Foreign News: Clemenceau

“Sister Theoneste! Sister Theoneste!”

“What is it, M. Clemenceau?”

“My Sister, will you make me a promise?”

“Mais, oui.”

“Then listen. When I am dead they must not place a cross above me. They shall not! . . .”

The nun, the same who nursed Georges Eugene Benjamin Clemenceau back to life when he was shot during the peace conference, made a low reply.

“Bear witness!” cried the Tiger of France to his doctors, to his son Michael, his daughter Mme. Jacquemaire. “The Sister has promised that no cross will be placed above me when I die. You must help her keep that promise!”

A little later, perfectly composed, the tough old patient said to Dr. de Gennes as though speaking of the weather, “I am suffering atrociously in my intestines.” Pain quickened into torture. “Let me take off your outer clothing!” pleaded Sister Theoneste. But the Tiger was obstinate. For years he has gone to bed fully dressed, merely kicking off his slippers and loosening his collar. “Because how do I know at what moment I may get up and write?” The iron will had begun to melt when at last he let the Sister put him into night clothes.

Then came merciful periods of stupor, some natural, some induced by morphine. To keep the great heart beating, Sister Theoneste injected hot camphorated oil. When he coughed and choked she gave a little oxygen.

“He is no longer the same man,” said Dr. de Gennes to reporters waiting in the rain. “What lassitude! The kidneys of Monsieur le President du Conseil have not functioned for 18 hours. Nothing can save him now except a miracle.”

Through night, another day, and far into the next night, the indomitable Father of Victory lived on. With groping motions he made clear, in his lucid moments, that he wished his hands—the famous Tiger claws, cased day and night in kitten-soft grey gloves—to be held by the two men who were perhaps his closest, dearest, most faithful friends, Albert, his valet, Francois, his chauffeur.

“I want no women and I want no tears,” were almost his last words.* “Let me die before men!”

Last act: With his grey paws he drew the hands of Albert and Frangois to his lips and kissed them. It lacked five minutes of midnight then.

Two hours later, a full hour after the Tiger had found oblivion in total stupor. Death came. Correspondents quarreled and kept on quarreling over whether Mme. Jacquemaire and Sister Theoneste were present at the end. They were not present when Clemenceau of France lost consciousness.

“Please put no words into my mouth,” begged Prime Minister Andre Tardieu, onetime political lieutenant of Clemenceau, as he issued from a last homage to his chief at 3 a. m. “All that I have to say is that in Death he lies magnificent and calm.”

Pretty Mary Plummer. “It was the happiest time I have ever known, the only really happy one”—so wrote Clemenceau of three brief years he spent as a young man in New York, where he worked as a librarian, and at Stamford, Conn., where he taught young ladies French and how to ride horses, at Miss Aiken’s boarding school.

“The library was well supplied with the best works of all sorts. It was generally deserted. I requisitioned it. Secluded, far from the tumult of the streets, in a little room inaccessible to the few visitors that came, I read the best historians and philosophers. Days, weeks passed. It lasted two years. My mind acquired there what it lacked; there my intellect completed its formation. It was a delight.”

Miss Mary Plummer of Boston, pretty as a peach blossom, could not resist her fascinatingly brown-bearded French and riding master. They were married at City Hall, Manhattan, though she had wept for a religious wedding. At No. 212 West Twelfth Street (the dingy brick building still stands) she bore him the present Mme. Jacquemaire. Then he took her back to Paris—on the dread eve of 1870—where she bore him Michael and “Le Petit Pierre,” now a businessman in Lima, Peru, where he raged last week at the slowness with which bulletins trickled in about his father.

After 23 years Mary and Georges were divorced. She died in 1922 in Wisconsin.

Wrecker of Cabinets. The bitterest years fast followed the happiest. Returning to Paris in the last days of fat Napoleon Ill’s tottering empire, the Young Tiger was just in time to gnash impotent jaws as Bismarck’s Prussians conquered with “blood and iron” at Sedan, then tramped on to Paris. The pomp, the swagger, the burning shame lit a blaze of hate in Clemenceau which nothing ever quenched. Bismarck, Wilhelm II, Stresemann—they were all anathema. “Stresemann was Bismarck’s best pupil,” growled the Tiger recently. “He has gotten everything for his country, while on our side everything has been abandoned. This will surely bring the next war.”

As the Second Empire fell, young Dr. Clemenceau—for like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather he was an M.D.—seized every toehold to scramble up in the third republic. Poor patients helped to get their medico chosen Mayor of disreputable Montmartre, later a deputy to the National Assembly. In 1880 he founded La Justice, first of the string of Clemenceau news sheets which really made his fame. As leader of the extreme left radicals he became “the wrecker of cabinets”—is said to have clawed down 18 prime ministers.

Enemies dragged the name of Clemenceau into the Panama scandals of the ’90s. Though falsely accused he lost his seat in parliament, seemed ruined. But another scandal—the Dreyfus case—made him a hero. As editor of L’Aurore he wrote the famed caption “J’Accuse!” above the most potent of many articles by Emile Zola which eventually freed Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus from “Devil Island,” where an anti-Semite French government had sent him to rot. The fight to free Dreyfus took six of Clemenceau’s and Zola’s best years. Last week the grateful captain stumped around to sign M. Clemenceau’s visitors book, just before the end.

