Year after year, hordes of university students head to France for their junior year abroad, as they have been doing since the 1920s. Perhaps you were one of them. In 1949 those students included a 20-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier. She had visited France before, on a whirlwind European trip the previous summer with some family friends, but now she was back for a whole year on her own to study the language and the culture. She later described this year as “the high point of my life, my happiest and most carefree year.” This is quite something, coming from a woman who was once at the pinnacle of American society. Moreover, the Paris she knew was just coming out of the war years. Housing was scarce and food was rationed. It was not the Paris today’s students see. She and two other American girls lived at 78, avenue Mozart, in the 16th Arrondissement, in the home of the widowed Comtesse de Renty and her children. There was no central heating, and in winter Jackie did her studying in bed, swathed in quilts and sweaters. The one bathroom, shared by seven people, rarely had much hot water. Jackie attended classes at the Sorbonne and at the American students’ center, Reid Hall (4, rue de Chevreuse), and, like most students in Paris, hung out at cafés on the left bank. Unlike most students in Paris, however, she had been queen of the debutantes in New York the year before and had society connections. Every so often she would dress up, put on what her cousin called her “one fur coat” (!) and head to the Ritz for cocktails with visiting friends. She referred to these evenings as “swanky.”
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