At almost the exact same time as Rebecca West attended the Nuremberg trial, Elizabeth Bowen travelled from Ireland to France to report on the Paris Peace Conference for the Cork Examiner. The conference took place amid the tired splendour of the Luxembourg Palace between 29 July and 15 October 1946, and like Nuremberg, was intended to restore some kind of lawfulness to postwar Europe. Borders between Italy, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and France were redefined; Italy, Romania, Bulgaria and Finland resumed sovereign state status; reparations were agreed and, after a late amendment, the signatories of the five treaties committed themselves to the ‘enjoyment of human rights and the fundamental freedoms’ for all people under their jurisdiction. The conference, however, lacked the historical and moral intensity of Nuremberg, and was a tense, weary event. Any sense that the world's diplomats were coming together to script the final chapter of an atrocious history was quickly tempered by the realisation that they were, in fact, in an early episode in the Cold War. Even as the delegates declared fundamental freedoms for all, Europe was in the grip of a mass population transfer.