Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [100]
Both House and Balfour were anxious to speed up the work of the conference in the absence of their superiors. They decided to concentrate on getting at least general terms ready for Germany (the details, it was assumed, could be negotiated directly in what was still expected to be a full-blown peace conference). The special commissions and committees (in the end there were almost sixty) were told to have their reports ready by March 6. That would leave a week for tidying up before Wilson’s return. The plan was to call the German delegation before the end of the month. This was wildly optimistic. 19
The delegates groaned but plowed ahead. When Nicolson met Marcel Proust—“white, unshaven, grubby, slip-faced”—at a dinner at the Ritz, he found the great writer fascinated by the details of the work. “Tell me about the committees,” Proust commanded. Nicolson started by saying that they generally met at ten in the morning. Proust begged for more details. “You take a car from the Delegation. You get out at the Quai d’Orsay. You climb the stairs. You go into the room. And then? Be specific, my friend, be specific.”20
By the time Wilson left Paris, the League’s covenant had largely been drawn up, some progress had been made on the German terms and most of the territorial commissions had been created. But almost nothing had been decided on the Ottoman empire, and the treaties with Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria had scarcely been considered. There was less and less talk about a preliminary peace conference and more about the quantity of work that had to be got through before the enemy states could be summoned to Paris. Although it was not yet acknowledged, what was happening in Paris was now the Peace Conference proper. In the hotels and meeting rooms, there were gloomy speculations about whether a peace could be made before the world went up in flames.
On February 19, as Clemenceau was leaving his house in the Rue Franklin to drive to a meeting with House and Balfour at the Crillon, a man in work clothes who had been lurking behind one of the public urinals jumped out and fired several shots at the car. Clemenceau later told Lloyd George that the moment seemed to last forever. One bullet hit him between the ribs, just missing vital organs. (It was too dangerous to remove and he carried it for the rest of his life.) Clemenceau’s assailant, Eugène Cottin, a half-mad anarchist, was seized by the crowd, which was waiting as usual to see the prime minister’s comings and goings, and nearly lynched. Clemenceau was carried back into his house. When his faithful assistant Mordacq rushed in, he found him pale but conscious. “They shot me in the back,” Clemenceau told him. “They didn’t even dare to attack me from the front.” 21
“Dear, dear,” said Balfour when the news reached the Crillon, “I wonder what that portends.” Many people in Paris feared the worst, especially when news came in a couple of days later that the socialist chief minister of Bavaria had been assassinated. Lloyd George cabled Kerr from London. “If the attempt is a Bolshevist one it shows what lunatics these anarchists are for nothing would do them as much harm as a successful attempt on Clemenceau’s life and even a failure will exasperate opinion in France and make it quite impossible to have any dealings with them.” 22
Clemenceau carried the whole thing off with his usual panache. Visitors found him sitting up in an armchair, complaining about Cottin’s marksmanship—“a Frenchman who misses his target six times out of seven at point-blank range”—and arguing with his doctors: “Doctors, I know them better than anyone because I am one myself.” To the nurse who said