Beaux Gestes

eFRANCE

Beaux Gestes e

"What will become of Albert and Franc,ois?" Frenchmen asked each other last week with sympathetic little shrugs, hoped the answer of Fate would not be too hard. The two old servants were Georges Clemenceau's valet and chauffeur. His last act was to draw their hands to his lips and kiss them, just before he said: "I want no women and I want no tears! Let me die before men" (TIME, Dec. 2).

Even better than the Tiger, the Chief of Police of Paris knows the value of a perfect valet. Monsieur Jean Chiappe, like New York's Grover Aloysius Whalen, is sartorially pluperfect. He appears at inquests in a cutaway, dashes to the scene of midnight murders in a white tie. It was a beau geste when Chief Chiappe gave Clemenceau Valet Albert employment last week, not as a valet but as a special inspector of police. People who remember that the "Tiger" generally slept in his clothes, hardly ever allowed them to be pressed, and once wore the same hat for twelve years, know that Valet Albert, however faithful, could never valet satisfactorily exquisite Chief Chiappe, but may make an excellent inspector of police. Chauffeur Franc,ois Brabant, who dug the grave of the Father of Victory, will soon be installed as curator of a "Clemenceau Museum." Funds are rapidly being raised. Checks are mailed to the Clemenceau estates executor. M. Nicolas Pietri, at the Chamber of Deputies. The "museum" will be either the three-room, ground floor flat at No. 8 Rue Franklin, Paris, where the Tiger worked and died, or the tiny, one-story stone house with a partly thatched roof in the Vendee, where he worked and summered. Both flat and house were rented. Both will be bought, if the owners' prices are not too dear. Of his Vendee landlady Clemenceau said, not long before he died, with typical Tigeresque cynicism: "She is a royalist countess. She did nothing with this place before I came. It was nothing to her. So I got it on a lease for my lifetime at 300 francs a year [$12]. Now she thinks when I die that perhaps the Government would like to buy it. So in that case she will put on a large price and make money out of the last home of Clemenceau." Chuckling, he added, "When I tell her I am feeling ill she is quite cheerful, and when I tell her I am in good health she is very sad. A very curious old lady."*

In Paris, soldiers, statesmen and war veterans paid tribute to the memory of France's great fighter with a final magnificent gesture. The dying Clemenceau had expressly enjoined that he be given no state funeral. Scrupulously were his wishes observed. But six days after the sod was tamped down on his simple pine coffin, some 12,000 War veterans marched slowly up the Champs Elysees, paused for an instant to pile flowers on the Unknown Soldier's grave in tribute. Leading the parade were President Doumergue. Prime Minister Andre Tardieu. Foreign Minister Briand, Marshal Petain, and one-armed General Gouraud. Just at eleven o'clock a cannon boomed, while all the crowd stood for a motionless minute. There were neither speeches nor prayers for Atheist Georges Clemenceau.

*Not unlike Clemenceau's landlady is an old woman of Williamsburg, Va., who owns and occupies a ramshackle two-room house built in George Washington's time, long used as the town clerk's office. Since John D. Rockefeller Jr. revealed his plan to spend upwards of five million dollars to restore Williamsburg to the condition it knew as the capital of the Old Dominion (TIME, June 25, 1928), Williamsburg has become a boomtown. The two-room woman has refused $45,000 for her property.

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