The Impostor

Two weeks ago 79-year-old Speaker Edouard Herriot heaved himself up from his chair overlooking France's Assembly to announce that one of its members, Jacques Ducreux, 41, had been killed in an auto smashup. At once the other deputies stood up, according to custom, to wait for the expected eulogy. They knew this one would probably take time: after all, Monsieur Ducreux was a member of the executive committee of Herriot's own Radical Socialist Party. Herriot started off in style: he limned the pastoral beauties of the Vosges countryside where Ducreux came from, and recalled its people's heroism during the Franco-Prussian War. But then, after effusive condolences to the deputy's family, he unexpectedly finished. The house sat down with murmurs of relief; the eulogy had been mercifully short.

But the deputies thought there was something odd about Herriot's speech. Why had he avoided tributes to Ducreux's wartime services and his promising political career? And, at the funeral, there was no honor guard, no wreath from the Assembly. Something was amiss, something which well-intentioned old Herriot had been at pains to conceal. After ten days of buzz-buzz in the corridors of the Assembly, Paris-Presse broke the story. Deputy Ducreux had not been Deputy Ducreux: his real name was Jacques Tacnet. Why had he changed his name?

From his widow came a confident retort: nothing to it, really. "Jacques changed his name because his family was ashamed to have him in politics"; his father had wanted him to take up some respectable career like wine making. Jacques had rebelled and had gone into politics, using his underground resistance name.

This was too much for the French police. They gave out the full story, which they had known since they pulled Tacnet-Ducreux's body from his wrecked car and found his two identity cards. Tacnet, they said, was a collaborator during the Vichy days, later joined the army in Algeria and deserted. Then--even though he was on the "wanted" list of every gendarmerie in France--he entered politics in the town of Wisenbach and got elected to parliament last year, with the help of the De Gaullists.

Speaker Herriot admitted that he had known these facts since Tacnet's death, but thought it best to let the story be interred with the impostor.

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