Ballots, Daughters, Jack

Voters balloted last Sunday on 16,000 candidates who sought 3,500 local offices in the cantons of France. As usual no candidate won in hundreds of constituencies, and in these final balloting takes place next Sunday. Returns from the first poll gave moderate bourgeois Premier Camille Chautemps, whose Radical Socialist Party is ludicrously misnamed, every reason to think that the French people have not swung to either extreme since they last voted in 1936, but favor the Popular Front Cabinet as its policies were recently revised and made less radical (TIME, Oct. 11). So far as could be judged, Socialist candidates were making slight gains at the expense of Communists, Radical Socialists were holding their own, as were the Centre and Right.

"The national unity is not in danger," opined Premier Chautemps. "The results so far make me very happy."

Meanwhile, 2,500 visiting U. S. Legionnaires were cavorting in Paris with much the same uproarious levity they loosed recently in New York. Since the French Government was paying their expenses, the fact that few of the hotels at which Legionnaires were at first lodged could claim to be even Fourth Class led to heroic eruptions of wrath. Typical ex-dough-boys and their good wives complained that 20 years after 1917 they were being asked to sleep in hotels some of whose other occupants were obviously daughters of joy. The Government blamed everything on a Paris travel agency which was said to have been paid enough to secure comfortable rooms. As Legionnaires were moved to better hotels last week their tempers improved.

In the vast, glassed-in courtyard of the Hotel des Invalides, only a few paces from the tomb of Napoleon, the whole 2,500 Legionnaires were seated at one time to eat a Paris lunch so good that ultimately all cheered and handclapped a strapping Legionnaire who rose and bellowed: "So far as I am concerned the French debt is settled--all agreed say 'Aye'!"

A final rush of Legionnaires off arriving ships brought the number in France to 4,500 and with ample dignity they gathered to see dedicated the Franco-U. S. War Monument just outside Versailles on the highway to Paris. Built almost entirely with money donated in small sums by school children and their elders throughout France, the monument features statues of General John Joseph Pershing and the Marquis de Lafayette.

"What has been the result of the almost unbelievable sacrifices of the great War?" asked General Pershing, keynoted his dedication speech with this reply, "The answer is that our liberty has been preserved, democracy survived as a fundamental structure of government, and civilization is unchanged."

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