Two Men

P: "He had an intense appreciation of the good things of life; good wine, good music, were appreciated to the full; his capacity for enjoyment was not marred by any pangs of doubt as to whether the course he happened to be pursuing was right. It was always right--always inevitable. He once said that he never regretted anything he had done--his only regret was for the opportunities for enjoyment which he had foregone or missed. Above all, he enjoyed the success of his own policy and was rightly proud of the service he had rendered to his country and the great personal position he had achieved."

The great man thus thumbnail-sketched was Gustav Stresemann who died of a form of apoplexy (TIME, Oct. 14). Thumbnailer: Viscount D'Abernon, patrician first Ambassador of Great Britain to the German Republic, writing in the January issue of Foreign Affairs, scholarly grey-bound U. S. quarterly. Of Stresemann and himself the Viscount writes: "For six years we were in almost daily intercourse. ... I believe that no two men in similar positions were ever more frank with one another or more free. . . ."

P: Best hater of Stresemann was Clemenceau. Last week Clemenceau was thumb-nailed by the only woman except his daughters to whom he left money (100,000 frs: $3,930), his stenographer, Mme. Pernoud.

"The morning I was summoned to go to Clemenceau's home," said she in Paris, "I was warned above all not to put rouge on my lips, and not to wear high-heeled shoes. 'Clemenceau has a horror of all those things in women,' I was told. Moreover, I had to use a goose quill pen, because the Tiger always hated the grating of steel pens. I consented to sacrifice these feminine vanities, and went not without trembling to the door of this 'terror of ministers,' this irascible enemy of governments.

"I was received with the utmost cordiality. From the first morning that I worked with Clemenceau I learned of his great heart, his unfailing generosity, and his great respect for humble folk. . . . His grandeur was that of a god, but his simplicity attached him to earth.

"People were wrong to say that Clemenceau was an antifeminist. In giving women franchise and social liberty, he did fear the influence on them by the clergy. Accordingly he was against too much power for women in Catholic countries. The Protestant religion he considered more as a philosophy, and he admitted therefore that universal suffrage was feasible in Protestant countries."

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