Foreign News: Name Your Seconds, Sir!

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Officially installed as Foreign Minister only a few hours, Edgar Faure was swimming in splendor at the first diplomatic reception of the year one evening last week. Then a journalist approached and drew his attention to a paragraph in L'Express, the news weekly edited by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, 31, a Mendés-France adviser who has never liked Faure. In a high moralistic tone, the paragraph hinted that just before quitting the Finance Ministry, Faure had proposed the tax on racehorse sales in favor of wealthy horse owners. Concluded L'Express: "The wall between politics and money is not as solid as one would like." Seated on a brocaded couch, Faure read intently, his face darkening, then sprang to his feet.

"This is too much!" he shouted. "Either I smash my hand across his face, or I attack him for libel, or I resign."

Rushing to the telephone, he called two friends, and asked them to be his seconds. At 2 a.m., Premier Mendeés-France heard the news and called Servan-Schreiber to warn him: "Faure is so mad he wants to kill you."

Next afternoon, while Faure, 46, was busy practicing target shooting in the basement of a sporting-goods store, his seconds called on Servan-Schreiber at his editorial office, announced stiffly that Monsieur Faure, "esteeming himself offended, demands apologies or reparations." Editor Servan-Schreiber, complaining gloomily that "this is all such 19th century stuff," found a pair of seconds, one of them his onetime commanding officer in the Free French Air Force. Actually, duels (with pistols), though often banned in France's gallant and tempestuous history, are by no means uncommon even in present-day France, particularly with newspaper editors, theater critics and existentialist painters. But the Foreign Minister's involvement threatened a government scandal.

Mendés advisers worked out a calming communiqué which stated that L'Express had "totally deformed the facts," but Mendes forbade its issuance. While Mendés' harried advisers went back to work, the seconds got together across the street from Maxim's to discuss weapons. At last the advisers produced a new version, criticizing L'Express' "fallacious account," and declaring that the Premier "deplored that inadmissible insinuations be leveled at the professional conscience" of someone who enjoyed the Premier's entire confidence. Faure was mollified, Servan-Schreiber was relieved that he would not be required to print a retraction. Late that night the seconds announced that "there are no grounds for an encounter or for reparations, and it would be desirable to consider the incident closed."