Hatless Heroism

A perfect mannequin's figure, the face of a pleasant elf, meticulousness, good taste, brains, and that French sauce of spirit that explains why Paris can remain, even in wartime, the world's style centre --these qualities combine to make Eve Curie, the 35-year-old daughter and biographer of Madame Marie Sklodovska Curie, a woman whose changes of dress or hairdo sometimes swing whole fashions. Last week Eve Curie wrote in Vogue about what happens to fashions in the face of tragedy:

"The first day of the war, the women in Paris, by a spontaneous and almost common accord, left their hats m their closets and sallied forth bareheaded.

"The little hats of last July, those impertinent hats of peacetime, those portents of happiness, unstable, tiny, poised comically over the nose, had suddenly become absurd. . . .

"Some idle women made an effort to assemble amazing 'war costumes' that betrayed their vague nostalgia for an officer's uniform. Raincoats closed with slide fasteners made a startling appearance in the restaurants of the moment, as well as the most tailored jackets you have ever seen, at which you glanced a second time to find the epaulets, the decorations, and the service stripes. And sometimes, on my word, you found them!

"In the same restaurants, seated at secluded tables, there were other, less martial women. Women dressed for peacetime, who opened their shining eyes as large as possible, so that the tears would not gush out. . . .

"War inflicts on men a total risk, the abandonment of all the gentle things of life. Men support, needless to say, the heaviest and most terrible part of the sacrifice. Nevertheless, I cannot keep myself from pitying the women who want to be brave, but who do not know how, and who must invent, each one for herself, a personal heroism."

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