T was an American diplomat of the older generation who told me the story of "the House of the Flirt." We had motored up the Champs-Elysées, made a sharp detour to the left, near Etoile, and slowed down as we entered the parked seclusion of the Place des Etats-Unis, with its suggestion of numerous nooks and angles and-peace.

"That is the President's house," said my friend, indicating a substantial, neutral-tinted villa on the opposite side of the green sod. A gendarme and a French staff-officer saluted us politely. Two young American gentlemen in khaki, spick and span, service rifles at the correct shoulder angle, guarded the approach to Mr. Wilson's Paris home. Except our own quiet conversation, only the twittering of the little birds welcoming the green shoots of May, making sounds into a silence that suggested the secrecy of the sacrosanct.

A good many years ago, when the nice, grandfatherly old gentlemen of to-day were gay young blades, with warm response for a sparkling eye and a Malibran shoulder, the dashing, daring Mamie Paine was the talk and the toast of Paris. That is merely another way of saying how Mamie was where every woman since Lilith or Mother Eve has loved and longed to be on the topmost limb of the tree of masculine adulation. She was the adored of young men and old. She was, they tell me, these gallants of dead decades, as pretty as a picture by David, and fully as tantalizing as the lady who was looked upon by another and still earlier David, in circumstances quite disapproved by the Nonconformist conscience and Mrs. Grundy. Mamie was très chic, and, unless I am

misinformed, she had a very expensive taste in clothes.

It was in the selfsame little room where Mamie tried on her dresses and worried the originating soul of the elder M. Worth that Mr. Woodrow Wilson tried to put together the broken fragments of a world smashed to smithereens, in a political, social, and economic sense, by William Hohenzollern, who was a youngster with a very vicious temper when Mistress Paine smashed hearts in Paris.

The young American beauty, Mamie Paine, after playing havoc with more than her fair share of young hearts and old, accepted the trembling old hand and experienced affections of the retired banker and sous-maire Bischoffen. And that was how Mamie came to live and to hold her captivating court in the house at 11, Place des Etats-Unis. But it was not thus called in that time.

The United States' legation in Paris was a "two-pair back," tucked away on a side street of little dignity and no importance, until Mr. Levi P. Morton became our minister to France. Mr. Morton leased a fine graystone mansion just a block on the north side of the house of Mamie's obedient husband, and then the Parisians discovered America. The frugal Frenchmen who were in the "inner circle" of the Government at Paris, and participants in the profits accruing from foresight in metropolitan real-estate investments, interpreted the Morton lease as a soothing shadow of an agreeable coming event: at last those dollar-decked Americans were going to act like real Europeans and buy an embassy building. To help the good work along, they called the peaceful, parked prospect the Place des EtatsUnis. It is not without significance

that Congress failed fully to appreciate. the compliment. To this day we do not own an embassy building in Paris. Our ambassadors are "renters," in the French diplomatic circle, "unhindered and unhampered" by any act of congressional munificence.

It was by the merest accident, I am told, that the President came to live in "the House of the Flirt." When he made his first appearance in Paris, he went to the Hôtel Murat. The Hôtel Murat was not available when he planned his second trip, so "the House of the Flirt" was hired to witness the work of making a new world out of a badly battered, gasping, ghastly globe. It may have been as significant as it was accidental.

The President went to Paris to make peace, and the Place des Etats-Unis is a peaceful spot. He returned to France "unhindered and unhampered" by earlier aspirations for "open covenants of peace, openly arrived at." Secrecy set its guards on every quiet bit of the small, wooded circle. Even the cute little sparrows, a family of birds as notorious for impertinence and irreverence as regularly trained American reporters, seemed to sense the all-pervading presence of the very spirit of secrecy. The young leaves on the nodding trees whispered their warning, "Hush!" All the gables were decently dignified and as perfectly proper-looking as if Mamie had never blown a coquettish kiss in their direction. Mamie was dead. The carved fireplace in the little room-that elegant fireplace was to hear and see many things that are destined to remain buried in a secrecy far more impenetrable than some of Mamie's most sacred secrets. What happened in that room was to go far to prove that modern diplomacy is still as close-mouthed as the grave no more so. What happened within the four walls that saw much of Mamie was to teach us all that flirtation is not confined to women.

