Paris: 1946.

This article focuses on the experience of Paula Fox, the writer, in Paris in the year 1946. A year and a few months after the end of the war and the German occupation, Paris was muted and looked bruised and forlorn. Everywhere the author went, she sensed the tracks of the wolf that had tried to devour the city. When the author visited Paris decades latter after 1946, corridors of museum of the Louvre, it was flowed with foreign visitors. But in 1946, the author was nearly alone in the museum except for a drunk, elderly custodian who was suspicious of her as though she might try to steal the Mona Lisa painting, which was then kept in the ground floor. Every few days, the author was supposed to mail off a story to the London wire service. Its budget was too low to permit the use of telephones. What expense account she was permitted to list was only for emergencies. In any event, her stories tended toward the picturesque rather than the newsworthy. The author further revealed that cigarettes were quite as valuable as money in that year. One could smoke a few of the cigarettes purchased and sell the rest of them on a flourishing black market.