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Both as politician and social animal, Mendès was a lonely man in these years. "There's a certain interior coldness about him," admitted one of his few close friends. His austerity was somehow impressive in itself. He does not smoke, dance or gorge. "He's a great believer in the American drugstore," said a friend, "because he can eat a little and quickly." In Paris, he is rarely invited to theater premieres or fashionable salons. "Getting choice invitations requires work," says one Parisian hostess. "Pierre doesn't go around complimenting people. He just doesn't care." The only passion he developed during these years was one for skiing.
Typically, he studied it as if skiing were a problem of high finance, developed a theory that it is a "study in will power." "He thought that one could reach a sort of inner harmony while skiing," says a friend. That harmony is still far off; he has broken a leg, been hospitalized with contusions. "I've never seen such a terrible skier," says a friend.
Within Thirteen Votes. In June 1953, President Vincent Auriol asked Mendès to try to form France's 18th postwar government. At first he refused; he was not ready. Then characteristically he concluded: "After criticizing the government as I have done, the people would not understand if I refused myself to try."
He failed by 13 votes. But his speech, blunt, sometimes eloquent, always incisive, raised him from the role of gloomy, intellectual Cassandra to the stature of a national figure. Overnight he became, in his own unblinking eyes, a man of destiny. "I have created a hope and trust in the country," he said. "It is now my duty to honor this hope and trust."
Sounding Board. To organize and kindle this new enthusiasm, rising young newspaperman Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, publisher of the intellectual magazine L'Express, began a series of informal diners du travail. Jacques Soustelle, De Gaulle's bright young lieutenant, came, so did young MRPers of Bidault's party like André Monteil and Robert Buron, and Socialists like Robert Lacoste and Gaston Defferre. Says Servan-Schreiber: "First, we had to get a sounding board for Mendès. With his isolation in Parliament, he made brilliant speeches but there was no political echo. Secondly, he had always worked alone. He didn't know how to work in a team."
Mendès waited. He was content to have Bidault try to negotiate an end to the Indo-China war. Let the opponents of negotiations negotiate, he said, because they are tougher. But Mendès always insisted that Geneva was folly, that the only way to get peace was through direct negotiation with the Viet Minh. "Really, your policy is incomprehensible," he told Bidault. "You ask Mao to stop aid to Ho. Why should he make you this gift?" Mendès also suspected another motive behind Bidault's policy: Bidault's hope that the U.S. could be persuaded to do what the French alone could not do—maintain French illusory politique de grandeur in Indo-China.