It was in that room of "the House of the Flirt" that Woodrow Wilson is now charged with having played with the hearts of one out of every four of the inhabitants of the earth, crumpled up his "Fourteen Points," and cast them into the waste-paper-basket.

They were three. Newspapers and the people of a large part of the world spoke of "the Big Four." There might have been more. Still, the fact remains that they were three, Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and David Lloyd George. I have named them in the order of merit and actual importance.

His foes and critics notwithstanding, Woodrow Wilson was by far the ablest among the participants in the Conference of Paris. He towered over them all. As an idealist, he was the soul of the conference. From the purely intellectual point of view, he could hold his own with the best of them, and there were one or two intellectual giants in other delegations: Bourgeois for the French, Balfour for the British, but only one other at the top of his own "pile," Venizelos, the great Greek.

The use of the term "Conference of Paris" suggests correction of a popular error that ought to be excised from the columns of our newspapers and the public mind. The peace conference was the Conference of Paris. It was a conference confined to the Allied and Associated victor nations. The ritual reserved for the defeated Germans billeted in the Trianon Palace Hôtel at Versailles was that of a drumhead court martial, as was fit and proper. Nothing less would have satisfied Foch and the French. Fittingly and properly, the Conference of Paris respected the feeling of the outraged nation in whose capital the map of the new world was being charted. The Austrian affair at St. Germain-en-Laye was an inquest, sometimes solemn, sometimes comic, sometimes almost joyful. I cannot testify as to the other side-shows, because they did not begin until I left Paris. Relations with the Germans were restricted to exchange of notes between the German delegation in Versailles and the Allies and Associates in Paris. I really think that M. Clemenceau enjoyed his task, as president of the conference, of replying to Brockdorf-Rantzau and the tall, sallow count's successors. Usually, in each sharp sentence, you could feel the bite of "the Tiger's" teeth.

Georges Clemenceau is a droll figure of a man, and a little giant in his own

way. Standing alongside Mr. Wilson, Clemenceau instantly suggested "Little Jeff" to the President's "Mutt." I never saw him without the inseparable gray suède gloves. He wore them always when presiding over the plenary sessions. He would sit for long spells with clasped hands and his head cocked over a humped shoulder, with ear trained upon the speaker of the moment. Then, perhaps, he would wrinkle his large forehead, shake his head up and down, turn it around and glare at the gentleman who was taking up the time that stood between France and peace. France wanted peace in a hurry and with a fanfare. Clemenceau, as the political incarnation of France, wanted peace at a pen-stroke. I think we all liked his loyalty to his own people. That was the real secret of his hold upon Allied affections in Paris. He was so frank in his zeal for France! He tore everything else out of his path, just like a big cat springing to save her young

ones.

Clemenceau is a great French editor. Now, it must be confessed that the French press has still far to go before it can take its place with the British and American press as a dependable, honest force in the formation of democratic public opinion. The majority of the Paris newspapers are sadly corrupt and lax in their methods of gathering and presenting news. Georges Clemenceau is a working journalist, with a high sense of the mission of the newspaper. Apparently, he has strong opinions about some of the tendencies of French reporters. Certainly, he disfavored any attempt to open up the real proceedings of the conference to the reporters present from all parts of the world.

"Where shall we put the photographers?" an Allied intermediary asked, when press arrangements were being considered.

"Put them in the donjon," snapped "the Tiger."

Just before the dramatic Italian "walk-out," Mr. Orlando was pleading Italy's claims to Fiume before his colleagues of the Council of Four, at "the House of the Flirt."

He was addressing his remarks particularly to Mr. Wilson. Mr. Lloyd

George was sitting back in his chair, in a brown study; Mr. Wilson was leaning forward listening patiently. M. Clemenceau, leaning back, was listening impatiently.

"See," exclaimed the Italian premier, waving his arms and shivering his silvery crop, "the press of France is unanimously in our favor. Every newspaper echoes our desire 'Italy should have Italian Fiume!'"

Clemenceau tapped Orlando on the arm, cupped his gloved left over his lips, and roared into the left ear of the impassioned Roman, in a stage whisper:

"Would you like me to tell the President how much it cost?"

