Tidings of the Riviera

The pinched pallor of life on France's once suntanned, vitamin-enriched playground was reported last week by a correspondent who was for 15 years a chronicler of the international set. Janet Planner, the "Genet" of The New Yorker's polished Paris letters, told in that magazine the story of starvation on the Riviera.

From letters, refugees, returning friends and from the Fighting French, Miss Planner pieced together her picture of present-day Nice and Cannes, where "raggle-taggle" French gamble in the casinos for thumping stakes behind blackout curtains; of Monte Carlo, where Nazis go to relax with "an occasional quisling let out for a run"; of Montauban, whose museum now holds the Louvre's Mona Lisa and whose brave Archbishop fights the anti-Semitism of Vichy.

"There are no gaudy tabloid features in what is tragically happening on the Riviera," she says. "It is a large, uniform panel of deterioration, in which no one is starving, everyone is hungry, and food is an obsession. The French declare they can keep going like this for the rest of the century, but they already lack emotional, mental and physical energy. Thousands of rickety, underfed children will soon be bowlegged. Twenty-five per cent of them are estimated to be on their way to tuberculosis. Three-pound babies are not uncommon. Only one baby out of five is normal weight at birth. Few, however, are born alive, and miscarriages are usual. In Auribeau, a hamlet perched on the slopes behind Cannes with 485 inhabitants, only one live baby was born in the last year. Of 30 victims of diphtheria in the same district, 16 died; whatever you catch can kill you. . . .

"Most of the cats, even the favorites, have been eaten. If you still have a pet dog, a butcher in Marseille will sell you pet food made of other pets. It looks and smells like tanbark. One stand-by for human feeding is pate soja [soybean paste], a dried-vegetable ersatz meat which has the texture of a salve. Hungry children cry when they see it coming, because they know they will eat it. ...

"According to reports, French adolescents are the group most in need of being saved. The French race is drying up without flowering or seeding. French children are now regarded, dietetically, as children through the age of eleven, and as such are entitled to milk, when there is any. At twelve they rank as adults at table, eligible for anemia. As a result, French girls fail to become nubile. Under the German Kirche, Kueche, Kinder [Church, Kitchen, Children] influence, French grade-school girls for the first time are being taught domestic science, now that there's not enough food for recipes and often no home left to be scientific about. . . ."

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