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Sweethearts. Everybody's marraine in this war as in the last is venerable, foghorn-voiced Mistinguett, 64, triumphant sexy grandma of the Folies Bergère and Casino de Paris. Her famed extremities are still as shapely as they were generations ago (see cut, p. 25). Nobody looks at her now-withered face, and since "Mees" no longer has the strength to do her Apache dances under her own power she is swung and flung about the stage by two virile youths. "Mees" last week came tottering from Bordeaux where she had been helping the Duchess of Windsor raise money for Finnish ambulances. "I may go to Holland and Belgium on tour," she croaked, "and I may go to America—there I think I might help!"
One class of extraverts as busy as ever in World War II are female French journalistic trained seals. Typical Titaÿna (Elisabeth Sauvy ), self-styled "Sweetheart of Danger" and a Floyd Gibbons in skirts, boasts that she has "covered eight wars" in hottest danger spots, with stopoffs at spots like Tahiti (see cut, p. 25). Last week Danger's Sweetheart was more safely employed reading German newspapers and preparing radio scripts refuting them to be broadcast by Paris Mondial.
Mistresses & Spinsters. Why in every part of the world is the French woman generally rated high, whatever at times be the world's rating of French men? She comes elegant and plain, extravagant and thrifty, faithless and devoted, wanton and maternal—yet so do women in plenty of other lands. A good reason for her rating is that the French woman is unique in her talent for creating, either as love-object or as mistress of the home, enduring human relations of exceptional harmony and interest. In the main she contrives to satisfy—her lover, her husband, her children, her parents, herself.
This is often made possible in France because there it is traditional to regard marriage and sexual love as either fusable or separate things. This does not mean that every French husband or bachelor has a mistress. What it does mean is that the French woman does not have to be enigmatic, isolated or incomprehensible. Like her husband she is gregarious, and hence wants a family more than she wants the vote. Like him, she is economical, often in the less advantaged classes to the point of unsanitation. A beaten rug loses part of its life, and no scraps of food of the slightest usefulness are to be thrown away.
The French girl of the middle classes and up is on no Nordic romantic pedestal but serene in her father's provision of a suitable marriage portion practically guaranteed to attract an acceptable fiance. Or if there is no money for a dot then she rationally faces the alternatives of spinsterhood in its more or less appetizing forms. These in France can be either. The French spinster escapes certain laws which her smugly married sisters take as a matter of course, laws which definitely make the French husband master in his home. For example, a wife cannot go on the stage, open a bank account or obtain a French passport without her husband's explicit consent.