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By now Nikita Khrushchev was his old bouncy self. He stopped off to tell the Chamber of Commerce how eager he was to have dealings with France's biggest capitalists, if only he had more to buy with. "We have a little gold," he added, "but we keep it. I don't know why. Lenin said, 'A day will come when they will pave floors of public toilets with gold.' " Then Khrushchev abruptly asked whether anyone knew of any descendants of a Frenchman named Lebrun who had owned the Ukrainian mine where he had slaved as a youth. No one did, and Khrushchev laughed, saying, "I do not ask for any reparations. Since then I have had many."
"We Have a Saying ..." Nina Petrovna Khrushchev proved herself a more engaging personality. At the Franco-U.S.S.R. Society, and at the two-room apartment once occupied by Lenin, she threw her solid arms about French Communist leaders and bussed them resoundingly. At the middle-class department store, the Galeries Lafayette, she fell in love with a pale green at-home dress. Later she took in a bit of the Louvre—the Mona Lisa, Napoleon's crown, the Venus de Milo—along with two of her daughters, in a 40-minute sprint. Meanwhile, at a luncheon at the Diplomatic Press Association, her husband spoke again.
"We have a wise saying," said he: " 'Better to have 100 friends than 100 rubles.' We would like France's friends to become our friends." But in his prepared answers to questions put by correspondents, there was a good deal more bite. "We want a final period put to the Second World War by a peace treaty. If our efforts remain in vain, we will be led to conclude a unilateral treaty of peace with the Democratic German Republic." And what of Western rights in Berlin and the null allied garrison? Khrushchev acted as though the garrison was the only instrument of Western power, and his venom matched his error. "If they are to prepare for war," he bellowed, "I wish they were half a million. It would be that much easier to leave them there and encircle them."
All in all, as Khrushchev went from boos and cries of "Budapest" in Bordeaux to cheers and waving flags in heavily Communist Marseilles, the feeling spread that he had won no new friends, had overplayed his hand, and was getting nowhere in trying to speak over the 6 ft. 4 in. Charles de Gaulle to the French people.