Never another word said Orlando. He swore under his breath as he took his defeated departure.

I HAD not seen David Lloyd George for almost twenty years when I shook hands with him in Paris. I found him much changed, and apparently for the better. Time has mellowed the once incoherent Welshman. The Lloyd George who supported Mr. Wilson's fine oration for a league of peace in the Hall of the Clock was a much finer figure than the obscure Welsh member who mobilized the "Nonconformist conscience," under the Liberal leadership of the jocular Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. His periods were more rounded, his rhetoric less flamboyant. Also, he was much better barbered and groomed. Some premiers feel it desirable to keep up appearances.

Lloyd George has indisputable claims upon American good-will. He is a selfmade man. He began as a small town attorney and Little Bethel lay preacher. He felt his way carefully over the shoulders of his Welsh miners, uttered orthodox Nonconformist views until, "with the Nonconformist conscience in the hollow of his fiercely clenched hand," he climbed upon the treasury bench, which is to say, the Government of the British Empire.

In height and general appearance Lloyd George suggests a compromise between his American and French associates in the management of the conference. Usually, there is a subtle message in the twinkling eye and the ingratiating smile that greet the reporter or news

paper photographer as a man and a brother. "Our Davy" is never too tired or too teased to please the crowd. He proved himself by far the best politician and tactician at the conference.

Wilson's mind was fenced about by fixed notions, postulates, principles. Clemenceau's clarity of vision was at times obscured by cynical selfishness. His ideas, always practical and pointed to protect France, came like stout logs carried down-stream under the fierce force of a torrential rain-storm. He would cough and spit blood and relapse into sudden silence. Lloyd George, with no principles to bother him, thinking and talking one day one way, and the next waxing even more eloquent in an opposite direction, leaped the hurdles of Wilson's conscientious scruples and dodged the logs of "the Tiger's" logic not at all through force of sheer ability, he was the least able of the three, but simply because of his native and acquired nimbleness, his ability, and his willingness to take orders from the British brains that employed him as a speaking-trumpet.

Like Mr. Wilson, Lloyd George worked under a severe strain, and one eye was always trained upon the French villa of Lord Northcliffe. The famous Irish newspaper king is England's political Warwick of to-day, and well did David know that the ax employed to decapitate the Asquith ministry was bright and sharp, and ready to tumble a new head into the yawning basket of the head-hunter of Carmelite House and Printing House Square.

An American of high standing ventured the opinion that "Lloyd George is not a great man."

"Is that so?" retorted one who knows the British leader well and loves him not at all. "Well, you just try to take his job away from him. Then you will see how great he is."

BATHED in the bright Paris sunshine, with the cheers of the Paris poor ringing in their ears, the President and Mrs. Wilson entered "the House of the Flirt" for the first time on March 14, 1919, just in time for a late lunch. President Poincaré and all the foreign notables had united in giving them a brilliant

welcome in the carpeted court of honor at the Gare Invalides. Mr. Wilson alone knows whether by that time he had learned to discriminate between real and artificial enthusiasm. As he helped Mrs. Wilson out of their Pullman and shook hands with Poincaré, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Foch, I caught a twinkle in the Presidential eye and a satisfied set of the Presidential jaws. The combination led me to believe he was taking the correct measure of his surroundings. He barely acknowledged the salute of Foch's pet troops, but he was quick to note and to lift his hat to a poor old basket-woman, who fought her way through the soldiers and, with arms and basket waving in the air and big tear-drops streaming from her red eyelids, called upon God to bless “the great American." The welcome of the Paris poor was honest, hearty, intensely real; the greeting of the great folk was mostly hollow pretense, crafty stage play, a deliberate, carefully calculated appeal to the Presidential ego.

It was within his first hour's residence at "the House of the Flirt" that Woodrow Wilson decided to play the part of Atlas and put his shoulders under all the world and its troubles. With hands clasped and clenched behind his back, jaws set and chin thrust forward, he paced up and down in front of Mamie's ornamental fireplace, formulating, revising, and discarding plans, and telling himself what he thought of the men he had left in charge of his peacemaking work in Paris.

