Geneviève Tabouis Lectures in Beirut

At the opening of this season — the season of cold and frost — there appeared among us a woman's face bearing, together with the majesty of winter and the ripeness of autumn, the splendor of spring and the warmth of summer.

The Lebanese knew the writing of this “world stateswoman,” Madame Geneviève Tabouis, before the last war, from her articles in the newspaper “L'Œuvre”; and the rising generation read her in her latest book, “Greatness and Abasement among the Americans.” During the war years I used to read her in the great newspapers of Brazil, which surrounded her name with haloes of admiration and esteem.

There gathered at the Lebanese Cénacle, at the invitation of its founder, that unknown fighter Mr. Michel Asmar, that company of people who wait for six o'clock every Monday to enjoy the delights of literature and thought — delights prepared, after long and arduous study, by the masters of culture in this country, and offered to us as a lofty spiritual nourishment that makes us forget for an hour the chaos of politics, the din of wearisome daily life, and the chains of the economic squeeze which not a day passes without their growing heavier on the necks of those who bear them — and those who bear them are you and I, my dear reader, and your kin and mine, and your neighbors and mine.

Perhaps I — returning from afar — am alone in a particular feeling not shared by those who enter this blessed Cénacle. For every time I hear a delightful lecture — and how many they are at the Lebanese Cénacle — I bless Michel Asmar, who makes me forget the streets of this truly shameful capital, and that dictionary of obscene words you hear as you walk among these people. They were told: do not curse the creeds, nor the crosses, nor those who own them, nor the God who is in the heavens — and they heard and obeyed; but the nature that rules them insists on cursing somebody... So these people pour down upon one another's mothers and sisters and aunts on both sides a long rosary of insults, reminding us that between us and civilization lies an unfathomable chasm.

But... what have I to do with this thing that stirs my pain every hour, every time I walk among the people in the street? Let us return to Madame Tabouis.

A noble face on whose features appears that which cannot be named — I mean the quiet splendor that a life of study, thought, earnestness, and work stamps upon the faces of those men of letters who bear missions, who carry, along with their private cares, the cares of a humanity that no sooner leaves one volcano whose fires have subsided than it enters another blazing up anew.

The theme of the lecture was “The World after the Failed London Conference.” Madame Tabouis drew for us swift pictures of the conferences that followed one another from the last days of the war and brought the world to its present impasse. So we saw the dying Roosevelt begging the grave for an hour's respite and dragging himself to the Yalta conference — Yalta, which recorded no official protocol but heralded a misshapen newborn, at whose sight this humanity, which had been promised an angelic child bearing a green branch in its mouth, could only grimace.

Then she spoke to us of the part played by General Eisenhower the day he refused Mr. Churchill's plan for the occupation of the Balkans and allowed the Soviet armies to liberate Eastern Europe; and she carried us to the San Francisco conference after Roosevelt's death — and it seemed to me that I saw the monster born at Yalta, with two small horns now sprouting on its head... And the lecture went on carrying us from Potsdam to Moscow, after the conference of the four great powers in London, where the Allies called one another out to the duel...

She said: “Georges Bidault, the delegate of France, tried to play the part of the mediating peacemaker between the two camps — Moscow and Washington — while the Communists in France were winning, in the latest elections, a third of the parliamentary seats and several ministries. Then, when President Truman declared his resolve to aid Greece, Italy, and Turkey, Russian policy in its turn opened a new page, and Molotov announced that he would protect the unity of Germany... And thus Germany was split in two — and Europe, and with it the world.”

Then Madame Tabouis spoke to us with much tact of the circumstances that led General Marshall to broadcast his famous plan, aimed at relieving the wretched of Europe in an effective way so that Communism should no longer find fertile soil; and of the meeting of Messrs. Bevin, Bidault, and Molotov in Paris; and of the refusal of the Soviets and of the countries living in their shadow to enter into any discussion of the plan — until she announced to us the birth of the Comintern a second time, under the name of the Cominform. And here she said: “The American press went mad and began to speak of a world catastrophe near at hand; and Walter Winchell — whose broadcasts a hundred million Americans listen to on the radio — sprang forward and launched his resounding cry: ‘Wake up, America!’ So rearmament was resumed, and men set about hastening it after the publications of the Russian Chabardze, who scattered his thunderous articles through several American magazines.”

As for this Chabardze, Madame Tabouis bestowed upon him the epithet of “the deserter who flees his camp and gives himself up to the enemy.” What he broadcast in America may be summed up as follows:

“The Kremlin, knowing that war is bound to come, divides the struggle into three stages:
1. The occupation of all Europe in three weeks.
2. The occupation of half of Africa and of the Middle East in three months.
3. Mastery over a part of Asia within three years, with the help of the Communists of China and of the Chinese and Dutch Indies — and, in the end, agreement with America on the dividing of the world.”

