Aunt Genevi

If a wise citizen of Paris wants to know what Hitler and Stalin are thinking, what will be the next fantastic episode in an improbable war, he reads what Genevieve Tabouis has to say in L'Oeuvre, then waits for the exact opposite to happen. For Tabouis is one of the most readable and unreliable reporters of secret political maneuvers, behind-the-scenes diplomacy in all Europe.

Last week Tabouis, out on a limb as usual, flatly predicted a peaceful settlement of little Finland's unwilling controversy with Soviet Russia. Next day a Soviet army crossed Finland's frontier (see p. 23) and Soviet planes dropped bombs on Helsinki. Tabouis followers were neither angry nor surprised. They had long ago learned to take her utterances with a shakerful of salt.

Back in August, Tabouis had written: "The Reich Army will join Hungary's General Staff in a common offensive against Rumania." Two weeks later, when Germany invaded Poland, Hungary was neutral. Said Tabouis, two days before Stalin signed a trade agreement with Hitler: "Foreign observers in Berlin learned last night that a basis for agreement has been reached in Moscow by France, England Russia, Poland, Rumania and Turkey," etc., etc.

Known variously to Parisians as "Aunt Genevieve," "the Pythoness," sometimes "the wastepaper basket of Europe," Tabouis in private life is the wife of an obscure radio executive, mother of two grown children. In the house of her uncle Jules Cambon, onetime French Ambassador to Berlin, she acquired a taste for the vague generalities of political conversation. After the war she took to visiting sessions of the League of Nations, writing chatty letters to her uncle from Geneva.

One day at lunch she persuaded the editor of La Petite Gironde to let her write some articles. Intimate as the bedchamber anecdotes of a gossip columnist, they soon caught on. Before long, Tabouis became foreign news editor of L'Oeuvre, anemic liberal organ of the Radical-Socialist Party. Pale, gaunt-faced Tabouis does her work at home, spends 18 hours a day in her glittering Chinese apartment, calling Embassies in London, Rome, the Balkans, studiously writing down whatever her informants tell her.

Tabouis's influence is not confined to France: her observations are syndicated abroad, are taken more seriously in England and the U. S. than they are at home. Last year a London Catholic journal, The Tablet, called her "one of the gravest of contemporary international dangers." Said The Tablet: "There is no era of history and no country of the world upon which she is not incompetent to write. . . . There can, indeed, be few other living writers who are as ignorant of anything as Mme Tabouis is of everything."

But rarely is Tabouis caught with a false prediction that she cannot balance with a true one. For she has no fear at all of contradicting herself, even in the same article, frequently prophesies happenings that are mutually exclusive. She has been spectacularly right & wrong simultaneously on everything that has occurred in Europe for a dozen years. On her own staff she wars perpetually with bearded, ancient Georges de la Fouchardiere, L'Oeuvre's political humorist. A witty contemporary once said that Fouchardiere "daily executes on page two the dangerous maniac who operates on page three."

Only once has Tabouis recanted. Last year, on the eve of a visit to Paris by Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Foreign Minister Lord Halifax, Tabouis wrote that they had decided to give Germany the French island of Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa. Next day she retracted her statement. To her denial L'Oeuvre's board of editors added a note in angry capitals: "IT IS DESIRABLE THAT FRENCH PUBLIC OPINION SHOULD NOT LET ITSELF BE TROUBLED BY RUMORS SPRINGING ENTIRELY FROM PURE FANTASY."

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