Most people who go to Baden-Baden do so to quaff curative quarts of German water, tone up their livers, rest. But last week in the sumptuous Hotel Stephanie potent bankers from seven nations continued to defy all restful rules. Night after long night they kept the Grand Ballroom blazing behind locked doors until nearly dawn. Chairman of these occult doings was driving, restless Jackson Eli Reynolds, President of the First National Bank of New York.
With colleagues representing the great central banks of Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, brisk Mr. Reynolds was trying to whip into shape a charter for the new Bank for International Settlements (TIME, Sept. 23) which under the Young Plan will handle German Reparations payments, issue Reparations Bonds. The Chairman's attitude: "We will go on until we have finished. This is a woodcutting job. There is going to be nothing spectacular about it and very little news."
Certainly there was nothing spectacular last week in the wilted mien of Belgian Banker Leon Delacroix as he went up to bed from the busy ballroom well after midnight. Nearly all the European delegates looked tired as spaniels. Distinguished M. Delacroix affects smartly upturned moustaches. Now they drooped. As he disrobed, the onetime Prime Minister of Belgium and the only original member of the Reparations Commission who remained a member last week sighed to Mme Delacroix, "Hélas, I am not so young."
Anxiously Mme Delacroix listened to her husband's breathing. She remembered that when the Young Plan Committee was sitting in Paris, Britain's great Banker Baron Revelstoke had gone to bed similarly weary and died of heart failure before dawn (TIME, Jan. 14 to June 17). Banker Delacroix's sleep seemed normal, however, and soon his wife was asleep too. About 5 a. m. she felt his hand on her shoulder: "I am feeling ill." To the telephone flew
Mme Delacroix. Meanwhile her husband rose unsteadily and she had to put down the instrument to help him into an arm chair. The sleepy switchboard boy seemed to take eons to raise the hotel doctor. Before he arrived the heart of Leon Delacroix had stopped.