I Love Paris

"I would want to live all my life in Paris if there was not this earth which is called Moscow," said Nikita Khrushchev in Paris last week, quoting the Russian poet, Vladimir Mayakovsky. But though Khrushchev was over the flu, in Paris he was still capable of catching a chill.

For the first time, he found himself in a Western nation with a powerful Communist Party. But never before had France taken such precautions for an official visitor. More than half the effectives of the Paris Prefecture, including 3,000 plainclothesmen, were assigned to protect him. Along his route, 2,000 firemen stood guard on rooftops, and the Metro stations below his route had been closed for an hour while engineers tested them for hidden bombs. A noisy barrage of 64 motorcycle cops boxed in his limousine. Even if there had been no guards around him at all, there would stiH have been a wall between Khrushchev and his hosts.

Guided at the airport by an unusually paternal President Charles de Gaulle, who towered a foot above him, the little visitor made his way down a 150-yard red carpet, past the lines of severely correct Frenchmen in cutaways. Then, standing on a carpet that had originally been woven for Napoleon's Josephine, he plunged into a round of handshakes in his now familiar manner--a quick look down for the hand, a look up for the owner, a short shake, and then onward. Behind him came friendly, roly-poly Mme. Nina Petrovna Khrushchev in black astrakhan coat and pillbox hat, her arms full of orchids. The rest of the family trooped in afterward--Daughters Julia, Rada and Elena, Son Sergei and Son-in-Law Alexei Adzhubei, editor of Izvestia. It was the first time since 1896 that a Russian ruler had visited Paris. It turned out that Khrushchev's target was the same as Czar Nicholas II's--Germany.

Unexploded Bomb. "Well, here you are," said General de Gaulle, face to face with a man who like himself had become a cartoonists' delight (see cuts). "We are ready to hear you and to be heard by you." Quicker than a wink, Khrushchev plunked his glasses on his nose, whipped out a thick manuscript. He paid pointed tribute to President de Gaulle as the man who had not "bowed his head to the [German] occupiers." If France and the Soviet had only had a firmer alliance, he said, blandly ignoring his own country's 1939 pact with Hitler, Germany might never have dared start World War II. As it was, both France and Russia were littered with "unexploded bombs and shells . . . abandoned by the Hitlerians." Should German militarism rise again, France would be the first to be threatened, for "not even a mad German militarist would risk war with us." When he had finished his ten-minute airport invitation to France to join a new alliance with him, he explained to General de Gaulle: "I too can speak without a text--that will come."

His pitch made, the pudgy Premier joined his Gothic host in a Simca convertible, and the two rolled off toward Paris. The night before, security police had made a final roundup of suspected troublemakers--a rightist general, a few young nationalists, a Trotskyite editor--to supplement the list of anti-Communists already on enforced "vacation" in Corsica (TIME, March 21). But the Parisians who were left kept their own enthusiasm well in check. The crowds along most of the route were thin, only the front row or so waving red flags under the Communist newspaper Humanite's exhortation to provide an "unforgettable welcome." As the guns roared an official 31-gun salute, 50 French lawyers in the Palais de Justice and 200 law students solemnly stood for one moment of silence. Nails, scattered along the Champs Elysees, were swept up in time. And when Khrushchev went to lunch at the Hotel Matignon, police had to scramble up a house next door and remove a Hungarian flag.

Borsch Strainers. Nikita Khrushchev himself ignored these lapses, and as he warmed to his mission, the fatigue that he had shown on his arrival vanished. He again reminded his hosts of his purpose by laying a huge wreath at the fortress of Mont Valerien, where 4,000 members of the French Resistance were shot by the Nazis; and though he said France's dead belonged to all the world, many Frenchmen thought the occasion an indecent political use of the dead. Even his gifts to President de Gaulle--models of Sputnik and Lunik--had their heavy-handed message. At the President's formal banquet in the Elysee Palace, behind a screen of azaleas and hydrangeas, police inspectors under the eyes of Soviet guards stood watch over three white boxes. With bitter humor, the French press dubbed the boxes "Nikita's Borsch Strainers," for they were there to test every morsel of food set before the Premier at the table of the President of France.

Early next morning, Khrushchev and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko went to De Gaulle's office for the first of their give-and-take conversations, to be resumed after Khrushchev and family finished their 1,800-mile tour of the provinces this week. That afternoon, when he made a speech in the Hotel de Ville near the working-class districts of the Bastille, tens of thousands of Communist sympathizers outside shouted, "Khru-chov, Khru-chov, Khru-chov!" Once again, Khru-chov returned to his favorite theme. "It isn't against such-and-such a country I speak," said he. "But if the German vengeance seekers are recognizing themselves and reacting to my warnings, what would you have me do? We have an old proverb which says that the cat smells of the lard it has eaten."

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.

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