Those were the days: on being a journalist in Paris in the '50s.

• Author: Karnow, Stanley
• Position: Excerpted from 'Paris in the Fifties'

Thousands of young Americans were flocking to Europe after World War II, and I joined the throng. Late in June 1947, fresh out of college, I went to Paris, planning to stay for the summer. I stayed for 10 years.

Pourquoi Paris? Its name alone was magic. The city, the legendary Ville Lumiere, promised something for everyone--beauty, sophistication, culture, cuisine, sex, escape, and that indefinable called ambiance. "When good Americans die they go to Paris," ran Oscar Wilde's oft-quoted quip. That was certainly not my purpose in going there, but then, what was it? Perhaps, simply, Paris.

Modern European history and literature had been my major at Harvard, and my courses on France had acquainted me with the ancien regime and the Enlightenment, the Revolution, the Napoleonic era, the Third Republic and, most recently, the valiant Resistance during the German occupation. I had grappled with the works of Moliere, Racine, Descartes, Voltaire, and les philosophes, Hugo, Flaubert, Stendhal, Balzac, Maupassant, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Zola, Gide, Proust, and postwar intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. Dabbling in art had left me with some notions about Monet, Manet, Degas, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Braque, and the Surrealists and Dadaists. I had been enchanted by such French film classics as "La Grande Illusion," "La Femme du Boulanger," and "Les Enfants du Paradis," and knew the songs of Maurice Chevalier and Charles Trenet by heart. Along with the rest of my generation, I had read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and smuggled copies of Henry Miller's salacious novels, and dreamed of retracing their footsteps through Montparnasse, Saint-Germain-des-Pres, and the Boulevard de Clichy. I was further gulfed by the real or exaggerated recollections of GIs and their doughboy fathers of compliant French women--the eternal Mademoiselle from Armentieres.

Air travel was then expensive, and most of us crossed the Atlantic by ship, usually third class. My friend and fellow Harvard Crimson editor, Anthony Lewis, the future New York Times columnist, wangled us passage for $50 each aboard a coal freighter bound for Le Havre. I stuffed some clothes and a supply of Camels into a rucksack and my old army duffel bag, and we sailed from Baltimore. We had been at sea for a week, idly reading and playing chess, when a radiogram advised the captain that a strike had paralyzed Le Havre and ordered the ship to Rotterdam. Both German and Allied bombing had leveled the city. I had served during the war in India and China, agricultural lands that were spared such destruction, and the scene as we docked stunned me. But it was only a prelude to the devastation I would witness elsewhere in Europe.

A Paris

The city, I noticed, had still not recovered from the war. Such essentials as milk, bread, butter, cheese, and eggs were rationed, and even resident...