FRANCE: Brave Old Wheelhorse

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Presiding over the debates on a new constitution, Auriol was in his element. Scrubby mustache bristling, his face grown plumper and pinker from exertion, Auriol would ring his little bell passionately as the debate grew stormy, calling, "Messieurs . . . MESSIEURS!"

When the constitution was promulgated, after 26 months of doctrinaire hairsplitting, it was a victory for Auriol's compromise policy. (A popular cartoon had showed him yelling into a telephone: "Thirty-seven Chambers and six Presidents, that's my final offer!") But the victory was only tactical. With a few minor changes, the same abuses which Auriol had attacked in his book would be possible under the Fourth Republic. On Jan. 16, 1947, Vincent Auriol was elected President of the Republic; since then his job has been, as he once wrote, to "regularize political disorder."

Always Guests for Lunch. For four years the President has worked and lived behind the pacing Gardes Républicaines in the Elysée Palace on the Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré, which has housed Bourbons, Bonapartes and 14 Presidents of the Third Republic before him. It takes 200 people to make the presidential beds, cook the meals, keep the salons and gardens in good condition, run the private telegraph office, turn out an honor guard on the arrival of a foreign dignitary.

In the cavernous palace, Auriol lives as simply as he does in Muret. He is up every morning at 6. A few minutes later, he brews himself some coffee on the hotplate which stands in his bedroom. For the next two hours and a half, he works in his bedroom on papers set out the night before. At 9, after a walk in the palace gardens, he joins Madame Auriol for breakfast. By 9:30 he is back at his desk receiving his personal secretaries, (including Paul Auriol, who lives with his wife and two sons in another wing of the palace).

There are always guests for lunch. Through one week the visitors' list may note such diverse personalities as General and Mrs. Eisenhower, a mountain climber just returned from the Himalayas, and the Comtesse de Paris, some of whose husband's Bourbon ancestors resided briefly in the Elysée. Most afternoons and evenings are packed with official receptions, dinners and speeches, but the President prefers a quiet evening at home—dining with Madame Auriol in a small bedsitting room. When he has no official engagement, he tries to be in bed by 8.

Weekends, the Auriols stay in a secluded, six-room, one-telephone hunting lodge in the forest at Marly-le-Roi, near Versailles. But every August, for a real vacation, they go back to the rose-walled house in Muret, close by the swift-flowing Louge. This is the France which Vincent Auriol, with a Frenchman's passion for the soil, loves best.

Auriol is a proficient angler and fancies himself a proficient hunter. At the big official hunt parties given every year on the presidential country estate of Rambouillet, M. and Mme. Auriol attain a high pitch of activity. Michèle Auriol scurries about directing the beaters to drive copious supplies of game in the direction of favored guests. Vincent with his gun swivels wildly to & fro. Those who know his aim and love their lives, duck. He good-naturedly contradicts any suggestion that somebody else brought down the bird at which he thought he aimed.