Symbol in the Surf

Returned to Hollywood last week from a South Sea cruise on the steamer Monterey, slim, honey blonde Joan Fontaine told how she had seen, without knowing it, an appropriately serene "revolution" on the languorous French island of Tahiti.

When the Monterey docked at Samoa en route to Tahiti, she said, a middle-aged English-looking Frenchman named General Richard Edmond Maurice Edouard Brunot came aboard with Mme. Brunot and the General's aide, one Captain Frataux. On the trip to Tahiti, Joan Fontaine found that the Captain was as gallant as French officers are supposed to be, while the Brunots were extremely retiring. The General said nothing of his purposes and few of the Monterey's passengers so much as knew his rank.

On the morning of June 6, when the Monterey entered the sunny harbor of Papeete, Tahiti, General Brunot appeared on deck in the blue uniform of France. An antiquated French airplane droned over the ship and dipped its wings. At the dock Joan Fontaine saw General Brunot received by two khaki-clad companies of native troops. A band broke the tropic stillness with the Marseillaise and Joan Fontaine, thinking of the France that was, could not help crying a bit.

Later in the day Tahiti's word-of-mouth "coconut radio" carried conflicting rumors that General Brunot had been assassinated, that he had effected some sort of coup, that somewhere among the swaying palms there had been general slaughter.

Still later it became known that immediately on landing the General had taken command of the island's sympathetic police, had bloodlessly arrested a pro-Vichy Government clique of 40 Tahitians (mostly judges, lawyers and doctors trying to safeguard their Government pensions), had removed them to a soft-aired concentration camp. By so doing, the General had removed resistance to a Tahitian plebiscite of last September, when the island's population declared themselves against the Vichy Government and in favor of General Charles de Gaulle by a vote of 5,000-to-18.

Last week, if Tahiti was scarcely more than a tiny, surf-washed symbol of the French Empire, that symbol adorned the cause of Free France.

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