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Pretty Mary Plummer. "It was the happiest time I have ever known, the only really happy one"—so wrote Clemenceau of three brief years he spent as a young man in New York, where he worked as a librarian, and at Stamford, Conn., where he taught young ladies French and how to ride horses, at Miss Aiken's boarding school.
"The library was well supplied with the best works of all sorts. It was generally deserted. I requisitioned it. Secluded, far from the tumult of the streets, in a little room inaccessible to the few visitors that came, I read the best historians and philosophers. Days, weeks passed. It lasted two years. My mind acquired there what it lacked; there my intellect completed its formation. It was a delight."
Miss Mary Plummer of Boston, pretty as a peach blossom, could not resist her fascinatingly brown-bearded French and riding master. They were married at City Hall, Manhattan, though she had wept for a religious wedding. At No. 212 West Twelfth Street (the dingy brick building still stands) she bore him the present Mme. Jacquemaire. Then he took her back to Paris—on the dread eve of 1870—where she bore him Michael and "Le Petit Pierre," now a businessman in Lima, Peru, where he raged last week at the slowness with which bulletins trickled in about his father.
After 23 years Mary and Georges were divorced. She died in 1922 in Wisconsin.
Wrecker of Cabinets. The bitterest years fast followed the happiest. Returning to Paris in the last days of fat Napoleon Ill's tottering empire, the Young Tiger was just in time to gnash impotent jaws as Bismarck's Prussians conquered with "blood and iron" at Sedan, then tramped on to Paris. The pomp, the swagger, the burning shame lit a blaze of hate in Clemenceau which nothing ever quenched. Bismarck, Wilhelm II, Stresemann—they were all anathema. "Stresemann was Bismarck's best pupil," growled the Tiger recently. "He has gotten everything for his country, while on our side everything has been abandoned. This will surely bring the next war."
As the Second Empire fell, young Dr. Clemenceau—for like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather he was an M.D.—seized every toehold to scramble up in the third republic. Poor patients helped to get their medico chosen Mayor of disreputable Montmartre, later a deputy to the National Assembly. In 1880 he founded La Justice, first of the string of Clemenceau news sheets which really made his fame. As leader of the extreme left radicals he became "the wrecker of cabinets"—is said to have clawed down 18 prime ministers.
Enemies dragged the name of Clemenceau into the Panama scandals of the '90s. Though falsely accused he lost his seat in parliament, seemed ruined. But another scandal—the Dreyfus case—made him a hero. As editor of L'Aurore he wrote the famed caption "J'Accuse!" above the most potent of many articles by Emile Zola which eventually freed Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus from "Devil Island," where an anti-Semite French government had sent him to rot. The fight to free Dreyfus took six of Clemenceau's and Zola's best years. Last week the grateful captain stumped around to sign M. Clemenceau's visitors book, just before the end.
Greatest Swordsman. Until he was past 60, Le Tigre challenged his enemies incessantly