(3 of 8)
Better Than Orson. Suddenly Pinay was a hero. Frenchmen began to compare him with Raymond Poincaré, who won fame in the 1920s not because he had been both President and Premier of France, but because he had saved the franc. In newsreel theaters, flashes of the dignified little man in plain double-breasted suit and the homburg provoked wild applause—"the first politician since De Gaulle who has received spontaneous applause," reported an impressed minister after an afternoon at the movies. At the autograph exchange in the gardens of the Palais Royal, the signature of Antoine Pinay went to the top of the priority list. "Even before Jean Marais [the actor]?" Pinay asked incredulously when he learned of it. "Even before Orson Welles," he was told.
One Cheese, Two Prices. Pinay moved his office to the ornate Hotel Matignon, the official residence of Premiers. But he refused to move even a toothbrush or clean shirt into the comfortable apartment maintained there for the chief of the government; he preferred to stay in his unpretentious five-room apartment, to save himself the rigors of the moving-out day which comes to all who move into the Matignon. As was his habit when a Deputy, he locked up his desk almost every weekend and took off to St. Chamond, to look in on his tannery and, as plain His Honor the Mayor, chat with his townspeople.
The new Premier browbeat some segments of industry into chopping prices (wholesale prices dropped 7.7%). He poked into shops and department stores to watch prices and buying habits. In one food store, he watched as a shopkeeper cut a Camembert cheese in half and then priced each half differently. "Always—you hear me, always," Pinay reported indignantly, "the women asked for the more expensive piece." The story is told that Pinay, unable one weekend to get his customary haircut at St. Chamond, went to a Paris barber, and was shocked when he was charged twice what he usually paid back home. Now there is a price ceiling on haircuts. He eased the mistrust of France's cautious peasants by combining a general amnesty for past income-tax evasions with a novel bond issue which could be cashed for gold: it drew more than 34 tons ($42 million) out of cellars, socks and mattresses all over France.
Waste of Time & Money. These homely activities made sense to the France that bred Antoine Pinay—not the American tourist's France of roasted chestnuts and rhinestoned poodles on the Champs-Ely-sées, "Allo darleeng" in the Place Pigalle, pressed duck at the Tour d'Argent, bikinis at Biarritz and baccarat at Nice—but the provincial France of hard-scraped farms, gnarled vineyards, smudgy little factories; of closefisted small shopkeepers, scuff-knuckled farmers and black-stockinged bakers' daughters. It is a France tradition-bound, slow to change, as stolid, solid and unspectacular as the pallid, stucco-faced building in the small town of Saint-Symphorien-sur-Coise where Antoine Pinay was born 61 years ago. His father was a drygoods merchant, his mother a steel-willed matriarch who trusted sternly in God and the franc.