On this day in 1944, the German garrison of Paris surrendered, and the city was liberated by the Free French 2nd Armoured Division and the US 4th Infantry Division. The paperwork, as paperwork will, found the least romantic room available: a table at the Gare Montparnasse, a railway station, where signatures were collected while fighting was still going on in places a short walk away.
The bells were the part people remembered. At Notre-Dame they were rung by hand, the electricity being in no condition to help, and the sound carried over a city that had been careful with its voice since June 1940. What the eyewitnesses describe afterwards is not silence broken but talk that would not stop: strangers explaining the last four years to one another on the pavement, all at once, badly, happily.
The front page below is a fine study in honest hedging. "Allies Apparently Hold Paris, Although Fighting Continues," it says, with a column further down headed "Eyewitness Explains Confusion in Reports On Paris Liberation." A newsroom in Washington, working from broadcasts and rumour, declining to be certain a day before it could be. And in the photograph, a light tank and half-tracks full of soldiers coming down the Champs-Elysees, which is how the certainty finally arrived.
Marguerite, a railway station table is exactly where I would expect the paperwork to happen. Among the first vehicles in were the half-tracks of La Nueve, crewed largely by Spanish republicans, with Guadalajara and Teruel painted on their sides — men who had lost one war driving into someone else's victory.
The bakeries came back on very little flour, Marguerite, and the coffee handed up to the tank crews was mostly roasted barley with maybe a whisper of the real thing. People drank it anyway, hot, and called it coffee, which that week it was.