Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (31 page)

George Clemenceau with French officers on one of his many expeditions to the front

Yet even Clemenceau, whom Ludendorff ruefully called “the most energetic man in France,” was beginning to show the strain.
³¹
In September the British ambassador to France, the Earl of Derby, wrote: “I had a talk with Clemenceau this morning and for the first time in my life thought him tired, but it is hardly to be wondered at when I tell you that yesterday he was 14 hours in his motor and that at the age of 77!”
³²
Clemenceau was, of course, suffering from diabetes. “No one knows,” he later said, “that I made war with forty grammes of sugar in my urine.”
³³
He was also suffering from eczema, which had worsened to the point that he wore gray gloves to conceal and protect the painful rash. He enthusiastically self-medicated, and one friend was amazed that he did not accidentally poison himself: “He has remedies in his drawer and helps himself by the handful.” He once downed an entire bottle of a sleep aid when the prescribed dose was a single spoonful.
³⁴

During these months, Clemenceau led a hectic but solitary life. He rose at five or six
A.M.
, performed calisthenics, fenced with an instructor, and then had a massage. He rushed back and forth between the Ministry of War—where, in contrast to his predecessors, he occupied
one of the smallest offices—and the Palais-Bourbon. He almost never accepted invitations, and his social life was reduced to occasional visits from his brother Albert, his sister Sophie, and his grandchildren. There were numerous trips to the front—sometimes as many as two or three a week—but no time for relaxing lunches in Giverny.

As when he served as prime minister between 1906 and 1909, Clemenceau chose not to occupy an official residence but instead stayed in the apartment in the rue Franklin into which he moved more than twenty years earlier. The rue Franklin was in Passy, an upscale district across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower, but Clemenceau’s lodgings were extremely modest: a three-room apartment featuring dirty woodwork, a threadbare carpet, and “almost lodging-house furniture.”
³⁵
However, the small apartment was adorned with his library of five thousand books and, equally dear to him, his various Japanese artifacts. These treasures included vases, tea bowls, prints by Utamaro, incense burners, an ivory-inlaid scabbard, and “a Japanese mask of terrifying and wonderful expression.”
³⁶
He also had a number of
kogo
, or incense boxes, that he liked to handle while reading or talking with someone. These precious artifacts were the remnants of a much larger collection of
japonerie
that financial problems had forced him to sell with much regret in 1894. The sale catalogue listed 356 illustrated books, 528 drawings and fans, and an incredible 1,869 Japanese prints. His admiration for the Japanese was such that in the first days of the war he wrote (in block letters) to an English friend: “IF ONLY THE JAPANESE WOULD COME.”
³⁷

Now, four years after those terrible first days of invasion, the end was almost in sight. On September 5, shortly after one of his visits to the front, Clemenceau rose to the podium to address the Chamber of Deputies. The magnificent chamber must have made a sobering sight as he gazed at the men fanned out before him. More than a dozen deputies had been killed on the western front, and their red-velvet seats remained shrouded in black crêpe and adorned with a tricolor scarf. One of them still serving, thirty-six-year-old Gaston Dumesnil, a veteran of Verdun and a holder of both the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’Honneur, would be killed by a shell three days later.

Clemenceau’s theme, as he spoke, had not changed in four years. “Our soldiers, our great soldiers,” he declared, “the soldiers of civilization, to give them their true name, are victoriously beating down the hordes of barbarism. This work will continue until it reaches the full completion that we owe to the great cause for which the best French blood has been so magnificently shed. Our soldiers shall give us this great day—the triumphant day of release—which is so long overdue.”
³⁸

CHAPTER TWELVE

THIS TERRIBLE, GRAND, AND BEAUTIFUL HOUR

NOVEMBER 11 DAWNED
foggy in Paris. It was, as the brutal daily tally in
Le Figaro
reminded its readers, the 1,561st day of the war. By nine o’clock people feverishly awaiting news filtered into the streets. One day before, the radio station at the top of the Eiffel Tower had received a message that the German command had agreed to the conditions of an imposed armistice. The morning newspapers in the kiosks were optimistic, announcing the imminent signing of the ceasefire and the abdication of the Kaiser. “The war is won,” proclaimed
Le Matin
. “Glory to the soldiers!” declared
L’Homme Libre
.
“Vive la France!”

Even so, people were cautious of celebration. Four days earlier, false news of an armistice had turned the boulevards prematurely jubilant. Moreover, the newspapers and public health officials had been warning against “the agglomeration of crowds.”
¹
During the previous month, thousands of Parisians had died from influenza, including, two days earlier, Guillaume Apollinaire. Early on the morning of the eleventh a series of dilapidated hearses, requisitioned to carry the bodies of the victims of the Spanish flu, had made their somber procession along the ChampsÉlysées.
²
Rumors and alarms were spreading as rapidly as the disease. Was the epidemic the result of a summer heat wave that left germs lingering in the stagnant air? Or was it the work of German bacteriologists infecting French food with deadly bacilli? Whatever the cause, the deaths steadily mounted. A Parisian housewife lamented: “This scourge is more terrible than the war or the Berthas and Gothas”—and it was, to be sure, quickly claiming more lives in Paris than the German bombs.
³
There were calls for Paris’s theaters and concert halls to be closed to prevent the contagion from spreading. Schools were frantically aired and disinfected, assemblies and awards ceremonies banned, religious
celebrations curtailed. The only crowds in the anxious first week of November had been the ones in front of pharmacies, where Parisians, some wearing antiseptic-soaked protective face masks, fought each other for dwindling supplies of quinine, castor oil, aspirin, and rum—none of which did any good.

