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There was no announcement of what these results were but there were suggestive leaks: 1) Dr. Schacht was said to have carried a personal message from Chancellor Hitler bidding Premier Blum not to consider the enlarged German Army as directed against France and wheedling for a weakening of Franco-Soviet ties. 2) In the air was a German offer of non-aggression against France for 25 years if France would agree not to interfere while the Nazis wade into Russia and smash the Bolsheviks. 3) As usual Dr. Schacht talked about "aligning" the currencies of the world in a stabilization agreement and about improving Franco-German trade through perfected clearing agreements. A net impression prevailed that the most important and possibly the only concrete result of Dr. Schacht's flying visit—nominally a mere return call upon new Governor Labeyrie of the Bank of France who recently called on him in Berlin—was to "break the ice" between Paris and Berlin, two regimes which have seldom had quite so little in common as they have today.
To bull-throated French Communist Party Leader Maurice Thorez the whole incident surpassed the powers of invective speech. He sat down and wrote a half-moaning, half-scorching letter to Premier Blum protesting that Governor Labeyrie's first visit was to Berlin "instead of London," protesting last week's Bank of France luncheon to Dr. Schacht, protesting Adolf Hitler's conscript decree, and winding up with a protest that Premier Blum & Cabinet were last week not attending radical French manifestations in favor of the Spanish radicals of the Madrid Cabinet.
Paying no attention, Premier Blum sent French police out to smash and break up private French organizations which had been collecting funds for the Madrid radicals. This should have roused Comrade Thorez to apoplectic rage, but instead the Paris Communist daily Humanité suddenly stopped printing appeals to French Reds to send money to Spanish Reds. A permissible inference was that the Moscow Comintern, paymaster and tune-caller of the French Communists, took with exceeding seriousness the possibility that Blum and Hitler might have a brain-wave and agree to regard each other as less of a menace than Stalin and what he stands for. Best way to put the best face on Communism and avoid any such brain-wave seemed to be for Communists to lie low.