Greatest Swordsman. Until he was past 60, Le Tigre challenged his enemies incessantly to duel, swords or pistols as they pleased. In declining such a challenge M. de Casagnac, himself no mean swordsman, said: “M. Clemenceau is probably the greatest swordsman in the world. He is also lefthanded, which gives him a tremendous advantage. Then, too, he is a skilled surgeon, who knows just how and where to give the most deadly thrust.”

Dr. Clemenceau was 66 when he first became Prime Minister in 1906. He styled himself “an old debutant,” worked passionately to achieve the Entente with England.

Few U. S. citizens realize that he went out of office in 1909, that he was not Prime Minister of France during the first three years of the war. As editor of L’Homme Libre and, when that was suppressed, of L’Homme Enchaine, he preached such deathless, rampant patriotism, printed such reckless denouncements of even highest government officials when he suspected them of pacifism, that at first some thought him mad. In the end. all France saw him as the incarnate Will to Victory. In 1917 the allied reverses and the fall of the Painleve Cabinet left President Raymond Poincare an alternative which Clemenceau described thus: “It was a case of Caillaux [pacifist] or myself. Had Poincare sent for Caillaux he would have had me arrested and made peace with Germany. He sent for me. I decided to have Caillaux arrested and to go on with the War.”

Catholic v. Atheist. Ferdinand Foch and Georges Clemenceau: Devout Catholic and fiery Atheist. They had to clash. They could win the War without coming to an actual break, but not the Peace. Which was right? Foch will always get his due as Conqueror. Hear Clemenceau: “We disagreed entirely on the question of the Franco-German frontier. The Marshal wanted me to annex the Rhineland, and wrote me so. I did not want to have a new Alsace-Lorraine that would send protesting deputies to the French Chamber, as Alsatian deputies were sent to the Reichstag after 1871. So Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George and myself drew the Franco-German frontier as it was in 1870.

“I would have gone up to the sea with the Rhine under my arm. But Germans, not Frenchmen, were living on the Rhine territory. If we had begun any annexing, other powers would have followed our example. It is easy to make war. It is more difficult to keep territories than to conquer them!”

Unfair of Foch. It was the ghost of Foch which kept Clemenceau writing night and day until he died, perhaps hastened his death. Journalist Raymond Recouly published last year Le Memorial de Foch, flaying Clemenceau’s handling of the peace conference in words allegedly quoted from Foch. In almost a paroxysm of rage, Le Tigre began to write his reply, had it complete last week except for a few pages of revision. “It is unfair of Foch!” stormed Clemenceau again and again in the last few weeks. “He is no longer here to receive my reply! . . . I am finishing it for myself, not for humanity.”

Equally egoistic was the funeral which Clemenceau demanded from France last week and which she humbly gave. “He asked that there be no state funeral,” said Prime Minister Tardieu, “I need not say there will be none.” In every French garrison, on every warship, in every French colony, cannon banged out a 21-gun salute while the Father of Victory was buried in a hole dug in a briar patch at his birthplace, Mouilleron-en-Pareds, a bleak region near La Rochelle on the Bay of Biscay. He supervised the digging of the hole years ago, and every summer has had Albert and Franqois spade the earth “to keep it soft.” Georges Clemenceau’s dearest wish was that like his father, like many people in the Vendee, he should be buried perpendicularly. “I shall stand on my feet even in death,” he explained. (Less irreligious Vendeeans are buried in the perpendicular for a pious reason—Christ died thus.)

But Albert and Francois had not dug deep enough. Gravediggers who labored all night preparing the tomb struck solid rock about four feet down. Despite good intentions, the Father of Victory had to be laid horizontally. He was not embalmed. Beside him in his simple pine coffin lay the ironshod walkingstick with which he had tramped through the trenches, some faded flowers from No Man’s Land, and a handful of earth from Verdun.

Above the grave of Tiger Clemenceau will stand Greek Goddess Minerva of Wisdom. He sketched her himself, had her done into stone by “E. Sigard.” The sculptor’s signature on the cold, rough stone is the only inscription, the only epitaph.

¶ “My philosophy? It consists in taking humanity as it is.”

¶ At first sight of couples fox-trotting: “I have never seen faces so sad or behinds so gay.”

¶ Letter to President Wilson (1977): “It is possible that your mind, inclosed in the austere legal frontiers, which has been the source of so many noble actions, has failed to be impressed by the vital hold which personalities like Roosevelt have on popular imagination. … I claim for Roosevelt only what he claims for himself—the right to appear on the battlefield surrounded by his comrades.”

¶ Of Wilson (1920}: “I never knew a man who could talk so much like Jesus Christ and act so much like Lloyd George.”

¶ Of Death: “To dread such a state surely indicates a lack of balanced judg-ment, since we enter it, by no means without satisfaction, at the end of every day. When we have completed our daily task, do we not seek to recuperate in sleep? Death is no more and no less than sleep.”

*Many last words were reported. Most plausible: “Stop that! Stop that!” as the heart specialist Dr. Landry sought to jab in a last dose of morphine.