Le Grand Voyageur

All was in readiness. French embassy staffs in ten South American capitals busied themselves with last-minute details, while hard-eyed agents of the Sure-te kept all anti-Gaullists in Latin America under close scrutiny. The French cruiser Colbert, on which le grand voyage ur would reside during six of his 25 days abroad, had been refitted with special communications equipment, furniture from the French National Museums, and paintings by Rouault and Utrillo. In Buenos Aires a French-born cabinetmaker put the finishing touches on a 7-ft. 2-in. bed, while in Rio de Janeiro carpenters readied a pair of chairs that would hopefully diminish the undiplomatic disparity in height between Brazilian President Humberto Castello Branco (5 ft. 5 in.) and his 6-ft. 4-in. visitor.

The Language of Bolivar. As Charles de Gaulle set out this week on his strenuous, 18,000-mile South American tour, little had been left to chance. With him went more than 50 prepared speeches, dozens of signed, framed photographs, a handful of oil paintings for especially honored hosts, scores of Sevres porcelain souvenirs, two physicians, six security men, a planeload of eager newspaper and television reporters, and his shy, self-effacing wife Yvonne, who was bringing along a special wardrobe by Jacques Heim.

Weeks of language lessons at his country home in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises had equipped De Gaulle with enough Spanish and Portuguese phrases to sprinkle through his speeches, though they did little to correct his heavy French accent. Tucked away in De Gaulle's prodigious memory were the key facts of South American history, geography, economics and politics contained in ten hefty dossiers prepared last winter by France's Latin American embassies.

But there was one thing that De Gaulle most emphatically was not bringing with him: francs. There would be no offers of cash aid or loans. The basic purpose of the trip was not to buy Latin affection, Gaullist sources insisted, but rather to "reactivate and reinvigorate" French relations in South America, which withered with France's decline as an international power during and after World War II. De Gaulle was clearly avoiding direct conflict with U.S. influence in Latin America, but he was not forgoing the chance to preach his favorite sermon of renewed nationalism. "I will simply employ the language of Bolivar," he explained, meaning that his main theme would be national independence and "self-liberation."

The Vertigo of Legend. It all sounded vaguely grand, or perhaps grandly vague, but many of De Gaulle's closest supporters were worried. For all its prestige value, the trip will keep the French President, at 73 and just five months after his prostate operation, on a dead run for more than three weeks. Gaullist newspapers worried in print about the "alarming trip" that would take their hero to "the land of revolutions, of assassination attempts one after another." Novelist Franc,ois Mauriac, a most emotional Gaullist, wrote in Figaro Litte-raire: "I fear this trip, I detest it; it seems to me a provocation of destiny. I ask myself if the personnage, already legendary, is not giving in for the first time to the vertigo of his own legend."

But De Gaulle no doubt has his own good reasons for making the trip, and rumors in Paris last week had it that if the South American journey proves immensely successful, he just might call a snap presidential election this fall rather than a year from now. In any event, as De Gaulle himself said to a worried aide who urged him to cut back on his schedule: "One can only die once: one cannot pass one's life, sleep, eat in an armored car."

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