There was yet another reason why people were chary of celebration: not everyone wanted the war to end. Many people were skeptical of German requests for a cease-fire, believing that no peace should be signed until the enemy had been driven back across the Rhine and comprehensively defeated—a goal that, after four years, was suddenly within reach. A report prepared for the police, who took soundings outside a butcher’s shop, concluded that the great majority of people favored continuing the war.
⁴

Their opinion was shared by, among others, Raymond Poincaré. But Ferdinand Foch, commander in chief of the Allied armies, believed the Allied goals had been met. “Enough blood has flowed,” he protested.
⁵
Indeed, French deaths were approaching 1.4 million; almost 4 million more had been wounded. A quarter of all French men born in the 1890s—the children of the belle époque—had been wiped out. Although his policy had been to
faire la guerre
, Clemenceau agreed with Marshal Foch, instructing him to draw up the technical military and territorial conditions on which an armistice should be based. Thus, at ten forty-five
A.M.
on the eleventh, Foch arrived back from the forest of Compiègne by train bearing the document that had been signed in his railway carriage at five eighteen that morning. He made his way to the Ministry of War in the boulevard Saint-Germain. Handing the signed armistice to Clemenceau, he told him: “My work is finished. Your work begins.”
⁶

At eleven o’clock precisely—the moment when the armistice was to take effect—cannons were fired in the Champ de Mars and by the submarine
Montgolfier
, moored in the Seine by the Pont de la Concorde. “Bombs,” speculated the pupils in one Latin Quarter school.
⁷
Then the bells of Notre-Dame began to ring. Suddenly there could be no doubt—and suddenly no one was worried about the agglomeration of crowds. People poured into the place de la Concorde, the Tuileries, the
Champs-Elysées. Jubilant Parisians clambered over captured German tanks and airplanes, laid flowers on the statue of Strasbourg in the place de la Concorde, and stripped away the sandbags and scaffolding protecting the statues on the Arc de Triomphe. Flags appeared in windows, bunting on buildings. Airplanes swooped overhead, dropping not bombs but paper cutouts—“butterflies of joy”—that fluttered into the streets. Students in the Latin Quarter poured out of their schools, forming an immense human serpent that writhed along the boulevard Saint-Michel. Singing the “Marseillaise” and led by beribboned soldiers, another serpent wound its way toward the Ministry of War, with everyone shouting
“Vive la France!”
and
“Vive Clemenceau!”
⁸

Armistice celebrated in the place de l’Opéra, November 11, 1918

The Ministry of War had been bombed in March; its façade was still pockmarked, its courtyard strewn with rubble. Clemenceau briefly appeared in a window. “He was frenetically cheered,” reported
Le Petit Parisien
. Visibly moved, he gestured for silence, then shouted: “
Vive la France!
Say it with me:
Vive la France!
” The crowd obediently roared back. Later he was taken by motorcar the five hundred yards to the Palais-Bourbon, which had been invaded by a huge multitude hoping to pay tribute to him. “Who of those present,” asked a reporter in
Le Figaro
, “can ever forget the arrival of Clemenceau in the Chamber of
Deputies?” At four
P.M.
he rose to the podium and, after reading aloud the terms of the armistice, announced that “it seems that at this hour, at this terrible, grand and beautiful hour, my duty is done.”
⁹
The reporter for
Le Figaro
saw tears fall from his eyes. The session ended with all of the Deputies singing the “Marseillaise.”

That night, more wild celebrations, more stirring renditions of the “Marseillaise,” more drinking of champagne in cafés that the prefect of police allowed to keep their doors open to accommodate the thousands of revelers arriving in Paris from the suburbs and countryside, “many of them already drunk,” as a journalist churlishly observed. The Eiffel Tower was lit for the first time in more than four years. Red, white, and blue searchlights beamed across the sky. It was left for a writer on Clemenceau’s newspaper to see in this heedless revelry the beatific auguries of a better future. “It was a breath of universal delirium,” wrote Jacques Barty in
L’Homme Libre
, “that portended the birth of a new world, the sublime resurrection of all the great heroes who died for their country, for civilization.” These dead heroes were, he wrote, like “the marvellous and beneficent divinity of a liberated humanity, united for greater destinies.”

Clemenceau strolled the exuberant boulevards arm in arm with his sister Sophie. “I’ve been kissed by more than five hundred girls since this morning,” he later boasted to Poincaré. A bitter Poincaré angrily confided to his diary: “To everyone he is the liberator of the occupied territory, the organizer of victory. He alone personifies France...And for myself, naturally I don’t exist.”
¹⁰
But the cool, aloof Poincaré could not possibly compete with the articulate, avuncular, and absolutely ferocious Père-la-Victoire. Winston Churchill, who heard Big Ben toll the peace that morning in London, later wrote: “Clemenceau embodied and expressed France. As much as any single human being, miraculously magnified, can ever be a nation, he was France.”
¹¹