Taking Pompidou's Pulse

French President Georges Pompidou recently confided to a friend that "when people shake my hand these days, I get the impression they are really taking my pulse." With some reason.

Public worry over the President's health has mounted from the whispered rumor stage to front-page news. During the past year, Pompidou, now 61, has gained at least 20 Ibs., ballooning from bourgeois rotundity to sickly flabbiness. His complexion has become blotchy, and he has begun to walk stiffly and clumsily. Descending from his jet to meet with President Nixon in Iceland late last month, he stumbled and nearly fell, though he was clinging firmly to both handrails.

Those distressing symptoms were more than enough to touch off public concern. Speculation about Pompidou's well-being reached new heights when the Elysee Palace announced last week that the President was canceling several social engagements over the next several weeks, "because he had not had the opportunity to take the rest needed to recover from the influenza he had suffered repeatedly this past winter." In what seemed an attempt at public reassurance, an official emphasized that Pompidou would carry on his regular office routine, which this week included meeting three African heads of state, the prime ministers of Korea and Mauritius, and several high-ranking French officials. Pompidou, the Elysee Palace said, would go ahead with official visits to West Germany later this month and to China in September, and would receive Italian President Giovanni Leone in Paris in late June.

Behind the official explanations, however, grimmer rumors were circulating. Elysee officials blamed his puffiness on the cortisone he is said to be taking to control rheumatism. But there was considerable speculation that his flabbiness and frailty were really due to radioactive cobalt treatments for a disease thought to be cancer of the bone marrow. Lending some credence to this rumor is the fact that one of his physicians, Professor Jean Bernard, is a leading leukemia specialist.

Pompidou's seven-year term of office expires in 1976. Under the constitution he can resign or be removed from office if he is too ill to continue. In such a case, national elections would be held within 35 days. Among the possible successors: Minister of Finance Valery Giscard d'Estaing, 47, and former Premier Jacques Chaban-Delmas, 58. If Pompidou decided to step down, he would almost certainly attempt to hand-pick a successor.

For the moment, at least, that eventuality seemed distant. After a midweek Cabinet meeting, Government Spokesman Joseph Comiti, who also happens to be a surgeon, said that the President was in "very great form." But then he added that Pompidou was leaving Paris immediately for a week's holiday at his country home in Cajarc, near Toulouse. Was he ill? "Well," said Comiti, "he would not be resting at Cajarc if nothing were wrong with him. Everybody is ill from time to time." Trailing Pompidou's limousine on the road to Cajarc was an ambulance.

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