"Est-ce Possible?"

The men behind news cameras are trained to be as impassive, as mechanically efficient in time of crisis as surgeons or telephone girls. By hook or crook they must get that picture. Last week to the venerable dean of Paris news photographers, Louis Piston, came the opportunity to crown his adventurous career by photographing the assassination of the President of the Republic.

Long years ago the future President Paul Doumer attended the wedding of the future dean of Paris cameramen. Last week it came about that bearded Photographer Piston was standing with his flashlight upraised, his camera trained on the patriarchal President at the precise instant when a tall, burly Russian bounded forward and fired point-blank at M. Doumer with a Colt pistol. Instantly dropping his flashlight, Photographer Piston wielded his camera like a club, beating the assassin over the head, stunning him momentarily--and throwing away the chance to make a Picture of the Century.

That act was significantly French. By law and by custom the honor & dignity of the President of the Republic are the honor & dignity of France--to an extent undreamed of in most other republics. It is a crime against the State to print jokes about the President of France or to disparage him from stage or platform. Frenchmen--as individuals and as a nation--were never more true to French traditions than in their instinctive, automatic reactions to the swift, tremendous tragedy of last week. Every moment of the 13 hours that passed between the shooting in mid-afternoon and the Death just before dawn was packed with drama.

Yet in a strange, sardonic sense the tragedy dated back to a day last May, the day on which Paul Doumer was elected President, a triumph which broke the heart of his far more famed rival and onetime friend, Aristide Briand. On that day victorious President-Elect Paul Doumer said: "It is strange how often the number 13 has arisen to the surface in my long political life. Not only have I just been elected 13th President of France on the 13th day of May, but the last two digits of this year 1931 make 13 when reversed!

"I cannot consider 13 my unlucky number, and I can give many other examples of its appearance. For example, when I proceeded to my post as Governor of

Indo-China. I reached Saigon on the 13th day of the month and Hanoi on the 13th of the following month. And certainly no unlucky happening followed either of those two thirteens!"

On the Friday of M. Doumer's assassination events moved thus:

2:30 p. m.: The 75-year-old President, who lost four of his five sons in the War, left his Elysee Palace to sponsor a sale of books by French War Veterans. In the limousine beside ancient M. Doumer rode alert, bristle-bearded Novelist Claude Farrere, President de la Societe des Ecrivains Combattants who were staging their "War Veterans' Book Afternoon" in the nearby building of the Rothschild Foundation. Book sales were proceeding briskly and Novelist Farrere's wife Henriette had just succeeded in selling a third book by her husband to the brawny Russian in dark glasses who loitered beside the Farrere book booth, asking repeatedly: "Of course your husband will autograph these books for me when he comes, yes?"

3:00 p. m. President Doumer had just smilingly agreed to autograph a book which Mme Farrere said she would auction off, and M. Farrere had just crossly autographed a book for the importunate Russian when the latter whirled, drew his Colt, and with a cry of "Die for the Fatherland!" made for M. Doumer, despite the fact that beside the President stood the Director of Municipal Police, M. Paul Guichard.

"The President had just signed the book when I saw a hand raised toward him, clasping a small automatic.'' said Director Guichard afterward. "I seized the assassin's wrist but already his first bullet had struck the President in the head. I yanked the hand downward but the man still fired. His second shot pierced M. Doumer's arm. His third struck M. Farrere who was now struggling with the assassin too. His fourth pierced my coat under my arm and I believe a fifth shot was fired."

Amid the crush of 500 people jammed into a salon not over large, the President of the Republic could not fall. He slumped slowly to his knees while a gush of blood from the wound in his head dyed his snowy beard suddenly dark red. Twice, as he was losing consciousness President Doumer murmured: "Est-ce possible?" (is it possible?)

More blood, spouting from M. Doumer's shoulder-wound, soaked his clothing and formed a pool upon the floor. Women screamed. "The President is dead!" Men battled to overpower the furiously fighting Russian. When he was down women's fingernails gashed his cheeks. Meanwhile the President was carried out feet foremost, rushed in a blood-spattered car to Beaujon Hospital only 100 yd. from the Rothschild foundation.

