An Illness in the Elysee Palace

For months France's President Georges Pompidou, 62, has been in visibly failing health. His face has become increasingly puffy, his movements have grown unsteady, and his energy has obviously flagged. When the normally reticent Eryse"e Palace last week announced that the President was bedridden and feverish with a bout of influenza, many observers read much more into the official announcement. "He's sick, very sick," concluded one diplomat. "It's no longer an unmentionable subject."

While Pompidou's health has long been unmentionable to French spokesmen, the fact is that President Nixon was so alarmed by the French President's appearance last summer when the two of them held a minisummit in Iceland that the U.S. embassy in Paris assigned a man to a Pompidou watch. He saw what other curious observers have noted too: gradually Pompidou has reduced his schedule to almost a blank page. When he addressed the Gaullist Party faithful in Poitiers three weeks ago, precautions were taken to preserve his strength. An armchair was placed close by, and his aides made sure he had to walk up no more than three steps.

The shock to those who actually see Pompidou is all the greater because the French press and television have gone out of their way to mask his difficulties. Most magazines and newspapers refuse to show telling closeups, and the government-controlled television network has been told by the government to try to show him only in profile.

What is wrong with Pompidou? The secret is locked away in the Elysee, which brusquely turns away all queries. Unofficially, however, spokesmen claim that he suffers from painful arthritis and that his puffy appearance is the result of massive doses of cortisone. Others outside the government speculate, however, that the real malady may be multiple myeloma, a disease of the bone marrow that can also be treated with cortisone.

Whatever ails Pompidou, it has had no immediate impact on French policy or on the day-to-day handling of the government, which in any event would normally be operated by Premier Pierre Messmer. Pompidou's ailing health may, however, have been at least partially responsible for the government's confusion in dealing with an economy troubled by serious inflation and a potential recession.

The President's growing incapacity has started an inevitable, if unseemly scramble for the succession. Messmer, who can be both dull and irascible at the same time, is generally ruled out as a possible President, and the race seems to be between former Premier Jacques Cha-ban-Delmas, 58, and Finance Minister Valery Giscard d'Estaing, 48.

Both have handicaps.

Chaban-Delmas was forced out of the Premiership in 1972 because of disagreements with Pompidou and a scandal over his excessive use of income tax loopholes. Giscard, on the other hand, who is thought to be Pompidou's choice, is not formally a Gaullist at all but a member of the allied Independent Republican Party. Giscard, moreover, is responsible for the French economy, and, rightly or wrongly, he will be blamed if it falters in the months ahead. Both men have been quietly campaigning for months. Chaban-Delmas, the mayor of Bordeaux, has been looking to his power base in the south, while the sophisticated Giscard has tried to show he is a man of the people, a la Nelson Rockefeller, by playing soccer and even squeezing out a tune in public on the accordion. So far, however, Pompidou has shown no desire to step down until his term expires in 1976. "My succession is not open," he angrily told his Cabinet late last year. "My health is my affair."

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