Four

KILLED BY ENGLISH CARDINAL

ACTOR DIES BLESSING FRANCE

AS PRINCESS WEEPS

IN BOIS DE BOULOGNE:

GREAT ACTOR DIES

IN ARMS OF

PRIMATE & PRINCESS

FINAL WORDS

“France is Everything!”

The understandable mistake of an English Cardinal and a Hungarian Princess of the words “Franz! Set to!” to mean “La France, c’est tout!” silenced all of Bernheim’s enemies at his death, for to minimize a man who had spoken such last words in the presence of two witnesses of such integrity would have provoked a lynching by an emotional populace. Though his lawyer was soon to hand over to his daughter bank cipher numbers and securities from funds and investments held entirely outside France, the national press, on the morning of the death of Paul-Alain Bernheim and for days thereafter, sternly proclaimed him to be “a true Frenchman” and “a great patriot who died as he lived.” The Chamber of Deputies grieved that the nation’s greatest artist had been struck down and urged all of France into mourning.

The police reached Cours Albert I with the tragic news at seven-twenty the following morning; they had felt that the daughter might as well be allowed to sleep while she could. At seven twenty-five, Lieutenant-Colonel von Rhode’s copy of the morning newspaper arrived as he was putting finishing touches on the study he had written the night before. He was absorbed in his text, and the orderly put the newspaper on the table beside him.

The employment of mobile and armored forces in battle will usually mark a decisive phase, and the tanks allotted should therefore be designed to insure or confirm the success of the main attack. Tank brigades or other mechanized forces are not suited for attacking strongly fortified localities and should generally be used to attack the enemy’s weakness rather than his strength. Suitable uses may be to strike the enemy on the flank, to attack enemy reserves in movement in order to prevent their intervention in battle, or to attack gun positions, headquarters, or other valuable points in the rear, when results gained are calculated to have decisive influence on the main attack.

A housefly caused von Rhode’s glance to fall on the photograph on the front page of the newspaper. It ran on four columns. He took the paper up slowly, unfolding it to read the story which ran below the fold, then read the eulogy heavily bordered in black and boxed on two columns.

One of the most intensely human citizens of the most endearingly human nation on this earth, our France, is gone. Paul-Alain Bernheim lived for the sake of living, not to live “correctly.” With human genius for blending Humanity’s whims and self-indulgences with Humanity’s aspirations, he cared less about making a mistake or an enemy then he did that one day he would be done with a life in which he had made all of the mistakes and all of the enemies humanly possible.

Paul-Alain Bernheim is dead, blessed with humanism. His life was a vivid explosion which assured all who would seek to curb him that there was little enough time given us for living. In that measure of humanism and expanding life, he was France.

Von Rhode grabbed his cap and, yelling for a car, rushed out of the building.

Paule, in a negligee, took the news from the police numbly. Yes, she would identify the body. Yes. Yes. Yes to anything. When they left she turned away blindly from Clotilde and Mme. Citron and walked slowly along the corridor to her father’s study, touching the wall for support. She closed the door behind her and stood where all the minutes of her father’s life had been crowded into the leather-bound books. Wherever he had gone this time, perhaps to haunt the rooms in the Hôtel Meurice, to which he had consigned all of his loving wives, a part of him was here and she would stay here with it. He had never sent her away with the others, and this room was as far as she could follow him. How could she ever leave this room? How could she step on the cracks in the pavement of time if he were not ahead of her to set the jaunty pace? She took down the first leather-bound book, as if she wanted to read over the minutes of his life again to try to understand what he had left unsaid to her.

In her grief she had left the front door open. Veelee entered and dropped his cap on a chair. Hearing the sobbing, he moved along the corridor and opened the door to the study. He stood behind Paule’s chair and put his hands on her shoulders to let his strength flow into her, and as she turned to look up, he lifted her into his arms, touching her hair, murmuring softly. He had the wit to speak in French. She had leaned hard on the protection of only one man all of her life. Now she saw that one man had been replaced with another, and she was able to cut the tie which bound her to her father.

The funeral was a spectacular of grief, and many flash guns. Three independent musical ensembles, totaling forty-six instruments, were commissioned by three anonymous mourners who evidently had the same idea that he would have wanted it that way. Seven ballerinas of an amazing spectrum of ages were at graveside. Actresses of films, opera, music halls, the theatre, radio, carnivals, circuses, pantomimes, and lewd exhibitions mourned in the front line. There were also society leaders, lady scientists, women politicians, mannequins, couturières, Salvation Army lassies, all but one of his wives, a lady wrestler, a lady matador, twenty-three lady painters, four lady sculptors, a car-wash attendant, shopgirls, shoplifters, shoppers, and the shopped; a zoo assistant, two choir girls, a Métro attendant from the terminal at the Bois de Vincennes, four beauty-contest winners, a chambermaid; the mothers of children, the mothers of men, the grandmothers of children and the grandmothers of men; and the general less specialized, female public-at-large which had come from eleven European countries, women perhaps whom he had only pinched or kissed absent-mindedly while passing through his busy life. They attended twenty-eight hundred and seventy strong, plus eleven male friends of the deceased.

The counsel for the departed, Maître Gitlin, read a short service over the coffin at the cemetery.

As required by German Army regulations, Lieutenant-Colonel von Rhode, on applying for permission to marry a foreigner, had no trouble whatsoever in securing approval from the Reichsministerium through his superior officer, General Klarnet, even though the woman was a Jew. This was a tribute to his family’s ancient traditions in the military service of his fatherland.