3:30 p. m. The news was broken to Mme Doumer, eight times a mother, five times a grandmother, by the wife of French Minister of Justice Paul Reynaud. The President's wife sat stunned for a moment, then asked to be taken to M. Doumer who lay unconscious on a plain iron cot in a small room on the first floor of the hospital, other beds being occupied.

Meanwhile the assassin, who police said had "fought like a devil." was in chains, undergoing a ferocious third degree. Shouted he: "I know you will kill me! I am Dr. Paul Gorgulov, the President of the National Fascist Party of Russia. European states and America seem favorable to Bolshevism so I decided to kill the President and cause France to declare war on Russia! I am a great Russian patriot. I admire Hitler and Mussolini!* I had no accomplices."

In Dr. Gorgulov's pockets were found a second loaded automatic, numerous pamphlets and one of the books autographed by Novelist Farrere in which was stuck an autographed piece of paper reading: "The man who killed the President of the

French Republic"--this neatly signed by Assassin Gorgulov.

4:20. The unconscious President received the first of three blood transfusions, recovered sufficiently to recognize Professor Gosset, the most eminent of eleven physicians and surgeons who were laboring to save his life.

"Tiens, Gosset," murmured M. Doumer and lost consciousness again.

4:40. Professor Gosset raised a cheer from hundreds of people gathered around the hospital when he exclaimed: "The ball in the head did not touch the brain. Therefore I refuse to say that the President is lost."

5:30. The doctors bulletined, "The situation is very grave."

6:45. They bulletined, "The condition is very satisfactory."

Meanwhile, Pope Pius XI, strolling in the Vatican Garden, had heard the news, telegraphed his hope that President Doumer would recover "with God's help and the aid of science."

King Vittorio Emanuele III telegraphed personally from Rome to Paris. King George V ordered his private secretary to keep in constant telephonic touch. Premier Mussolini, informed of the crime while in the Chamber of Deputies, blazed: "The assassin struck not one man but wounded and humiliated all humanity!" President Hoover cabled, "The attempt ... of a dastardly assassin shocks and saddens me."

8:00 p. m. Dr. Gorgulov, still under a terrific police grilling, divulged that his "Green Fascists" had kidnapped Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. and would never give the child up.

10:00 p. m. At Monte Carlo the assassin's wife returned from evening service at a Nice church, was arrested, grilled. Said she: "My husband told me he had gone to Paris to attend a book sale and sell some of his poetry. Now I think of it he did say: 'You'll soon hear great things of me!' But I thought he meant he expected to sell a lot of books."

11:56 p. m. Stimulated by another transfusion President Doumer recovered sufficiently to ask: "What happened?"

"You were run over by an automobile," answered his family physician.

"Not purposely?" queried M. Doumer. "Not purposely?" The President sank into alternate coma and delirium, seem ingly worried about why anyone should have wished to run him down, moaning occasionally, "Strange, I remember nothing."

Through the whole night Premier Andre Tardieu and most of the Cabinet remained at the hospital.

2:00 a. m. The Ministry of Interior bulletined the President's relapse into profound coma.

4:37 a. m. The President quietly expired, without recognizing Mme Doumer or his daughters.

5:00 a. m. Wrapped in a silken shroud the body was taken in an ambulance1 to the Elysee where, on the second floor, embalmers went to work.

Mme Doumer left the hospital between her daughters. Next came the Premier and members of his Cabinet with red eyes and tear-stained cheeks.

11:30 a. m. There being no Vice President in France, the Cabinet decreed that the Chamber and Senate, which recently adjourned for a General Election (see p. 20), must reassemble as the National Assembly at Versailles and elect a new President of the Republic.

"To the French people!" read the Cabinet's proclamation. ". . . All France, stricken with astonishment and plunged into consternation, mourns the illustrious Elder whose life was spent in her service and whose four sons died in her defense.

"She inclines before the saddened widow, who this morning saw the closed eyes of her husband who also fell on the field of honor.

"Let us honor our Chief ... by our calm and our dignity. . . .

"Vive la France! Vive la Republique!

(Signed) "TARDIEU."

Aftermath. Though the Paris police who third-degreed Assassin Gorgulov ended by calling him a "madman," this opinion was reversed by three French alienists who proceeded to find him "sane and responsible for his act," a finding which probably meant that Dr. Gorgulov will be guillotined as was the assassin of the only other French President ever assassinated: President Marie Franc,ois Sadi Carnot, stabbed by an Italian anarchist at Lyons, June 24, 1894.

