Word: daudets
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...barbed wire was erected last week by perspiring young French Royalists outside the Paris office of their obstreperous news organ, L'Action Française. Parisians stopped to loiter, to tip one another the wink, to shrug and pass on. They knew that fiery, effervescent Royalist Editor Leon Daudet must be preparing with dramatic Daudeterie to resist arrest. A sentence of five months in jail "for defaming the police" has hung over him these two years; and only a fortnight ago he refused once more to set a time convenient to himself to serve his sentence (TIME, June...
...periodic intervals for the past two years, the police have repeated their invitation, indeed, M. Daudet may be said to have a standing invitation with the Prefect. But each time M. Daudet has declined, at first politely, but with increasing firmness...
During the last week, the police decided that something really must be done. Instead of the usual printed card, the host himself called, M. Daudet was adamant; once and for all time, he did not intend to accept Monsieur Le Prefect's invitation. M. Le Prefect hinteu vaguely at arrest, bowed and retired. Now French policemen don't often speak of such things. M. Daudet was warned, and placed bob wire about his building, bolted doors and windows, and waited, first hinting to his friends and the police that he would die before he stooped to the Prefect's compulsory...
Three or four days later--such things are not important with the Gallic police--a squad of gendarmes rang M. Daudet's door bell. M. Daudet's butler intimated that the master was not "at home". The gendarmes bowed and announced that they would wait. And so the "siege" that ended two days ago began. After M. Daudet had received French pastry, champagne, and other life maintaining victuals in great number from his friends, and after daily during the "siege" announcing that to surrender would mean the end of civil liberty, honour, and whatnot, M. Daudet quite naturally surrendered...
Contrast this with American police methods. M. Daudet would most certainly have been sworn at; he might very readily have been hit over the head. It is even possible that he would have had to pay his call to the Prefect in a patrol wagon. Had he waited to angle his silk hat properly, it is even conceivable that he would have been hit with a pistol butt. Third degree methods might have been applied should M. Daudet have continued his propaganda at the station in favor of a monarchy. Most certainly his siege would have been enlivened with tear...