THEY CALLED ME CASSANDRA—Geneviève Tabouis—Scribner ($3).
Other books have described the death of France. This book describes how France lay dying for 20 years. It is an alienist's intimate case history of the progressive political schizophrenia between Right and Left—a disorder which infected all Frenchmen and all French classes, a disorder so incurable that the Nazi invasion seems almost like an inevitable mercy killing.
Against this doom Geneviève Tabouis, ex-political pythoness of Paris' Leftist L'Oeuvre, for seven years waged a one-woman struggle, of which these memoirs are a record. To her hopeless struggle she brought a union sacrée of journalistic hysteria and a sense of history that made her acutely aware of all that was most ominous to France in the turmoil of her times. She crammed her daily column on international politics with facts. Sometimes they were staggering and momentarily effective. Sometimes they were merely melodramatic.
Tabouis' wealth of information and insight worked as much against as for her. She became less a guide than a sensation. They called her Cassandra, forgetting that it was not Cassandra but the Trojans who would not listen to her who made the big mistake. For France did not die merely of the wounds inflicted by murderers and traitors. France died first of the deafness, blindness, dumbness and frivolity which are the proud hallmarks of the skeptical civilized mind.
Predestined. Geneviève was predestined for her job. She was born into a diplomatic family when "a little man named Loubet" was President of France's shaky third try at a Republic. Her uncle Jules Cambon ("the dominating influence in my life") was France's Ambassador to Washington, Madrid, Berlin. Her uncle, Paul Cambon, was France's famed Ambassador to London who signed the Entente Cordiale. She grew up amid discussions about anti-Semitism, anti-clericalism, anti-militarism, anti-Republicanism. She recalls, "as if it were yesterday," her parents saying: "Things have never been as bad. . . . This state of affairs cannot go on."
Now Author Tabouis realizes that those bad times were gay, uninhibited days when there was still an element of pour le sport in politics. "One old gentleman [Baron Christiany] made it a point at all social affairs which the President [Loubet] attended to throw rotten eggs at him" or bash in the Presidential topper with a cane. It was not long before Mme. Tabouis would see Premier Léon Blum's head bashed in by young Royalists.
Ambassador Jules Cambon took youthful Niece Tabouis to France's embassy in Madrid to see the marriage of Alfonso XIII. There she had a foretaste of the history of the 20th Century. She saw a bomb explode in the wedding procession, spatter blood on the Queen's wedding dress, smash the crown on the royal coach.
Back in Paris, she specialized in Egyptology, learned ancient Egyptian, and, "irritated at the thought that many . . . treasures in my field were withheld from the masses," presently wrote popularized lives of Tutankhamen, Nebuchadnezzar, Solomon. Then Ambassador Jules Cambon took Niece Tabouis to Berlin, where she "was struck by the complete absence of good taste."