Face Watching

After a three-week rest at his villa in rural Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, France's foremost convalescent returned to public life last week, and instantly the nation's favorite game became face watching. The face, of course, belonged to Charles de Gaulle, and what his countrymen saw in it depended partly on their politics. The anti-Gaullist weekly L'Express, for instance, carried a photo of a worn, waxen-faced man whose eyes were more deeply pouched than ever. Gaullists found him leaner than before his April prostate operation but fit enough to serve for years and years in the Elysee Palace. And those who viewed him without any political prism saw a man surprisingly vigorous after major surgery--but, after all, 73 years old.

First Fruits. De Gaulle's first public outing took him to the inauguration of the Moselle River Waterway. After six years of work and an investment of nearly $200 million, the Moselle has been widened and provided with locks, thus making the river navigable for big barges and giving the steel mills of Lorraine an easy link to the Ruhr Valley's coal.

France considers the Moselle Waterway so valuable that it paid a handsome price: Paris agreed to foot two-thirds of the bill and renounced its claims to the Saar; Germany paid only one-third of the cost, though nine-tenths of the canal flows through its territory. When the project is linked up with the Saone and Rhone rivers through a complex system of canals, it will provide an unbroken waterway from Marseille to Rotterdam, a route first visualized by the Roman generals Nero Claudius Drusus and Gaius Antistius Vetus some 2,000 years ago.

At the French town of Apach, De Gaulle boarded the carnation-decked pleasure boat Strasbourg, along with West German President Heinrich Luebke and Luxembourg's Grand Duchess Charlotte, to begin the four-hour cruise along the Moselle to Trier, across the German border. There, De Gaulle hailed the project as one of "the first fruits" of the recent Franco-German rapprochement. After "so much pain to which this river was a sad witness for centuries," said he, "we have been able to sail down it together, without meeting any resistance except that of ribbons."

Fecund Frenchwomen. The boat ride tired De Gaulle, and when he returned to Paris, a scheduled Cabinet meeting was put off 24 hours. But after a day's rest, he not only presided over the meeting but played host to King Mahendra of Nepal. Later in the week, De Gaulle received a delegation of 14 mothers who have given his "100 Million Frenchmen" campaign a boost by bearing big families, also welcomed a papal legate on hand to help celebrate the 800th anniversary of the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

While he was in the hospital, according to the latest De Gaulle story making the rounds in Paris, his wife timidly suggested that he might not be up to another term. His reply: "I am old enough to know what I should do--even another seven years at the head of the Republic."

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