“He said to me,” reported Mr. Christenberry, “‘You know what this is all about, don’t you?’ and I said I did. ‘Well, all right then,’ he told me, ‘you take all this stuff back to New Orleans with you and fill out the forms, and then bring the whole thing back Monday or Tuesday, and I’ll sign the damn papers and we’ll be rid of them. Look, I’m not even going to stay here till the end of this session. I’ll leave Tuesday, maybe even tomorrow, right after the House passes the bills, and come down to New Orleans and sign them there. And you know what we’ll do then? We’ll go on a vacation together, just you and me, no bodyguards or anything. We’ll get in your car and go wherever we want to go without making one single, slivery plan in advance.’
“After that, he and I went down to the cafeteria and had lunch. Naturally, there was the same steady procession as always of people coming to the table to say hello, but not so many as there would have been any other time except Sunday noon. Most of the legislators and out-of-town politicians would not be in till later that evening because the Senate was to be in recess till Monday and the House wasn’t going to meet till eight, and it was going to be just a short session to order the bills put on the calendar for the next morning.”
John Fournet was one of the out-of-town notables whose arrival that evening was expected. He had been a member of the Long peerage for years, but had refrained from political activity of that sort ever since his elevation to the state Supreme Court a year or so earlier.
None the less, he had been Speaker of the House for four years, he had been elected to the lieutenant-governorship on the Long-supported Allen ticket in 1932, and was one of those whose name was frequently mentioned as Long’s likely choice for endorsement to become Oscar Allen’s successor.
Senator Long had requested him to come to the capitol for a conference, and he had left New Orleans early that morning for the home of his parents in Jackson, planning to invite his father to accompany him to Baton Rouge. It would be a proud thing for the elder Fournet to see the deference paid his son as a state Supreme Court justice, as an intimate of the Kingfish, and perhaps as a candidate for governor of Louisiana.
7 —— September 8: Afternoon
“This day may be the last to any of us at a moment.”
——HORATIO NELSON
The thirty-one must bills which were certain to be enacted into law within no more than three more days were the subject of Sunday’s mealtime talk throughout Louisiana that noon. Huey Long was expressing complete confidence as to what these would do to “put a crimp into Roosevelt’s notion he can run Louisiana.” Everyone who paused at his table in the capitol cafeteria was given the same heartening assurance.