"What's Wrong?"

In the Algerian seaport of Bone, F.L.N. terrorists tossed a grenade into a hotel, killing a guest, and in revenge a European mob surged through the streets and lynched the first two Moslems it encountered. In Oran. Sidi-bel-Abbes and Constantine, European counterterrorists exploded plastic bombs. At the U.N., the Afro-Asian nations lined up 46 of the 50 nations needed to call a special session of the U.N. General Assembly to discuss Tunisia's charge of French aggression at Bizerte. Boatloads of thousands of penniless French refugees, fleeing the possibility of renewed war in Tunisia, were docking at Marseille. After digesting this unpleasant assortment of news, an aide of President Charles de Gaulle last week said worriedly, "Things are not going at all well, mon general." De Gaulle stared at him with studied surprise, asked solicitously, "What's wrong? Is some member of your family ill?"

Rapped Clown. In his customary grand seclusion, Charles de Gaulle seemed unwilling to believe, or indifferent to the fact, that much of the world was distressed by his recent actions. Had France reacted too savagely in relation to the provocation in slaughtering more than 800 Tunisians at Bizerte? De Gaulle is reported to have remarked: "Bourguiba decided to act like a clown. He was rapped over the knuckles for it. So much the worse for him." The failure of the U.N. Security Council to condemn France, after De Gaulle's scornful disregard of it, only convinces De Gaulle that the U.S., for all its misgivings, can only support the French position. He seems equally sure that the U.S. will head off any General Assembly debate on the base at Bizerte lest it give an opportunity to Cuba's Fidel Castro, backed by the Soviet Union, to sound off about the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo.

Last week Tunisia's President Habib Bourguiba accepted his first Communist aid, $27.7 million in ruble credits. He did so while muttering imprecations against the two nations that he had trusted, France and the U.S. To the De Gaulle government, this was less an occasion for regret than proof of Bourguiba's weakness. And when Bourguiba announced that if France would agree to negotiate its eventual withdrawal from Bizerte, he would not press for a U.N. debate, the confident French took their time about replying. An official source said casually that in view of present East-West tension over Berlin, the timetable for the departure of French troops from Bizerte could not be measured in terms of "days, weeks or even months." That left only years.

Violent Response. De Gaulle himself is still confronted by the two imponderables: the Algerian F.L.N. and his own French army. The breakdown of peace talks with the rebel F.L.N. at Lugrin over Algerian demands for all of the oil-rich Sahara came as an unpleasant surprise to Paris.

As for the French army, its ruthless tactics at Bizerte have been widely interpreted as a deliberate army maneuver --in excess of orders--to upset De Gaulle's peace moves in Algeria. High French officers, who led the April insurrection at Algiers and had been condemned to death in absentia, were reported casually strolling along the Champs-Elysees in Paris, unharmed. And Parisian left-wing newspapers, France Observateur and L'Express, predict that a second army putsch against De Gaulle in Algeria is scheduled for this month. Such speculations might ordinarily be discounted, but the same newspapers accurately forecast the army's uprising last April, naming names and dates.

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