Word: helleu
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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French Backdown. At week's end the French yielded to pressure. Delegate General Jean Helleu (who had arrested the Lebanese officials) was invited to return to Algiers "for consultation"-i.e., to become the goat. President Khoury was ordered released and reinstated. Ardent nationalist Premier Solh was freed, but nothing was said about reinstating him. Negotiations were to be opened at once to restore "constitutional life in Lebanon." After that, broader negotiations would be held in Damascus for the "harmonizing of the French Mandate with the regime of independence promised by France to the States of the Levant [Syria...
...Riad Solh and his cabinet ministers. By the day's end, Parliament had been dissolved, a puppet regime led by Francophile ex-President Emile Eddé had been installed, newspapers banned, martial law and curfew imposed, troops posted in squares. Having ordered these measures, French Delegate General Jean Helleu leaned back, ready for the worst...
...Jean Helleu and his Senegalese did not have to wait long. Angry Arabs, armed with long-hidden rifles, homemade grenades, knives and stones, spewed out upon the streets. The French colonials went into action. Shots were traded, blood spilled. In the Place des Canons-the capital's Times Square-demonstrators cried: "A bas la France!" Nothing so menacing had been heard in the French Levant since 1925-27, when the Druses ran riot...
...great friends were the deft caricaturist Sem, and Jean Giovanni Boldini, "The King of Swish," whose portraits of women seemed like the ravishing end toward which Helleu's casual etchings were moving...
...middle years, Helleu maintained a small yacht, aboard which he used to receive the neurasthenic Marcel Proust, transported at night from Paris to the sea in a favorite taxicab. Helleu is said to have been, in part, the inspiration for the painter Elstir in Proust's great A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Helleu often visited the U.S., saw much of the Francophile architect Whitney Warren. Warren got Helleu to design the starry blue heavens which can still be seen, faded and streaked, on the main ceiling of Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal...