FRENCH THRIFT

Taranaki Daily News, 23 December 1931, Page 3

FRENCH THRIFT

NEW HOARDING VOGUE.

PEASANT’S "WOOLLEN STOCKING.”

(Auckland Star Correspondent). > Paris, Nov. 10. Thrifty France intends to be more thrifty than ever now and the tradition of the woollen stocking is being officially floodlighted with the approval of the National Savings Bank. Representatives of that body have just given their blessing to a propaganda film, the first of its kind in France, called "The Angel of the Hearth.” It tells the story of a working mother who kept her family while her husband was unemployed. The woman is killed in a road accident and the children believe themselves destitute. But it is discovered that the heroine had, by putting aside a sou at a time, built up quite a substantial balance in the Savings Bank, and so the family is tided, over its immediate difficulties.

The film serves as a gentle reminder that the stocking, or any other domestic hiding place, is at a great disadvantage compared with the security of the State Bank. Of this the authorities know well that the French peasant still has his grave doubts. There is a new vogue among working women for hoarding fifty-centime pieces. These yellow coins are small enough to pass the neck of a wine bottle and when the novel money box is full the owner knows she has saved fifteen hundred francs. The new fashion is draining the newspaper kiosks, Metro booking offices and small shops of change. Indeed the very dearth of these tokens recently enabled the British Vice-consul at Toulon to recover a sum of money stolen from his apartments. Two hundred of the coins (worth little more than two cents each) had disappeared from his drawer with some French bank notes. A local restauranteur could scarcely believe his eyes when a soldier paid his bill of 20 francs with forty 50-centime pieces and at once communicated with the police. Subsequently the soldier admitted th© theft. No doubt there will be more small change about when some of the wins bottles have poured their valuable vintage into the banks, as in time many of them are bound to do, and the coins have been re-issued. At the other end of the scale is the

gold famine and the newest body of sufferers are the Paris dentists. Most of the gold m Europe is in Paris, but that doesn’t help the dentists since the. chief, and practically the only, dealers in the precious metal have lost heavily on the bankin o- side of the business and therefore closed their doors. They are the Comptoir Lyon-Allemand, whose daily circular guided every jeweller in Paris in making a price for the buying and selling of gold and silver by weight. The dental profession is looking forward anxiously to the firm’s reopening.