(3 of 6)
> "We produce a billion francs worth ($22,500,000) of silk exports alone every year, four hundred millions in perfumes, four hundred and fifty millions in jewelry, and six hundred millions in exports of dresses and hats. Luxury trades are not luxuries but necessities in French commercial life. To eliminate our so-called luxury trades would be not only a temporary loss for France but a loss forever and for everyone [probably to the U. S.]."
An able displayer of luxury goods, in Paris, as she was planning her U. S. tour recently, Eve scandalized Designer Schiaparelli by assembling no special wardrobe. "It would be ridiculous for you to appear in pre-War costumes!" she was told. So publicity-wise Schiaparelli created for her, among other things, a black oilskin coat lined with fluffy lamb's wool and equipped with huge pockets—just the thing for a Paris air raid or Kalamazoo.
Names. "France is not a country where personal effort is advertised in bright colors or shouted from the housetops," Spokeswoman Curie pointed out last week. "Just as one does not mention the name of an individual soldier, an individual bombing pilot in wartime, so in women's work the individual function is not to be publicized: there is publicity for the whole." Nevertheless, the unanimity with which the whole of French womanhood has joined up in War II is not best demonstrated by the anonymous millions of sweaters in industry and agriculture. It is best shown by the vast and varied array of non-sweating Big Names—including Curie—that, sharing or shunning the spotlight, are engaged in social war service.
Last week Mme Albert Lebrun, wife of the President of the Republic, refused—answering her own telephone, as she keeps no secretary—to give the press any details of her multifarious war work. But it includes nominal presidency of nearly every big French war charity, plus much personal effort in others such as Les Déjeuners des Lettres et de la Musique (TIME, Dec. 11), a group serving cheap meals to artistic folk made jobless by the war.
Mme Ynès de Bourgoing Lyautey, 70. indomitable widow of the great French empire-building Marshal, completed with no publicity an arduous tour around North Africa in the interest of war charities and colonial morale. Back in Paris she rested only a few hours, pegged off to more war work in Bordeaux.
In Lyon, centre of the French silk trade, Mme Edouard Herriot, obscure, lean wife of the enormous and much publicized of Deputies Speaker Edouard Herriot, Mayor of Lyon, meanwhile continued quiet supervision of her 15 ouvroirs for 2,055 war-impoverished seamstresses. Most of these women have been so desperate that they even pawned their sewing machines. These Mme Herriot got out of hock with charitable funds, kept the women from drifting into Lyon sweat shops, set them to making soldiers' uni forms and clothes for evacués. They earn what is considered good pay in Lyon, about 50 francs ($1.13) per day.