Word: matignon
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...happened to be Pompidou's 57th birthday. De Gaulle called in Couve to the Elysée for long and serious talks that morning, and worried friends telephoned Pompidou to tell him about the unexpected conferences. That afternoon Couve came to a routine Cabinet meeting at the Hotel Matignon, the Premier's official residence, and told Pompidou that he felt that Pompidou should remain as Premier and that if Pompidou wished to, he should tell the general...
...France through the greatest peacetime crisis in more than 100 years. While De Gaulle brooded alone in the Elysee, thinking in characteristically bold strokes about how to end the chaos, Pompidou all but ran the government from an emergency command post set up near his office in the Hotel Matignon. When some Ministers started cracking under the strain (one took to packing a pistol under his coat, another wanted to crush the rebellion in the same way that he had put down Algerian terrorism), Pompidou calmly took over their responsibilities. Sleeping in snatches near his desk and eating little...
...Paris or their farm at Cajarc in the south of France. Pompidou reads and tends his rosebushes, his wife practices her horsemanship. In the city, they occasionally go to first nights at the theater and constantly browse through the galleries for new paintings. Those that are not at the Matignon decorate their six-room, Louis XV- and XVI-furnished apartment overlooking Notre Dame Cathedral from Paris' fashionable and romantic Ile Saint-Louis...
...Pompidous entertain frequently, both at large receptions at the Matignon and at dinner parties for twelve in their apartment, where Pompidou holds forth on everything from his favorite nouvelle vague film director (Jean-Luc Godard) to his favorite poet (Baudelaire, whose work he never reads "without emotion"). In fact, Pompidou ranks somewhere among the literati himself, having begun work on two novels ("It would be entertaining to be a writer") and edited a widely used anthology of French poetry...
...When I first arrived at the Matignon, my desire was to reconcile Parliament and De Gaulle," he says. "I had forgotten only two things. Parliament and De Gaulle." But if he has not reconciled the two institutions, he has at least bridged them. As for the future, Paris rumor has it that, during the tumult, Pompidou reached a clear but tacit agreement with De Gaulle on when the President would retire. Whether that is true or not, when a lonely, shaken De Gaulle was planning his now famous rendezvous with French generals, he found time to telephone Pompidou. De Gaulle...