Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [38]
PART TWO
A NEW WORLD ORDER
5
We Are the League of the People
ON JANUARY 12, the day after his arrival in Paris, Lloyd George met Clemenceau, Wilson and the Italian prime minister, Vittorio Orlando, at the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay for the first of well over a hundred meetings. Each man brought his foreign secretary and a bevy of advisers. The following day, in deference to British wishes, two Japanese representatives joined the group. This became the Council of Ten, although most people continued to refer to it as the Supreme Council. The smaller allies and neutrals were not invited, an indication of what was to come. At the end of March, as the Peace Conference reached its crucial struggles, the Supreme Council was to shed the foreign ministers and the Japanese to become the Council of Four: Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Wilson and Orlando.
The great staterooms at the Quai d’Orsay have survived the passage of time and a later German occupation surprisingly well. They were given their present shape in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon III ruled a France that still dreamed of being a great world power. Important visitors still go in the formal entrance overlooking the Seine, past the massive branching staircase which leads up to the private apartments, and into the series of reception rooms and offices with their parquet floors, Aubusson carpets and massive fireplaces. Huge windows stretch up toward the high decorated ceilings and elaborate chandeliers. The heavy tables and chairs stand on fat gilded legs. The predominant colors are gold, red and ebony.
The Supreme Council met in the inner sanctum, the office of France’s foreign minister, Stéphen Pichon. Today it is white and gilt; in 1919 it was darker. The same carved-wood paneling still decorates the walls, and the faded seventeenth-century tapestries still hang above the paneling. The double doors open out to a rotunda and there is still a rose garden beyond. Clemenceau, as the host, presided from an armchair in front of the hearth with its massive log fire. His colleagues, each with a little table for his papers, faced him from the garden side, the British and Americans side by side, then the Japanese and the Italians off in a corner. Wilson, as the only head of state, had a chair a few inches higher than anyone else’s. The prime ministers and foreign ministers had high-backed, comfortable chairs, and in clusters behind them were the lesser advisers and secretaries on little gilt chairs.
The Supreme Council rapidly developed its own routine. It met once, sometimes twice, occasionally three times a day. There was an agenda of sorts, but the council also dealt with issues as they came up. It heard petitioners, a procession that did not end until the conference’s conclusion. As the afternoons closed in, the green silk curtains were drawn and the electric lights were switched on. The room was usually very hot, but the French reacted with horror to any suggestion of opening a window. Clemenceau slouched in his chair, frequently looking at the ceiling, with a bored expression; Wilson fidgeted, getting up from time to time to stretch his legs; Lansing, his foreign minister, who had little enough to do, made caricatures; Lloyd George chatted in a loud undertone, making jokes and comments. The official interpreter, Paul Mantoux, interpreted from French to English and back again, throwing himself into each speech with such verve that one might have thought he was himself begging for territory. Since Clemenceau spoke English well and the Italian foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, spoke it reasonably, conversations among the Big Four were often in English. The assistants tiptoed about with maps and documents. Every afternoon the doors opened and footmen carried in tea and macaroons. Wilson was surprised and