After accomplishing a series of official chores the President drove with Mrs. Wilson in the evening to the Gare de Lyon, where the Italian royal train awaited them. “To my surprise,” wrote Edith, “the Italian train was the most magnificent of all. I had never seen anything like it: servants in livery of royal scarlet; plate, china and glassware bearing the Italian arms; table linen and bed linen beautifully embroidered.”
The Italian ambassador to Washington and a “tall lugubrious-looking individual wearing a longtailed frock coat and looking like the undertaker at an important funeral” who represented the King of Italy were hosts on the train. Margaret Wilson and Miss Benham were of the party and, of course, the indispensable Dr. Grayson who cared for two of the ladies who were taken with travellers’ ills on the journey.
Next morning the American ambassador to Rome met them at the frontier. They stopped in Genoa long enough for the President to visit the house Columbus was reputed to have been born in. The journey south was lovely. “Our arrival in Rome,” wrote Edith Wilson, “will always be the most brilliant canvas in all the rich pictures in my memory.” No more rain. The sky was sapphire blue. Golden sand had been spread on the streets traversed by the state cortège. Brocades and velvets embroidered with coats of arms in tarnished gold hung from the balconies.
The Quirinal Palace, where they were lodged, was still used as a military hospital, but one wing had been furnished with tapestries and rugs and museum pieces of statuary and of Renaissance furniture. The pictures were a collector’s dream. Every window of their suite of rooms looked out on a garden full of flowers. Edith Wilson was told that a hundred thousand people packed the streets and squares around the palace waiting for her husband to show himself on the balcony.
During all the state dinners and the mummery and the toasts of his visit to Rome, Woodrow Wilson was tortured by the prospect of having to call on the Pope. Various State Department advisers and members of the diplomatic corps had been insisting that such a visit was essential. Protestant missionaries were bitterly protesting. All the President’s Presbyterian hackles rose at the thought. He had consented to go to the Vatican with the proviso that he should spend the same amount of time calling on his friend the Reverend Mr. Lowry, the rector of the American Episcopal Church.
The President’s ride across Rome to the Vatican, standing up in an open touring car, developed into a triumphal procession. The crowd was so great His Holiness was kept waiting fortyfive minutes.
The President had let it be known that on his return from the Vatican he would address, from the window of the Quirinal, the enormous crowd that had gathered in the square outside. He was intending to undercut Orlando and Sonnino through a direct appeal to the Italian people to back the Fourteen Points. When he returned from his papal audience he found that squads of police had dispersed the crowd.
This discourtesy threw the President into a cold rage. He let loose to the newspapermen gathered about him in no uncertain terms. The incident threw a chill over the rest of the Italian trip, although the enthusiasm of the crowds in Milan surpassed that of the crowds in Rome.
In Milan the President’s presence had been advertised for a gala performance of Aïda at La Scala. It was a Sunday. The President declared he never went to the theatre on Sunday. The Italian chief of protocol smoothly explained that this was a “sacred concert,” and the President allowed himself to be placed in a box where he listened solemnly while choruses sang the national anthems and soloists caroled out some arias from church music. Right after, the curtain rose and Aïda was performed in its entirety.
In Turin the President harangued a thousand mayors from the cities and towns of the Piedmont region who had gathered to greet him. They represented men of every walk of life, bankers, merchants, farmers, storekeepers, blacksmiths. When he shook hands with them all after his address a few of the more rustic mayors bent over and kissed his hand. The President was deeply touched.
At the university an honorary degree was bestowed on him. Edith felt her husband was at his best in the simple friendly speech of appreciation he addressed to the students. He brought down the house by putting on a blue student cap. “How young and virile he looked as he stood there,” she exclaimed.
These stately progresses seemed to Edith Wilson the consummation of her girlhood dreams. “Fate having chosen me,” she wrote in My Memoir, “for such a Cinderella role, I have tried to picture it for others, in an endeavor to make a return for this great privilege which was mine.”
When the Wilsons arrived back in Paris on January 7, fagged by many functions and long trainrides, the President was determined that ceremonial engagements should no longer be allowed to interfere with the work of peacemaking. He instructed his secretary to accept no more invitations.
As soon as he was settled at the Hôtel de Mûrat, he called his confidential colonel on the private telephone line he’d had installed between his study and House’s room at the Crillon, to be brought up to date on the news. The formal opening of the Peace Conference was set for January 18.
The American commissioners were meeting that afternoon at House’s rooms at the Crillon. Much to Lansing’s chagrin, House — who with innocent vanity noted in his diary that he had more rooms than all the other commissioners put together — usually managed to have them meet in his suite. The President, whose familiars were already dropping hints that the confidential colonel was taking too much the center of the stage during his absences, sent word that he would be there at five to preside over this meeting in person. Almost at the same moment a message arrived from Clemenceau that he too was calling on House at five P.M. for a private talk.
The colonel faced a dilemma. Even his worldfamous tact was strained to meet this test.
“The President came first,” House noted. “I brought him to my reception room and had the other commissioners meet him.” The President of the United States had just started a lively discussion with Lansing and Bliss and White on the difficulties they were facing, when Monsieur le Président du Conseil de Ministres was announced. “I asked President Wilson to excuse me and took Clemenceau into another room, where we had one of our heart to heart talks.”
Clemenceau, one of the most malicious of men, who liked House, but was already complaining that Wilson thought he was Jesus Christ, undoubtedly appreciated the possibilities for mischief. Keeping the President of the United States waiting in the anteroom was as much fun as putting something over on Poincaré. He dawdled over his conversation with House.
House was preoccupied with his task: “I convinced him,” House dictated to the faithful Miss Denton when she typed out his diary, “I think, for the first time that a League of Nations was for the best interests of France … I called his attention to the fact that today there was only one great military power on the Continent of Europe and that was France … There was no balance of power so far as the Continent was concerned, because Russia had disappeared and both Germany and Austria had gone under … I asked whether or not in the circumstances France would not feel safer if England and America were in a position where they would be compelled to come to the aid of France in the event another nation like Germany should try to crush her … If she lost this chance which the United States offered through the League of Nations it would never come again … Wilson could force it through because, with all the brag and bluster of the Senate, they would not dare defeat a treaty made in agreement with the Allies, and thereby continue alone the war with Germany or make a separate peace.”