BOOKS: Madame Tata

THEY CALLED ME CASSANDRA—Geneviève Tabouis—Scribner ($3).

Other books have described the death of France. This book describes how France lay dying for 20 years. It is an alienist’s intimate case history of the progressive political schizophrenia between Right and Left—a disorder which infected all Frenchmen and all French classes, a disorder so incurable that the Nazi invasion seems almost like an inevitable mercy killing.

Against this doom Geneviève Tabouis, ex-political pythoness of Paris’ Leftist L’Oeuvre, for seven years waged a one-woman struggle, of which these memoirs are a record. To her hopeless struggle she brought a union sacrée of journalistic hysteria and a sense of history that made her acutely aware of all that was most ominous to France in the turmoil of her times. She crammed her daily column on international politics with facts. Sometimes they were staggering and momentarily effective. Sometimes they were merely melodramatic.

Tabouis’ wealth of information and insight worked as much against as for her. She became less a guide than a sensation. They called her Cassandra, forgetting that it was not Cassandra but the Trojans who would not listen to her who made the big mistake. For France did not die merely of the wounds inflicted by murderers and traitors. France died first of the deafness, blindness, dumbness and frivolity which are the proud hallmarks of the skeptical civilized mind.

Predestined. Geneviève was predestined for her job. She was born into a diplomatic family when “a little man named Loubet” was President of France’s shaky third try at a Republic. Her uncle Jules Cambon (“the dominating influence in my life”) was France’s Ambassador to Washington, Madrid, Berlin. Her uncle, Paul Cambon, was France’s famed Ambassador to London who signed the Entente Cordiale. She grew up amid discussions about anti-Semitism, anti-clericalism, anti-militarism, anti-Republicanism. She recalls, “as if it were yesterday,” her parents saying: “Things have never been as bad. . . . This state of affairs cannot go on.”

Now Author Tabouis realizes that those bad times were gay, uninhibited days when there was still an element of pour le sport in politics. “One old gentleman [Baron Christiany] made it a point at all social affairs which the President [Loubet] attended to throw rotten eggs at him” or bash in the Presidential topper with a cane. It was not long before Mme. Tabouis would see Premier Léon Blum’s head bashed in by young Royalists.

Ambassador Jules Cambon took youthful Niece Tabouis to France’s embassy in Madrid to see the marriage of Alfonso XIII. There she had a foretaste of the history of the 20th Century. She saw a bomb explode in the wedding procession, spatter blood on the Queen’s wedding dress, smash the crown on the royal coach.

Back in Paris, she specialized in Egyptology, learned ancient Egyptian, and, “irritated at the thought that many . . . treasures in my field were withheld from the masses,” presently wrote popularized lives of Tutankhamen, Nebuchadnezzar, Solomon. Then Ambassador Jules Cambon took Niece Tabouis to Berlin, where she “was struck by the complete absence of good taste.”

Author Tabouis preferred the “taste” in Paris, where she was thrilled by a “wonderful party” given by famed Couturier Paul Poiret. “At the door, we were met by half-naked Negroes, draped in beautiful Persian silks and holding torches and yatagans. . . . Pink ibises were strutting about in the light of the moon, and in trees with luminous fruit were monkeys and parrots attached to the branches by little chains. At last, at the end of the garden, we found Paul Poiret, an ivory whip in his hand, enthroned in the “midst of his beautiful harem. . . . There were men with huge snakes coiled about their necks . . . and fantastic-looking fortunetellers . . . one who had diamonds incrusted in her teeth. . . . As a finale, there was a peal of thunder, and as the ‘storm’ broke, the guests were showered with a rain of stars and thousands of brilliant insects which buzzed about, while the monkeys and parrots chattered and shrieked in terror.”

The Long Armistice. During “the Long Armistice” between World Wars I & II, Author Tabouis broke the taboo that kept French women out of journalism, became League of Nations correspondent for two powerful provincial papers. She arrived for the fifth annual session, together with President Herriot, Gustav Stresemann, Ramsay MacDonald. Said one diplomat: “It is just like Deauville during the summer season.”

Nevertheless, “everyone seemed to feel an almost religious faith in the creation of a system which would assure universal peace for long years to come.”

Later Reporter Tabouis covered the making of the Locarno Pact, was as jubilant as Foreign Minister Briand for France’s future. “Make way, guns, mitrailleuses, and cannons,” cried Briand, “for understanding, arbitration and peace!” Realistic old Uncle Jules Cambon brought Niece Tabouis down to earth. “Can’t you see,” he said, “that in spite of all those fools at Geneva who are congratulating themselves on Locarno, nothing has been basically altered? Geneva cannot change human nature overnight!”

