Word: vermeersch
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...Halles, "the belly of Paris," 250 market women left their stalls last week, crowded into a schoolroom where a plainly dressed woman, obviously and proudly pregnant, talked about food and coal. Her tone was conversational, her words easy to understand. She knew what interested them, did Jeannette Vermeersch. Listening to her was like a chat around a kitchen table. It was hard to realize that Jeannette Vermeersch might be the next First Lady of France...
...spoke of Maurice Thorez (pronounced tore-ezz), to whom she had borne two sons (9 and 4) and whom she had at last married a few months ago. People said that he was Vice President of France. Jeannette Vermeersch denied it, with biting political irony rather than wifely indignation: "Where would he get the money? The Communist Party allows its deputies to keep only 8,500 francs [$70] out of their monthly salary of 30,000 francs [$250]. And this year rich capitalists are not helping Maurice Thorez give 35,000-franc presents to mistresses...
...Production in order to cut off the electric current. Thorez' wife retorted that two factors, lack of coal and the drought, had caused the power shortage. Production Minister Marcel Paul had spurred the miners on to increase coal production until it exceeded the prewar level. Then salty Jeannette Vermeersch added with a wink: "And, comrades, we don't believe in God-but it rained. Today there is plenty of current...
Quick Shift. From Paris had flowed a generous measure of the ideas that nourished Western democracy. Were Parisians hungry enough to forget their heritage of freedom? Jeannette Vermeersch and Maurice Thorez were betting that they were. Frenchmen everywhere, nearly as food-and fuel-conscious as the women of Les Halles, last week heard Communists making down-to-earth campaign speeches with little mention of Marxist ideas. By stressing the black market that fed the rich and starved the rest, Party Boss Thorez hoped he could make enough Frenchmen forget the less immediate but not less important issues involved in this...
Thorez' greatest political liability-his absence from France during the war-is also his greatest political asset. It carried him and Jeannette Vermeersch to Russia. (How, they said last week, "is still a secret." But they did not deny that a Russian bomber might have taken them over part of the journey.) Thorez was living in Russia during the war, when the Russian Communist Party made a successful experiment which the French party is trying to repeat. Moscow fought the war with nationalist, not Communist, slogans. Would this technique be feasible outside the U.S.S.R.? The boys are now trying...