Avery Trufelman

Linda did not know what was up with these dolls, but she couldn't really dwell on it.

So, among the Rodana sculptures, the Romanian furniture, a large collection of indigenous art and a display of chess sets, there were the dirty dolls, piling up against the glass showcase in the hall, collecting dust.

until one day when Linda got a call from a curator at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

She asked Linda if she could come to Maryhill because she wanted to see these dolls.

And that was when Linda learned what she had on her hands.

These dolls weren't supposed to be so macabre.

Actually, they were kind of heroes in a way because these dolls had saved French fashion.

After four devastating years of Nazi occupation, Paris was liberated on August 25th, 1944.

Some of them gathered up the ration tickets that had governed their lives and tore them into confetti.

And this turned out to be a very bad idea because the war was not over.

They'd still need those ration tickets.

In the aftermath of the occupation, more than 5 million French adults and children didn't have adequate shelter or food.

Parisians, dressed in ratty, worn clothes, walked and bicycled through their dark city.

The capital of light, of art, of culture, was a shell of itself.

During the course of World War II, Paris lost its position as the epicenter of contemporary fine art.

That moved to New York City.

The literary world also re-centered around New York.

But Paris was determined not to lose its soul, or at least not to lose everything to New York.

Somehow, even though they didn't have electricity, Paris had to remain a capital of beauty and ideas.

It had to retain its title as the capital of fashion.