Just a month before, to the day and almost to the hour, he had started home from Paris with the skeleton for his pet child, little League of Nations. His critics in the American Senate, and American statesmen of note out of office, but much in the public eye, had rattled the bones of this fragile skeleton and broken some of them. He came back to Paris, forced unwillingly to attach a Monroe Doctrine bone, a withdrawal bone, and to add and subtract other bones of contention. He had committed himself to the British to leave the bulldog his bone of naval supremacy, to abjure "freedom of the seas," and to deny the Japanese their bone of racial equality, because Mr. Hughes of Aus

tralia threatened secession rather than bite at or swallow that bone. Wilson landed once more in France confident in his ability to surmount these difficulties, and his surprise and anger may be imagined when he found that his own "rubber stamps" had removed these obstacles by joining with Mr. Balfour in pitching his pet skeleton out of the treaty and out of the conference.

In "the House of the Flirt" they told him what Mr. Balfour had done to him a brief few days before his return to the Seine. In the Council of Ten Mr. Balfour had moved a resolution divorcing the league from the treaty. Worse still, Mr. Lansing had delivered a speech in Paris publicly sustaining the plea for "immediate peace"; that is, peace without the league.

In "the House of the Flirt" it was mentioned to the President how the British were getting tired of Colonel House's flirtations with the Sinn Fein faction, just then planning a St. Patrick's day demonstration right under the nose of the conference. That was very bad. For cheer, the President turned to one of Lord Northcliffe's many newspapers, and his keen eye caught a flaming editorial, "Wilson or Lenine?" That was the choice. The President took his courage in his hands, called for his car, and rode down the Champs-Elysées to the Crillon.

We watched him ascend to Colonel House's parlor. Nobody has ever told what took place in that room. We saw Clemenceau and his secretary, Lieutenant Montoux, hurry in and upward a few minutes later; then Lloyd George and Sir Maurice Hankey; and afterward Mr. Orlando, with his thick, upstanding, white thatch of hair. We saw Baron Makino and Viscount Chinda come and go.

We knew that something big was happening, but nobody outside that little room guessed just what was taking place.

What happened was this: Mr. Wilson, accepting the "Daily Mail's" invitation, assumed the rôle of Atlas. He took upon his shoulders the burdens of the world, and bowled Balfour and Lansing out of the conference. That was the first meeting of the Council of Four, with Woodrow Wilson as the "Big One," "boss," of

the Conference of Paris in fancy, but not in fact.

Mr. Wilson trumped Balfour's trick by a public announcement, pointing out the fact that on January 25, at the second plenary session, the conference had already made the League of Nations an integral part of the peace treaty. That act could not be set aside by the Council of Ten, or by any other organ of the conference, without first securing the assent of a plenary session. Mr. Wilson well knew that his friends, the small nations, would back him as a solid unit on an issue of that sort. And the thimbleriggers of the Quai d'Orsay and Whitehall laughed up their sleeves, because at last they had Mr. Wilson just where they wanted him.

Mr. Wilson committed hara-kiri when he created the Council of Four and transferred the actual peacemaking from the Hall of the Clock to "the House of the Flirt." He did just what M. Clemenceau and Mr. Balfour wanted him to do-Clemenceau, the Bismarck of the conference, and Arthur James Balfour, its Beaconsfield. It was Mr. Lloyd George, prompted by Balfour and Curzon, who harped upon the advantage of "getting along" with a few men who could speak and understand English that, of course, relieved the President of an embarrassment. It was M. Clemenceau who suggested that Lieutenant Montoux, a limber linguist, could be called in when interpretation became necessary. "Hankey is a remarkable shorthand reporter. I find him invaluable," said the Welsh premier.

Sir Maurice became the official recorder of the "Big Four," and I can well believe that Mr. Lloyd George found that dapper young man absolutely “invaluable." David had his witness. Clemenceau had his witness. Wilson had his brief victory over Balfour, his snub to Lansing, and no witness.

I noted at the time that the Marquis Saionji, although the chief representative in Paris of one of the great Allies, was not included in the new Supreme Council. There were explanations that did not explain. The Japanese accepted these in good part. After the sessions got into full swing at "the House of the Flirt," stories, since confirmed, came to