By way of hurling a political bombshell which he hoped would swing French voters to the Right, former President Alexander Millerand declared: "I have private information which enables me to affirm categorically that the assassin of President Doumer belonged to the regular Bolshevik forces."

On the contrary, Russians who had known Dr. Gorgulov in Paris, Vienna. Prague and Brussels, declared that aside from practicing medicine with no proper credentials his chief preoccupation seemed to be with an embryonic movement called the "Green Fascists" which was to oust Russian Communism and make him the "Green Dictator." There was ample evidence that numerous Russians had talked about a "Green plot" with Dr. Gorgulov, but no evidence that his "Green Fascists" existed anywhere as a party last week. The fact that he had been twice expelled from France for medical practice without a license led to questions as to how he managed to return to France last week, gave the Paris Communist sheet L'Humanite an opening to declare: "The Government of France is responsible for the assassination of the President of the Republic!"

Naturally the Moscow headquarters of the Communist International denied that Assassin Gorgulov was a Communist, crossed its fingers with the observation: 'The Party rejects individual terrorist acts."

To gaze upon the waxen face of dead President Doumer, the people of France shuffled slowly to the Elysee, packed closely in a queue eight wide, blocks long. Drenched by fickle showers, flecked by hail, many a citizen waited three hours to file by the bier, resting in state before a great black canopy.

Career of Doumer. The life of President Paul Doumer began with a coincidence. His father, a common railway foreman, died the day Son Paul was born.

Growing up in desperate poverty while his mother worked as a charwoman. Paul Doumer ran errands for pay almost as soon as he could run, became apprenticed to an engraver of medals when barely in his 'teens, studied nights and won the French equivalent of a high school diploma when 15.

By the time he was 21, Engraver Doumer had married "for love" a girl with no dot, and had wrung from the University of Paris a degree which set him up as Professor Doumer. From teaching in a country school he graduated to provincial journalism, next into politics and in 1888 was elected to the Chamber of Deputies. From then on he slogged and slaved at all sorts of political tasks, won recognition as an expert on finance but drifted into debt and barely managed to extricate himself by obtaining appointment as Governor General of French Indo-China, where he ruled 17,000,000 souls with Coolidgian frugality, Rooseveltian firmness. Returning to France he was elected Speaker of the Chamber in 1905 and in 1906 he took the bold plunge of running for President of the Republic against the Speaker of the Senate, Clement Armand Fallieres. By a vote of 44940-371 the National Assembly elected as President not Speaker Doumer but Speaker Fallieres.

It was during the War that the Senators and Deputies who elect French Presidents came at last really to know and respect Paul Doumer. Working under "Tiger" Clemenceau yet also friendly with Aristide Briand, M. Doumer slowly became symbolic of the type of Frenchman who is quietly indomitable in defense of La Patrie. As the father of five fighting sons only one of whom was not slain by the enemies of France, M. Doumer wrung the nation's heart by writing a book of austere dignity, Le Lime de Mes Fils.

In the post-War years Paul Doumer was twice made Finance Minister by Premier Briand who used to boast "I myself know nothing about money!" When the "Peace Man" decided to crown his long career by seeking the Presidency of France he asked M. Doumer--whose candidacy had previously been announced -- to withdraw. Quiet, firm, bourgeois to the core Senator Doumer refused to withdraw, broke the Peace Man's heart by his triumph.

As President le bon bourgeois had only one eccentricity--which almost drove the police frantic. He would not permit detectives to dog his heels, motored about France to see his friends totally unguarded and serene. Who would kill the father of Four Sons? To President Doumer the very notion was preposterous. He was confident that all men knew him for what he was--a good, industrious man to whom the honor and defense of France were supremely dear. Respectfully pressed to accept a secret service guard by former Premier Pierre Laval, last year, the President replied with an ancient chuckle:

"My little one, your plain-clothes policemen with their heavy boots, long mustaches and inevitable baggy umbrellas are altogether too conspicuous. If I went about with them I would have no privacy at all. Every one would spot me."

* Within two hours the Italian Ambassador officially protested to the French Foreign Office "the intolerable presumption of Gorgulov in termina himself a Fascist."

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