BLACK MARKET

Wairarapa Times-Age, 25 September 1943, Page 4

BLACK MARKET

PRACTICES IN FRANCE. PROCEDURE AT SOME PARIS RESTAURANTS. Maxim’s, Fouquet’s, in the Rue Royale and the Champs Elysees respectively’-, and the Tour d’Argent and La Perouse, on the left bank of the Seine, are privileged restaurants of Paris ’to whom the Germans have given priority rights to buy their supplies at the Central Market, says a writer in ‘La Marseillaise,” the French weekly published in London. The writer says that Maxim's has been newly decorated. It has had the visit of Goering on each of his visits to Paris. Its black market tariff seems fairly modest, a meal running into 1000 francs (a little over £5 at pre-war exchange), without champagne or other wine. The Tour d’Argent—where in happier days of yore customers who ordered their specially cooked duck were given a certificate testifying it was the so-many-thousandth duck —presents the diner with a bill of anything from 1500 to 2000 francs for what is described as a very ordinary meal. La Perouse and Fouquet’s are not behind the prices of the Tour d'Argent and Maxim’s. The ordinary citizen finds restaurants where meals are offered at 18 to 25 francs, meals of cucumber and salads. Other restaurants, of very ordinary aspect, display a bill of fare roughly within these prices. When the customer takes his seat, a smiling serving girl asks if he will have roast pork and other tasty dishes which do not figure on the menu, but which can be had at a price she whispers in his ear. If he declines and calls for the meal as advertised on the menu, he is told, with a thousand regrets, that the restaurant, in view of present restrictions, is only able to serve its habitual customers. Everyone rails against the black market, but there is apparently no means of stopping it, especially as the Germans are financially interested in it. Vichy, while passing decrees against the black market, does not set an example of observing the law, for Vichy officials are among the worst offenders, going long rides into the country to find some hidden-away place where they can get a good meal. The women of the towns are the great sufferers. Often they spend hours in queues before shops, only to be told when they reach the counter that' the stocks are exhausted, but they know the shopkeeper's personal friends have been served at the back door, that the local police commissioner’s inspector has carried off a small souvenir of his inspection, that the policemen who keep the queues in order also have preferential treatment, and that the offer of black market prices is a temptation shopkeepers find hard to resist. Bitter anger rises higher every day, shopkeepers are reminded that some day the war will end, and anonymous letters threaten to hang up the butcher where the meat is generally displayed.