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Novel Idea. One day Author Tabouis called on the editor of L'Oeuvre. "I have an idea," she told him, "which will make L'Oeuvre a fortune." Her novel idea: to tell the truth. L'Oeuvre's editor "was visibly bowled over. . . ." This was an I innovation in French journalism almost as revolutionary as the invention of the printing press. But he agreed. In ten years the circulation of L'Oeuvre jumped from 80,000 to 500,000. Soon Reporter Tabouis was L'Oeuvre's foreign editor, and one of the most influential in Europe.
For L'Oeuvre, Author Tabouis spent hours in the Chamber of Deputies. Uncle Cambon got her a card for the President's box. "All the lovely friends of the Ministers coaxed to be given cards to it." Several of the statesmen had a signal system to let their lady friends know when it was time to go. Minister Loucheur passed his hand over his bald head three times. Minister Daladier blew his nose furiously five or six times. Deputy Ybarnégaray, later Minister for Youth & Family in the Vichy Government, boldly waved a sheet of paper. "Oh, those gentlemen," said Head Usher Bouchonnet. who had the worldliness of a hotel clerk. "Madame Tabouis. if you only knew!"
For seven years Geneviève Tabouis was both reporter and actor in France's disintegration. Her informal luncheons were famous. "There was scarcely a foreign minister visiting Paris who did not make a note in his memorandum book—Wednesday (or Saturday)—lunch at Madame Tabouis' house.' " Actors, poets, writers also came. Once the conversation was about Royalist Writer Léon Daudet's unforgettable nicknames for people he did not like. He called New Dealish Léon Blum "the Circumcized Hermaphrodite." A bewhiskered Rightist deputy was "our most Distinguished Burper." Foreign Minister Boncour was "the Don Juan of the Washrooms." Author Tabouis herself became "Madame Tata, the Clairvoyant."
Editor Tabouis began her tremendous exposés. She exposed Laval's secret Ethiopian deal with Mussolini. She exposed the terms of the Hoare-Laval pact. She foretold (from information supplied by agents among the Nazis) the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Nazi seizure of Austria and Czecho-Slovakia. In time she seemed to be able to see through dispatch boxes, the impenetrable files of chancelleries, the even more impenetrable minds of Europe's statesmen.
When Hitler shouted, "As for Madame Tabouis, that wisest of women, she knows what I am about to do even before I know it myself," 50,000,000 Frenchmen laughed. For Author Tabouis, with possibly the best sources of any European journalist, often did not show good judgment in sifting the true from the sensational. She promulgated not only scoops but fables. As her consciousness grew that France was doomed, so did her hysteria.
She was in the thick of the Popular Front and Spanish Loyalist affairs. The failure of both, followed by Munich, all but shattered her. Then the Germans invaded Poland. Madame Tabouis watched her son go off to war.