38 - 1918: Paris towards the end of the War

Summary

When I had not returned home, quai Conti, as the bombing was beginning, the good women who lived at the Institute were intensely afraid and imagined that my presence would ward off the bombs. What is true is that there remains a witness not of the influence of my presence, but of my concern for Mme Waltner (a woman sculptor), for example, who lived above me, and some other women. I had a bench made for their benefit because there was nothing for them to sit on in the underground passages—the bench still exists under the plaster cast of the Parthenon in the vestibule. On the days of bombardment, the women taking refuge were seated there. One day, five bombs were intended to strafe the Mint. They actually exploded nearby and miraculously neither the Mint nor the Institute was hit. During the bombing, the good Waltner [le bon Waltner] and I were walking bravely on the Pont des Arts, in the wonderful moonlight at midnight. The whistle of a bomb grazed our ears and I said to Waltner, “Hey, that was meant for us!” It was the first of the bombs that fell, not on our place but next door at 5 rue Bonaparte, on the house of the future Marshal Hubert Lyautey. That night, the Luxembourg basin was hit by a bomb that punctured the bottom of the artificial lake, which was dry for months.

I was a member of the Superior Council of Public Education which meets three times a year. In the June 1918 session, I was next to Lucien Poincaré, brother of the president of the Republic, a very charming man who died prematurely. During a break between two meetings, I asked him: “Is it indiscreet to know what the opinion of the Elysée Palace is on the outcome of the war? People are a little worried around me.” Poincaré replied, “There is no indiscretion. We are on the right track. We are receiving today, as every day, American forces boat by boat, which means that around September 1st at the latest we will have the happy resolution.” And as we were talking about the bombings that were continuing, he said to me again: “Raymond Poincaré, my poor brother, and my sister-in-law came to the Sorbonne only once to have dinner there.