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Salon v. Saloon. That statement was made by a balding, crinkly-eyed little man who used to be known as the socialite Mayor of Versailles. Gaston Henry-Haye was a moderately successful businessman when he entered politics in 1928 by running for Deputy from Versailles. Behind him was the record of an officer who had spent 18 days before Verdun, coming down from the lines with just five other members of his company. In 1935 he became a Senator and the same year was elected Mayor of Versailles. As a Mayor he got to know such eminent U. S. citizens as John D. Rockefeller Jr. (who restored much of Versailles), General John J. Pershing (whose statue stands at Versailles) and Mrs. Harrison Williams ("best-dressed U. S. woman"). As a Senator he was active in the France-Germany Committee, of which Fernand de Brinon and Otto Abetz were leaders. All three became Ambassadors after the Franco-German Armistice: Abetz became Germany's Ambassador to Paris, De Brinon Vichy's Ambassador to Paris, Henry-Haye Vichy's Ambassador to the U. S.
Gaston Henry-Haye never met Hitler and there is no record that his activities toward appeasing Germany were less patriotic than those of Neville Chamberlain and many another man of property and peace. Nevertheless, when he arrived in the U. S. as Ambassador, the mass of U. S. citizens instinctively distrusted him because of his background. They have continued to distrust him because Ambassador Henry-Haye has chosen to plead his cause largely among intimates in U. S. salons rather than among the masses in U. S. saloons. His pride, his bitterness that France with her 100,000 World War II dead and her 2,000,000 prisoners should fare so badly in the popular opinion of friends of her better days, prevents him from making a wider appeal. When he says: "I am pro-French," as a soldier of France he expects to be believed.
Ambassador Henry-Haye arrived last September with a twofold job: 1) to win friends for the Vichy Government; 2) to get food and medical supplies to Unoccupied France. In the six months he has been at his post he has done his job so well that last week his appointment was renewed for another six months. (Under French law M. Henry-Haye, as a Senator, may hold his Ambassadorship only under a temporary six-months appointment.) The somewhat qualified esteem in which his Government is now held in the U. S. is due to a great extent to the Ambassador's work, but perhaps because of its inconspicuousness his work has not been properly appreciated.
The French Ambassador has two busy aides in his press attaché, Captain Charles Emmanuel Brousse, bomber-squadron commander in World War I, and his longtime friend and assistant military attaché, one-eyed Lieut. Colonel Georges Bertrand-Vigne, another soldier of Verdun and Narvik. In addition he numbers among his good friends the elegant Mrs. Williams, ageless Lady Mendl, Count René de Chambrun (Pierre Laval's son-in-law, who quit the U. S. for France after Laval's fall), Jeweler Pierre Carder (longtime paterfamilias of the French colony in Manhattan), onetime U. S. Ambassador to France William Christian Bullitt (who helped to get him his appointment) and, of course, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and General John J. Pershing.