Word: mends
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Escorting Molotov to the door. Mendès glanced at his watch, and said jestingly: "Mr. Minister, it is after two o'clock. I have lost my bet. Do you think I should resign?" Molotov answered:"You mustn't do that." Said Mendès: "Thank you, Mr. Minister. May I tell the French Parliament that I stayed in office at your insistence?" "I don't think that would help you," said Molotov amiably, and climbed into his curtained black...
Anticlimax. Exhausted, Mendès went to bed. A few minutes later, at 2:42 a.m., the cease-fire agreements for Laos and Viet Nam were signed by second-tier officials in a small room off the main council chamber in the Palais des Nations. The ceremony, watched only by a handful of photographers and minor officials, took just 7½ minutes. Ten hours later, the gallant Cambodians signed the revised agreement that may some day make the difference between freedom and Communist slavery for them and for Laos...
...While negotiators and officials celebrated with wine and fine food, he scrawled out a statement: "I tender my resignation ..." Nobody paid any attention to the man who had stood helplessly by while 12 million of his countrymen were passed over into Communist slavery. "Reason and peace have triumphed!" cried Mendès-France...
...MENDÈS-FRANCE HAS WON HIS BET, cried the headlines...
...praised the stocky little Frenchman. "Tireless energy . . . firm determination," cheered the Socialist Midi Libre. "Authority and dignity . . . honor . . . loyalty," said the right-wing L'Aurore of Paris. "What Frenchmen, apart from sectarians blinded by hatred." asked the left-wing Combat, "could today refuse him their gratitude?" But Pierre Mendès-France was insistent: there must be no show of triumph upon his return from Geneva. He did not conceal from himself the fact that Geneva was a defeat for his country, a victory for Communism; he wanted only to be greeted, he told a Cabinet minister...