Harry Truman's increased pressure on world Communism extended all the way to Paris' Place de Châteaudun, where a beggar was plaintively singing: J'attendrai. Fernand Lurçat, who had lost a leg in a Nazi concentration camp and was now a night watchman at Communist headquarters, felt the international tension. Irritably, he hobbled out and told the beggar to shut up. "On discute,là-haute" (They're deliberating, up there), explained Lurgat.
They were deliberating, passionately and bitterlythe 37 men who form the Central Committee of the Communist Party of France, the world's most important outside Russia....