Love and the Budget

If there is any subject that is guaranteed to divert a French Deputy from a prosaic discussion of a budget, it is Love --sacred or profane. Last week France's National Assembly was debating whether to cut the $71-a-month allotted to Deputies for secretarial help. Socialist Deputy Maurice Deixonne objected that France's No. 1 Communist, Deputy Maurice Thorez, continues to draw salary and secretarial allowance "even though he has not set foot in the Assembly for years. Surely the Communist Party doesn't need the money. Mr. Thorez rides around in a car modeled on that of the King of Yemen. He lives on the Riviera in a magnificent villa surrounded by swarms of bodyguards. For my part, I suggest that two Deputies living in concubinage should receive only one allowance."

That did it. Communists set up a whoop & holler; one Red Deputy wanted to settle affairs with Deixonne in the corridor. Others challenged his facts. The truth is that the now ailing Thorez lived for years in unsanctified amour with frowsy-haired Communist Deputy Jeannette Vermeersch and fathered her three children, but he and Jeannette are understood to have been quietly married in 1946.

The Communist Deputies raised such an uproar over the gibes that the session finally had to be suspended--the first time, said one Deputy, that the subject of love ever had that much effect on a French National Assembly.

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