HAIL BRITTANIA - A GOOD TIME WAS HAD BY ALL

Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh

GRAPHIC PHOTO UNION

PIX

For the first time the world listened to a royal princess in Westminster Abbey say, "I do," heard the stumble of a five-year-old royal page.  A party for Londoners, The Wedding became a pageant to refresh the inner eye, to expand the historical imagination.  At its centre were two young people, surrounded by the full resources of church  and royal state - gold plate on the high altar; trumpeters, glass coaches, tiaras, Household Cavalry, medieval standards; surrounded by the full resources of press, radio, television and newsreels; reporting even the minutiae of Cockney cracks; of the police, resting during the ceremony, at St. James's Park, drinking hot tea, their helmets beside them.

THE ROYAL WEDDING

Vogue January 1948

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MARCEL PROUST

Paris: Champs-Elysees 1948

Swann's Way:  "The chairs, deserted by the imposing but uninspiring company of governesses, stood empty...across the frontier guarded at regular intervals by little bastions of barley-sugar women...motionless, on the lawn nurtured by the invisible sun which here and there, kindled to a flame the point of a blade of grass."

Proust's France

The great French novelist - and the geography of his world

Vogue January 1948

Photography: Erwin Blumenfeld

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