At the Bedside

Since the days of the French Revolution, when fanatics proclaimed that they had dethroned God and placed Reason on the ramparts of heaven, Frenchmen have struggled over the deathbeds of famous men. Stories, some apocryphal and some authenticated, tell of the last moments of such famed skeptics as Aristide Briand, Paul Valery, Voltaire and Andre Gide. Last week the battle was once more joined over the final hours on earth of Edouard Herriot, who had done as much as anyone to insist on the separation of church and state, and had fought tirelessly against church control of public education in France.

The longtime leader of the Radical Socialist Party, a gourmet and bon vivant, Herriot was for 52 years mayor of Lyon, five times minister, and three times Premier of France. An inveterate joiner (some 300 organizations), Herriot was so outraged by the Russian rape of Hungary that he resigned from the Franco-Soviet Friendship Society--and when he asked the name of the society's president, to address his resignation to, he discovered it was himself.

Recumbent Wishes. In 1957, full of years, Herriot died at 84. Ex-Premier Guy Mollet called him "the very incarnation of the Republic." Said ex-Premier Pierre Mendes-France: "For 34 years I have admired, followed and loved him." Herriot's free-thinking friends were at first startled, and then indignant, to hear that on his deathbed, Lifelong Agnostic Edouard Herriot had gone back into the Roman Catholic Church, and been buried with church ritual.

Last week the dispute came to open warfare. The first barrage was laid down by Biologist Jean Rostand, 65, who reputedly knows more about frogs than any man alive, and who had been elected to Herriot's vacant seat in the Academie Franc,aise. Wearing the academy's braided uniform and cocked hat and with a sword dangling awkwardly at his side, Rostand, as custom requires, used his acceptance speech to eulogize the academician whose place he took. Herriot's last moments, according "to certain witnesses," said Rostand, were not "in harmony with his whole life." He went on to censure the "passions" that created the contradiction "between the words of the man standing and the murmurs of the man recumbent." Novelist Jules (Men of Good Will) Romains, went farther, assured the 40 "immortals" of the academy that it was untrue that "Herriot died denying the concepts of Herriot alive," and deplored the "exploitation of the 'last hours' of an illustrious man."

Pierre Cardinal Gerlier, primate of the Lyon diocese, who was responsible for bringing the dying Herriot back into the church, issued a statement rejecting with indignation "the gratuitous and odious allegations . . . which dare to assert that I had taken advantage of the weakness of a diminished man." Herriot not only answered his questions in a firm voice, said the cardinal, but twice expressed "his desire for a religious funeral."

Hostile Answers. In rebuttal, Romains produced a letter from Herriot's widow stating that her husband "had died perfectly calmly in all freedom of thought, as he had lived." Entering the fray, the Paris-Presse published a telephone interview with Mme. Herriot in which she added that "when the cardinal made his visit, my husband was no longer conscious, and could not recognize anybody."

Cardinal Gerlier retorted that Mme. Herriot "can affirm nothing," and insisted that at the time of his conversation with the dying Herriot, she "was at the far end of the room and could have heard very little." The Herriots' maid supported the cardinal, as did a nun who had been at the deathbed. While clericals and anticlericals exchanged broadsides, badgered Mme. Herriot offered a last line about her husband's death. Said she: "No one will ever know the truth."

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