Et Tu, Benito

"My mouth brushes against his and I say: 'And you, Benito-do you know I love you?' "

With such sultry passages did the onetime French gossip columnist, Magda Fontanges, reveal the story of her passion for Italy's aging (58) Mussolini. Last week, two years later, she would scarcely have recognized her onetime lover.* In his private study at the Palazzo Venezia, Mussolini no longer entertains visitors. In deep gloom he sits alone, reading Dante and Virgil, while his people faint on the streets from hunger.

For the first time since Italy declared war on the U.S. came a firsthand account last week of how recent months have affected Mussolini and the humble paesanos he exhorted to "live like lions." It came via Cairo. It tallied in most respects with a series of "Inside Italy" articles by Michael Chinigo, longtime I.N.S. correspondent in Rome, and with information smuggled out by secret societies. All accounts told of hunger in Italy, of disillusionment, of despair.

Even the Pigeons. So hungry was Venice that the thousands of pigeons in famed St. Mark's Square were almost gone. Roman first-aid centers "cured" women and children who fainted in the streets by giving them bowls of hot soup. Donkeys were slaughtered and sold as "milk-fed veal." Prize buffaloes from the Pontine Marshes turned up as "high-grade beef." Bread was scarce, fats almost nonexistent. Vegetables were being exported to Germany to pay for coal. But coal was so scarce that convalescent soldiers shivered miserably in Turin's Royal Hospital of Charity.

As Italy's food grew scarce, down went Italian morale. Servants whose sons were frozen to death in the Greek campaign still worked in swank resorts, saw profiteering contractors avoid Government taxes by giving weekend trinkets to pinchable blondes. Old families were being ruined by gambling debts. Married couples rowed over trifles. The black market's tentacles reached into the top of the Fascist hierarchy, despite fulminations against racketeers and "slackers" by Publisher Roberto Farinacci. Thousands of Romans, terrified by accounts of R.A.F. bombings in Naples, took their bambini into Vatican City, where they crowded together ten to 15 in a room.

The quip of the moment was: "If England wins, we are losers; if Germany wins, we are lost." The underground Matteotti society circulated an antiFascist, anti-German newspaper. Students toyed with Rivoluzionario groups; older antiFascists were increasingly active in the Free Italy secret organization directed in the U.S. by cultured, white-bearded Count Sforza.

The Questura and Mussolini's Informatori Privati del Duce ruthlessly tracked down secret agents and saboteurs. But they were handicapped by a wartime shortage of castor oil and by the people's sullen resentment. Trains, particularly those carrying German troops, were wrecked more often than authorities admitted. The Germans were everywhere, openly bragging that Italy was under their full control. But German officers and their women were stoned in Sicily.

No Wonder. "Rome will make the peace," Mussolini had said. But 1) the failure of England to fall promptly after France collapsed, and 2) the entrance of the U.S. into the war were factors that no amount of chest thumping could counteract. From a symbol of greatness Mussolini by last week had become a laughingstock to millions of Italians. His daughter, Edda Ciano, was aware of the shame, prayed for an hour each day in a Roman cathedral. Her husband, Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, appeared everywhere flanked by secret-service men. He was as bitter as the people. "No wonder we blunder," he said. "Mussolini is lovesick-so lovesick he has no time for affairs of state."*

Not all Italians believed this story, but later there were eyewitnesses when Mussolini reviewed troops bound for Russia. He had watched them from the steps of the pink marble villa he built for Claretta Petacci. Ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-trained, the troops stumbled when they tried to goose-step. "It doesn't much matter," said Mussolini. But not long after, periods of depression engulfed him. By last week he was surly, as likely to fly into tantrums as he was when Angelica Balabanoff found him sleeping under bridges in Switzerland; when Rachele Guidi shuddered as he spat at priests. A mockery of the man he might have been, Mussolini could well turn to reading the ancients. In the quiet of his study he might still forget the gnawing present in reading Virgil's silver lines:

"While rivers run into the sea, while on the mountains shadows move over the slopes, while heaven feeds the stars, ever shall thy honor, thy name and thy praises endure."

*Among other women in his life: Revolutionist Angelica Balabanoff; Barmaid Rachele Guidi, his common-law wife (later legal) for ten years; the brilliant exiled Jewess, Margherita Sarfatti; the sisters Maria and Francesca Ferroni; and slim, brown-eyed Claretta Petacci, daughter of a former Vatican surgeon.

*Last week's chief affair of state was the establishment of diplomatic relations with Vichyfrance. By the country from whom Italy once expected to receive Nice, Corsica and Tunis, she was given only the frontier town of Menton, where the zone of occupation ends at a row of pavilion lavatories.

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