And Madame Tabouis says that the broadcasting of these secrets drove the Americans — who labor unceasingly at perfecting the invention of pilotless aircraft, atomic bombs, and killing microbes — to hasten the discovery of the secret rays which, though they remind us of the tales of H. G. Wells, are the only way by which America can help her allies in the West! She believes, further, that the failed London conference brought us nothing new, for it merely gave “an official stamp to a situation already existing and known to those taking part in it”; that any solution and any state of affairs is better than a casual agreement lined with fundamental disagreement; and that the coming war will not be declared for two years! As for what came after the London conference, she told us that it dashed every hope — above all the resolution for the partition of Palestine, which “will remain in the records of history a perfect picture of the greatest political error committed by postwar policy.” And she spoke to us of her hope that the Americans would find a way to delay its execution, and even to fight the voted resolution with certain reservations!

* *

And Madame Tabouis sat down, having delivered her lecture standing — contrary to the custom that French lecturers have followed. She sat down amid sharp, long applause, aroused — along with her sympathy for Palestine — by her elegant bearing, her wide knowledge, her concise sentence, and her strange intimacy with every jot and tittle of world politics.

The president of the Cénacle announced that the lecturer was ready to answer questions from the audience, and this allowed us to touch the Lebanese consciousness — wary, comprehending, and skeptical.

Among the questioners were ladies. And among what was said:

You have spoken to us of the great quarrel between the Americans and the Soviets, but you have told us nothing of the position of the mistress of the seas.

She answered, after a tactful circling in which little of the conclusion's frankness could be commended, that England is America's ally and will remain her ally.

And someone sprang up to say:

What drove the statesmen of France — men of prudence and of fine feeling — and he all but said: and among them a great stateswoman of the very measure we have just seen — to stand on the side of partition?

She answered, calling the amusing jest to her aid in order to win the round:
“It was the Frenchmen's delicate sense that partition would never come to pass that drove them to go along and to vote with the resolution.” Then Madame Tabouis turned about, returned to her sincerity and her gravity, and intimated to us that the French are in need of everything — of food and of clothing...
It is the dollar!!

The most mischievous of the questioners was the gentleman who said: How do you explain the Anglo-Americans' fear of Communism — all this fear — and then Russia's positive stand for partition? The execution of partition will bring the hand of the Soviets into this Near East. How are we to explain that?

The writer of these lines believes that this profound question received no frank answer, despite the lecturer's skill and her radiant intelligence...

A glance chanced my way, and I saw the face of the intelligent Mrs. Alice, wife of President Alfred Nakkash, smiling at me a smile of far-reaching meaning; and it occurred to me to say to Madame Tabouis:
— You have spoken to us at length of the Four Great Ones, and of the Big Forty; will you not speak to us of the small? Will you not describe to us — you who have traveled the inhabited world — the feelings of the peoples of the small countries, like Belgium and Holland and Albania and Greece?... Will you not tell us something of the fearful, trembling mothers bent over the cradles, and of the fledgling boys who in two years — as you have foretold — will be dragged off and cast into the volcanoes? Will you not speak to us of the revolt blazing in the hearts of the simple folk of the earth, who know that the atomic bombs will level their homes and their villages in two years — as you said? But I said nothing.

O Madame Tabouis! In your hands, and in the hands of your peers among the great women of the West, lie life and death! You told us at the end of your lecture that there are in the world great hearts full of love, and that the spirit of good will prevail, and men will live in happiness!

O Madame Tabouis!
How worthy it would be of you, and of the great women your peers, to travel the earth and knock at the doors of the mighty and say to them: Enough! Enough of the lifeblood that has been spilled and the monuments of civilization that have been razed! Enough of vengeance and hatred and evil and rancor!

As for us here, in this chain of villages scattered from the foothills of the peaks down to where the waves break, we are a simple, gentle people, with neither strength nor power, and with no say in the quarrel of the giants! And if you knock at the hearts of the righteous and faithful men and the righteous and faithful women, you will receive but one answer: the Lebanese has no hope but to remain a friend to the East — the Islamic East and the Russian East — and a friend to the West — the European West and the American West.

O Madame Tabouis, take it from a Lebanese woman, and tell them, if you are asked, that the Lebanese dream a beautiful dream: that they be left alone, and that they remain — in the struggle that is coming upon the world with its evil — an oasis of spreading shade to which the weary may take refuge!