PARIS 1919 by Margaret MacMillan

did not establish good personal relations with the leader of either country. Where Wilson and Lloyd George frequently dropped in on each other and met over small lunches or dinners during the Peace Conference, Clemenceau preferred to eat alone or with his small circle of advisers. “That has its disadvantages,” said Lloyd George. “If you meet for social purposes, you can raise a point. If you find that you are progressing satisfactorily, you can proceed, otherwise you can drop it.” 17 Clemenceau had never cared for ordinary social life at the best of times. In Paris in 1919, he saved his flagging energies for the negotiations.
    Clemenceau was the oldest of the three and, although he was robust for his age, the strain told. The eczema on his hands was so bad that he wore gloves to hide it. He also had trouble sleeping. He woke up very early, often at three, and read until seven, when he made himself a simple breakfast of gruel. He then worked again until his masseur and trainer arrived for his physical exercises (which usually included his favorite, fencing). He spent the morning in meetings but almost always went home for his standard lunch of boiled eggs and a glass of water, worked again all afternoon, and after an equally simple supper of milk and bread, went to bed by nine. Very occasionally, he took tea at Lloyd George’s flat in the Rue Nitot, where the cook baked his favorite, langues de chat. 18
    Clemenceau did not much like either Wilson or Lloyd George. “I find myself,” he said in a phrase that went round Paris, “between Jesus Christ on the one hand, and Napoleon Bonaparte on the other.” Wilson puzzled him: “I do not think he is a bad man, but I have not yet made up my mind as to how much of him is good!” He also found him priggish and arrogant. “What ignorance of Europe and how difficult all understandings were with him! He believed you could do everything by formulas and his fourteen points. God himself was content with ten commandments. Wilson modestly inflicted fourteen points on us . . . the fourteen commandments of the most empty theory!” 19
    Lloyd George, as far as Clemenceau was concerned, was more amusing but also more devious and untrustworthy. In the long and acrimonious negotiations over control of the Middle East, Clemenceau was driven into rages at Lloyd George’s attempts to wriggle out of their agreements. The two men shared certain traits—both had started out as radicals in politics, both were ruthlessly efficient—but there were equally significant differences. Clemenceau was an intellectual, Lloyd George was not. Clemenceau was rational, Lloyd George intuitive. Clemenceau had the tastes and values of an eighteenth-century gentleman; Lloyd George was resolutely middle-class.
    Clemenceau also had problems closer to home. “There are only two perfectly useless things in the world,” he quipped. “One is an appendix and the other is Poincaré!” A small, dapper man, France’s president was fussy, legalistic, pedantic, very cautious and very Catholic. He was a republican, but a conservative one. Clemenceau came to despise him during the Dreyfus affair, when Poincaré carefully avoided taking a stand. “A lively little beast, dry, disagreeable, and not courageous,” Clemenceau told an American friend. “This prudence has preserved it up to the present day—a somewhat unpleasant animal, as you see, of which, luckily, only one specimen is known.” Clemenceau had been attacking Poincaré for years and even spread rumors about Poincaré’s wife. “You wish to sleep with Madame Poincaré?” he would shout out. “OK, my friend, it’s fixed.” During the war, Clemenceau, who like many leading French politicians had his own newspaper, criticized the president, often unfairly, for the failings of the French military. L’Homme Libre (renamed L’Homme