Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [97]
Like Franco-American relations, the weather turned colder. Wet snow fell over Paris; American soldiers had snowball fights in the Champs-Elysées. There was skating in the Bois de Boulogne and tobogganing at Versailles. Because of the shortage of coal, even the grand hotels were icy. People came down with colds or, more dangerously, fell prey to the flu epidemic which had started in the summer of 1918. The military doctors in the Crillon dispensed cough mixture and advice. Smoking, said one, was an excellent preventative. 6
Delegates—in the end, there were well over a thousand—continued to arrive. The British issued each of theirs 1,500 visiting cards to leave with their counterparts because that was what had been done at the Congress of Vienna. After many complaints about the waste of time, Clemenceau ruled that the practice be abandoned. Many delegates were diplomats and statesmen; but, for the first time at a major international conference, many were not. The British brought over virtually the whole of the Intelligence Bureau from the Ministry of Information, including men such as the young Arnold Toynbee and Lewis Namier, later among the most eminent historians of their generation. The Americans had their professors from House’s Inquiry, and Wall Street bankers such as Thomas Lamont and Bernard Baruch. The professional diplomats grumbled. “An improvisation,” said Jules Cambon, the secretary-general at the Quai d’Orsay, but such views did not bother Lloyd George or Wilson, or Clemenceau for that matter. “Diplomats,” in Lloyd George’s view, “were invented simply to waste time.”7
Paris was also filling up with petitioners, journalists and the merely curious. Elinor Glyn, the romantic novelist, entertained prominent men at her corner table at the Ritz and wrote articles asking “Are Women Changing? ” and “Is Chivalry Dead?” Franklin Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy, persuaded his superiors that he had to supervise the sale of American naval property in Europe and arrived in Paris, a resentful and unhappy Eleanor in tow. Their marriage was already falling to pieces; now she found him too attentive to the Parisian women. William Orpen and Augustus John settled in to paint official portraits of the conference, although the latter spent much of his energy on riotous parties. British Cabinet ministers popped over for a day or two at a time. Bonar Law, the deputy prime minister, bravely flew back and forth, dressed in a special fur-lined flying suit. Lloyd George’s eldest daughter, Olwen, a lively young married woman, came over for a brief visit. Clemenceau offered her a lift in his car one afternoon and, as they chatted, asked if she like art. Yes, she replied enthusiastically, and he whipped out a set of salacious postcards.8
Elsa Maxwell, not yet the doyenne of international café society that she would become, secured a passage from New York as companion to a glamorous divorced woman who was on the lookout for a new husband. The two women gave marvelous parties in a rented house. General Pershing supplied the drink; Maxwell played the latest Cole Porter songs on the piano; and the divorcée found her husband, a handsome American general called Douglas MacArthur. Outside, early one morning, two young officers fought a duel with sabers over yet another American beauty.9
Attractive women had a wonderful time in Paris that year. Few delegates had brought their wives; indeed, it had been expressly forbidden most of the junior ranks. “All the most beautiful & well dressed society ladies appear to have been brought over by the various Departments,” wrote Hankey to his wife. “I do not know how they do their work, but in the evening they dance and sing and play bridge!” The puritanical suspected that worse was going on than bridge. An American female journalist traveled