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"Conferential Tsarism" was the term applied to this magisterial method by one of the offended delegates. He said to me on the morrow: "My reply to M. Clemenceau was ready, but fear of impairing the prestige of the Conference prevented me from uttering it.
M. Clemenceau was openly charged with striving after the hegemony of the Continent for his country by separating Germany from Austria and surrounding her with a ring of Slav states Poland, Jugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and perhaps the non-Slav kingdom of Rumania. All these states would be in the leading-strings of the French Republic, and Austria would be linked to it in a different guise.
After one sharp slighting look at the visitor, Madame Clemenceau had withdrawn her senses within herself, so to say, to come to a conclusion on the singular conduct of her husband. His cold scorn daunted her, and filled her with dread.
Though he lacked the political brilliance of Lloyd George and had not the suppressed but irresistible vehemence that characterized Clemenceau, his very simplicity of argument availed much. He was not destined to carry through the full programme of idealism as set out in the Fourteen Points, at least not as interpreted by most liberals.
Since he stores his secrets in that chest, and no company drops in, this is a hermitage. Mademoiselle Rebecca is not one of the prying sort." Madame Clemenceau, who had risen with more nervous anxiety than she cared to display to the servants, stood by her chair, looking toward the door. "Has he talked about me, sometimes?" "Master? never not before me, anyway, madame."
Such an attitude is, of course, characteristic of most modern executives and has been intensified by war conditions. The summary disregard of Lansing, shown by Wilson at Paris, was less striking than the snubbing of Balfour by Lloyd George, or the cold brutality with which Clemenceau treated the other French delegates.
On the other hand the pronouncement, "Réparation des dommages," included, as in fact was afterwards included, any claim for damage by land or sea. The representatives of Belgium, Italy and Great Britain remark that it is a condition of peace, not of armistice. But Clemenceau makes it a question of regard and consideration for France.
Besides the cause was in very good hands; Clemenceau and Vaughan, Yves Guyot and Reinach, Jaures and Gerault-Richard, Pressense, Cornely, and scores of others were fighting admirably in the Press, and his intervention was not required.
It may be judged that an afternoon spent in such company was little change to Madame Clemenceau, and that the five o'clock tea, initiated from the English, was a kind of penitential drink. But she became a habitué, and took a very natural liking to hear again the anecdotes indicating how matters moved in Germany and Russia, where her childhood and early girlhood had passed.
In the meantime the rumour that there was a horse down in the Clemenceau Road had spread rapidly, and more boys, several little girls, and three soldiers in blue, with red ties, had joined the group round Mr. Lavender, to whom there seemed something more than providential in this rapid assemblage.
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