“Gradually” Reporter Tabouis “grew accustomed to the fact that there were really two worlds: the dream world of Geneva . . . and the world of reality—that of the Governments and Parliaments which were daily growing more and more nationalistic, one might even say xenophobic.”

But five years later (it was 1929) Reporter Tabouis still received “a strong impression of warmth and enthusiasm” at the League’s tenth session. The Young Plan had been substituted for the Dawes Plan. The unrealists sighed with relief. Said Briand: “There will be no more victors now, and no more defeated.’ To symbolize the new international harmony there was an international radio concert. “The piano,” said the woman announcer, “is in Paris, the first violin is in Vienna, the oboe is in London. . . . The conductor of the orchestra is in Berlin.” “I hope,” said Czech Prime Minister Benes, “that last isn’t symbolic.”

Novel Idea. One day Author Tabouis called on the editor of L’Oeuvre. “I have an idea,” she told him, “which will make L’Oeuvre a fortune.” Her novel idea: to tell the truth. L’Oeuvre’s editor “was visibly bowled over. . . .” This was an I innovation in French journalism almost as revolutionary as the invention of the printing press. But he agreed. In ten years the circulation of L’Oeuvre jumped from 80,000 to 500,000. Soon Reporter Tabouis was L’Oeuvre’s foreign editor, and one of the most influential in Europe.

For L’Oeuvre, Author Tabouis spent hours in the Chamber of Deputies. Uncle Cambon got her a card for the President’s box. “All the lovely friends of the Ministers coaxed to be given cards to it.” Several of the statesmen had a signal system to let their lady friends know when it was time to go. Minister Loucheur passed his hand over his bald head three times. Minister Daladier blew his nose furiously five or six times. Deputy Ybarnégaray, later Minister for Youth & Family in the Vichy Government, boldly waved a sheet of paper. “Oh, those gentlemen,” said Head Usher Bouchonnet. who had the worldliness of a hotel clerk. “Madame Tabouis. if you only knew!”

For seven years Geneviève Tabouis was both reporter and actor in France’s disintegration. Her informal luncheons were famous. “There was scarcely a foreign minister visiting Paris who did not make a note in his memorandum book—Wednesday (or Saturday)—lunch at Madame Tabouis’ house.’ ” Actors, poets, writers also came. Once the conversation was about Royalist Writer Léon Daudet’s unforgettable nicknames for people he did not like. He called New Dealish Léon Blum “the Circumcized Hermaphrodite.” A bewhiskered Rightist deputy was “our most Distinguished Burper.” Foreign Minister Boncour was “the Don Juan of the Washrooms.” Author Tabouis herself became “Madame Tata, the Clairvoyant.”

Editor Tabouis began her tremendous exposés. She exposed Laval’s secret Ethiopian deal with Mussolini. She exposed the terms of the Hoare-Laval pact. She foretold (from information supplied by agents among the Nazis) the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Nazi seizure of Austria and Czecho-Slovakia. In time she seemed to be able to see through dispatch boxes, the impenetrable files of chancelleries, the even more impenetrable minds of Europe’s statesmen.

When Hitler shouted, “As for Madame Tabouis, that wisest of women, she knows what I am about to do even before I know it myself,” 50,000,000 Frenchmen laughed. For Author Tabouis, with possibly the best sources of any European journalist, often did not show good judgment in sifting the true from the sensational. She promulgated not only scoops but fables. As her consciousness grew that France was doomed, so did her hysteria.

She was in the thick of the Popular Front and Spanish Loyalist affairs. The failure of both, followed by Munich, all but shattered her. Then the Germans invaded Poland. Madame Tabouis watched her son go off to war.

One day, toward the end, she was working in her apartment when she heard the Marseillaise in the street below. She went to the balcony and saw the reservists from her arrondissement marching to the Gare de l’Est. They were followed by their wives, many with babies in their arms. As they marched below, they had reached the second stanza of the anthem. “Carried away by their spirit,” and weeping, Author Tabouis sang with them:

Liberté, liberté chérie,

Arme nos bras vengeurs!

A few months later the Nazis were in Paris. Author Tabouis wandered through the carefree crowds at a carnival at Bordeaux, where the Government had fled as Paris fell. She had not been able to arouse them. She had not been able to save France. She saved herself by fleeing first to England, then to the U.S. Sometimes, she says, she is tempted to say: “Nothing gives one such a good idea of the infinite as human folly.” But, she says, she prefers: “Nothing gives one such a good idea of the infinite as the hope that springs from human hearts.”