Tiger, Tiger!

Three events focused the attention of thoughtful Americans last week upon the aged "Tiger" of France, M. Georges Eugene Benjamin Adrien Clemenceau, now in his 84th year.

The first was the death, early in the week, of Senator Felix Jules Meline, 87, dean of French Parliamentarians, Premier during the period of the famed Dreyfus scandal, known as "The McKinley of France" on account of his indefatigable championship of the protective tariff. The passing of M. Meline, it was observed, leaves M. Clemenceau as practically the sole survivor of the group of great French statesmen who were in at the death of the Second Empire and waited as youthful accoucheurs upon the birth of the Third Republic.

Secondly, the French press has continued ever more loudly to clamor for a Dictator, to bring order out of the present politico-fiscal chaos in France. More and more often the name of Clemenceau has been linked by editorial writers with the "one strong man" whom they demanded.

As a third development, more than passing interest attached to the arrival at Manhattan of the famed U. S. architect, Whitney Warren, who announced that he had recently spent some hours at a luncheon, tete a tete with his friend Clemenceau. Mr. Warren declared roundly that he had never seen M. Clemenceau in better health and spirits or more fully in touch with the current situation in France. The famed whiskers may droop like the tusks of an old walrus, but between them the decisive jaw continues to snap with the fierce pugnacity of a bulldog.

Architect Warren scoffed at the idea of Clemenceau as an enfeebled old man: "The newspapers are always trying to write obituaries of really great men before their deaths. Who has not heard rumors that Mussolini is a pale spectre of himself, burnt out by overwork? I visited him three weeks ago in Rome, and found him not at all the feeble man tottering into the grave that I had been led to expect. . . . He looks fit, mentally and physically. . .".

"Similarly I had been told that Cardinal Mercier was dying and could not last another week. I dined with him at his palace in Malines shortly before I sailed and found him active and full of constructive ideas for the benefit of his people. . . .*

"It is the same with Clemenceau. The newspapers speak of him as old and decrepit. . . . On the contrary, in my opinion, he is the one man alive today who is capable of handling the big job of Dictator of France!"

American students of French politics wondered if the times had indeed fallen so far out of joint that Clemenceau must turn back from the brink of the tomb to set France right. In a mood of whimsy, they recalled a few of the stray threads that tie up the life and personality of Clemenceau with the U. S. For example, the events of his long and incredibly active political career fall between two visits to the town of Stamford, Conn.

Clemenceau's initial bow to Stamford was made in 1866. At that time he appeared in the guise of a young French medical student, who had recently spent two months in the prison of Mazas, for speaking disrespectfully of the Empire of Napoleon III. One Miss Aikens employed him to teach French to the young ladies of her Stamford seminary. The gods laughed and Clemenceau, after wandering down various New England lanes with one of his fair pupils, a Miss Mary Plummer, married her and returned to France.

Some 50 years later a private car hummed out of Manhattan over the steel ribbons that lead to Stamford. The World War was still fresh in all minds. Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Wilson had been The Big Three who had made the peace and perhaps won the War. As the train slackened speed at Stamford, the "Tiger" appeared on the observation platform of his private car. Miss Aikens, kindly schoolmistress, was dead and gone. The young ladies whose lips he had guided in the formation of French vowels were now tasting the dregs of middle age. And he himself, in the hour of his world triumph, was only a squat-figured, heavy-paunched, oily-skinned man, whose flashing eyes and rapier wit alone proclaimed that he does not grow old. Had any oldtime Stamfordites seen him, they might well have felt their heartstrings torn at the contrast between the jaunty penniless school-teacher and the obese plenipotent statesman.

The 50-year-long road which Clemenceau traveled between these two American interludes, lay over and through the opposition of almost every politician of note in France.

Young Dr. Georges Clemenceau laid the foundations of his political power in the 70's by attending gratuitously an immense practice among the poor of Paris, especially of Montmartre. With the votes of this ultra-radical constituency behind him, he worked his way up into a commanding position among the leaders of the Left, as the Third Republic got under way.

For something like a decade he earned the nickname of "The Tiger" by helping his radical friends to claw down no less than 18 ministries and set up three presidents of France.

Then his enemies conceived the brilliant idea of denouncing him for his intimacy with some of the scoundrels who launched the French Panama Canal swindle. The tar of that brush of infamy stuck sufficiently to cost him the votes which he needed to stay in the Chamber.

Eclipsed for an hour, he turned to his pen. Steadily there flowed out upon literary France the prodigious flood of his pent up genius: La, Melee Sociale, Le Grand Pan, Le Voile du Bonheur, etc., ad infinitum. His published works have swelled to the equivalent of 35,000 ordinary novel-size pages.

Amid all this effort the strange case of Dreyfus, a Jewish Captain in the French Army, an alleged German spy, caught and fired the imagination of Clemenceau and Zola. Together they launched an attack upon the corrupt court martial which had convicted Dreyfus. The attack swelled into a national and then an international scandal the repercussions of which are still felt in France.

Out of the fray Clemenceau victoriously bounded back into power. As Senator, Minister of the Interior, and finally Premier, he spent a decade in governing constructively where he had once sought only to tear down incompetence and claw dishonesty to ribbons.

The World War found him an old man, supposedly retired from public life, but known all over France for his incessant warnings against the armed menace of Germany. France turned to him. As Premier and War Minister he hounded such spies as Bolo Pasha to death, championed Foch and rushed out to the fighting front every few days to see how things were going for himself. At that period he had one motto, one battle cry: "Je fais la guerre. Je fais la guerre. Je fais la guerre."

He did indeed make war--like a mad bulldog-walrus-tiger all rolled into one! Strangely enough, his pessimistic worldly philosophy caused him to deny explicitly on one occasion that God inspired the almost religious Crusade which he made out of the War. He gave the credit to the Spirit of France: "Ce n'est pas Dieu, c'est la France qui le veut!"

*Despite his appearance of good health, the 74-year-old Cardinal announced to the clergy of Belgium last week that his doctors have advised him to undergo a surgical operation for a long standing indisposition.