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His pitch made, the pudgy Premier joined his Gothic host in a Simca convertible, and the two rolled off toward Paris. The night before, security police had made a final roundup of suspected troublemakers—a rightist general, a few young nationalists, a Trotskyite editor—to supplement the list of anti-Communists already on enforced "vacation" in Corsica (TIME, March 21). But the Parisians who were left kept their own enthusiasm well in check. The crowds along most of the route were thin, only the front row or so waving red flags under the Communist newspaper Humanite's exhortation to provide an "unforgettable welcome." As the guns roared an official 31-gun salute, 50 French lawyers in the Palais de Justice and 200 law students solemnly stood for one moment of silence. Nails, scattered along the Champs Elysees, were swept up in time. And when Khrushchev went to lunch at the Hotel Matignon, police had to scramble up a house next door and remove a Hungarian flag.
Borsch Strainers. Nikita Khrushchev himself ignored these lapses, and as he warmed to his mission, the fatigue that he had shown on his arrival vanished. He again reminded his hosts of his purpose by laying a huge wreath at the fortress of Mont Valerien, where 4,000 members of the French Resistance were shot by the Nazis; and though he said France's dead belonged to all the world, many Frenchmen thought the occasion an indecent political use of the dead. Even his gifts to President de Gaulle—models of Sputnik and Lunik—had their heavy-handed message. At the President's formal banquet in the Elysee Palace, behind a screen of azaleas and hydrangeas, police inspectors under the eyes of Soviet guards stood watch over three white boxes. With bitter humor, the French press dubbed the boxes "Nikita's Borsch Strainers," for they were there to test every morsel of food set before the Premier at the table of the President of France.
Early next morning, Khrushchev and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko went to De Gaulle's office for the first of their give-and-take conversations, to be resumed after Khrushchev and family finished their 1,800-mile tour of the provinces this week. That afternoon, when he made a speech in the Hotel de Ville near the working-class districts of the Bastille, tens of thousands of Communist sympathizers outside shouted, "Khru-chov, Khru-chov, Khru-chov!" Once again, Khru-chov returned to his favorite theme. "It isn't against such-and-such a country I speak," said he. "But if the German vengeance seekers are recognizing themselves and reacting to my warnings, what would you have me do? We have an old proverb which says that the cat smells of the lard it has eaten."