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The judgment against him (250 to 213) was not a constitutional majority, and therefore Mollet was not required to resign, but Mollet snatched at the opportunity anyway, and quit. While Mollet ate sandwiches with President Coty at the Elysée Palace, some Deputies, over beer and sauerkraut at the nearby Brasserie Lipp, belatedly discovered that in the haste of Mollet's overthrow they had forgotten to faire la cuisine, i.e., cook up a successor.
This is a task complicated by arithmetical certainties. With the 143 Communists and 37 Poujadists outside the parliamentary pale, a new Premier would need the approval, avowed or implicit, of the bulk of the remaining 400 Deputies. One hundred of these are Socialists who have vowed to serve only in a government headed by a Socialist. By going down waving a Socialist tract, Mollet had "fallen to the left," entrenching himself firmly in the esteem of his followers and reducing the possibility of forming "a Mollet government without Mollet."
Mendès Quits. Oddly enough, the man who had suffered most by the upset was ironic, bitter-tongued Pierre Mendés-France, who had joined Mollet's government at its inception with 13 members of his Radical Socialist Party. Mendés-France later resigned over Mollet's Algerian policy, but let his fellow Radicals stay on in the Cabinet. Last week he was unable to whip his party into line for a solid vote against Mollet, and, crushingly defeated, barked: "I'm thoroughly disgusted. I'm quitting."
At week's end, commissioned by President Coty on a "mission of information" to bring the parties together, former Premier René Pleven had no illusions about becoming the incoming Premier himself. Said he: "My task is only to spur reconciliation, and I can use only one argument: patriotism." Once, on a similar mission of information, Guy Mollet had recommended Pleven as having the best chances of forming a government; now Pleven, after all his looking, might find himself recommending Mollet to Coty. Such is French politics. Despite the nation's evident prosperity, the growing budget deficit was bringing France perilously close to bankruptcy, the franc was in grave danger, the war in Algeria no nearer ending, but what saddened gracious, occasion-loving Rene Coty was the fact that he would have to put off, indefinitely perhaps, his warmly anticipated state visit to the U.S. Said one of Coty's aides: "Now what do we do with those white dinner jackets we had made? Nobody wears them in Paris."