big-name couturier to stage an opening since World War II, showed a collection of 40 models instead of the usual 200. Swank customers like the Hon. Mrs. Reginald ("Daisy") Fellowes tried to put patriotism on a par with fashion by vigorously knitting socks for soldiers as the lissome models paraded. With few big foreign buyers or wealthy customers in sight, the Molyneux salesclerks, hitherto notoriously snooty, for the first time were relatively cordial to anyone who looked as if she might be able to pay Molyneux prices.

> On the labor front, about 1,000,000 skilled French workers were beginning to feel the War decree forbidding a man to quit his job in a Government-requisitioned factory, even if he does not like to work 72 hours a week with half-pay for overtime. This prevents private employers from tempting skilled workers away by offers of higher wages, and punishment is swift. Le Petit Parisien reported the case of proletarian Louis Combe, 52, a decorated war veteran rated 75% disabled, employed in making vital tools for French aircraft factories. On Sept. 18 he quit his job, was promptly arrested, tried and last week sentenced to two months in jail, plus a fine of 100 gold francs.