Word: mends
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...after Geneva, Mendès landed at Villacoublay airport in his French air force DC-3. He ran his fingers through his wife's poodle cut, then kissed her. He declined to review a guard of honor, because: "It's hardly the occasion for that sort of thing." He ordered his car along side streets into Paris, in case the people were lining the main roads. But Mendès need not have bothered. There was relief that the war in Indo-China was ended-nothing more. Fewer than 250 Parisians waited outside Mendès' Quai...
...Debate. Pacing himself characteristically by the clock, Mendès quickly got unanimous Cabinet approval for Geneva, then closeted himself with three secretaries to dictate his speech for the National Assembly. Six hours after leaving the airport, Mendès was at his place in the government front benches, thumbing a pink folder and the white sheets of his manuscript...
When he rose to deliver his accounting, Mendès got a one-minute ovation-very warm from the Communist left, warm from the Gaullist right, scattered or nonexistent from the moderate center, where ex-Foreign Minister Georges Bidault cocked his head towards a wall and elaborately did nothing. Palais Bourbon's tiny shelflike visitors' boxes were crowded; most of the diplomatic corps was there...
...Mendès was crisp and matter of fact, like a company president notifying stockholders of a sad liquidation of property. "Within a few days," he began, "blood will cease to flow, and we will no longer see our youth decimated over there. This is the end of a nightmare...
...have no illusions, and I want no one else to have illusions, about the terms of the cease-fire agreement. The terms are sometimes cruel because they consecrate facts which are cruel." Geneva, argued Mendès, reflected "losses already suffered or rendered inevitable by the military situation." But Mendès then went on to claim that Geneva would permit France to retain its "presence" in the Far East, even that Geneva had improved relations between France, Britain and the U.S. The Assemblymen clapped hands when Mendès mentioned his good friend Anthony Eden; for the name Foster...