No matter how unpleasant the world outlook, the lack of a French Government, the promise or performance of strikes, and the difficulties of parking one's car, the autumn in Paris is always worth living. This gentle season of marvellous grey. painters' lights, and Sundays spent in the gold and russet woods of Senlis or Sénart has a quality all of its own, in which the new books, plays, clothes and other autumn sensations are mingled and merged.
Every year the rentrée brings its problems- a long Government crisis, steadily rising prices, the Algerian war dragging on, the sputnik - had left Parisians and French people in general in a state of frustration, impatience or melancholy. This is not wholly the case, however. With the exception of certain penalized sections of the community - the underpaid Civil servants, the people on fixed pensions, the hundreds and thousands who are badly housed - almost everybody else has never had it so good. Like most inflationary situations, the economic crisis is a crisis of prosperity, which is the main reason why comparatively few of the public can or will recognize it as a crisis at all.
Never before in her history has France worked so hard, had
so many people employed or produced so much. But, equally, never before has she consumed so many imported raw materials, with which to keep the expansion going, while at the same time failing to requite them with the export of finished products. Now at last the restrictive measures taken in the summer, and added to since, are beginning to be felt; imported luxury articles are disappointed from the shops, and the credit squeeze should before long begin to make itself felt in internal consumption.
For the most part, however, the degree of sacrifice, of helping to pay for keeping the expansion going, for a high level of social welfare, for proving with something more than words that I' Algérie c'est la France , is distinctly limited. The most conspicuous form of it, in Parus at least, is that it, in Paris at