Poor Paderewski, weary from months of trying to establish order in Pilsudski’s peculiar brand of chaos, now realized that he had a tremendous job of political “fence-mending” to do in Paris. For the problem was Dmowski himself. The small nations at the Conference—those whose main business was asking rather than dispensing favors—had to depend to an enormous degree on influence. And influence was largely a question of personality. In personality Dmowski was sheer disaster. Not only did his cold and academic manner do little to win him friends among the delegates, but his terrible anti-Semitism won him active enemies among Jewish and non-Jewish delegates alike. And of all the delegates who hated Dmowski, Lloyd George hated him the most. So irked, in fact, was the fierce little Welshman that Paderewski’s arrival only succeeded in rousing him to greater heights of anti-Polish feeling. “After all,” he said, “what can you expect from a country that sends as its representative a pianist!”
Paderewski decided to start repairing the damage at the very top. Immediately after his arrival he paid a call on the powerful President of the Conference, Georges Clemenceau—the “tiger of France.”
The present “tiger” met the former “lion” with a ghost of a twinkle in his stern eyes. “Are you, by chance,” he asked solemnly, “a cousin of the famous pianist Paderewski?”
Paderewski, with equal solemnity, bowed and said, “I am the very man, Mr. President.”
Clemenceau sighed deeply. “And you, the famous artist, have become merely a Prime Minister! What a comedown!”
The two men laughed as they shook hands warmly. They were off to a good start.
It was not long before nearly every delegate to the Conference—even Lloyd George—came to the conclusion that the Polish question must definitely be reconsidered before any final decision was made. Paderewski quickly became one of the most admired and therefore influential men in Paris. He was useful, too, as it developed. President Wilson and Colonel House sought his help in explaining some American attitudes to the Europeans, while the European delegates could always count on him to interpret their feelings for the Americans. More than any other man in Paris, Paderewski belonged both to the old world and the new.
“He came to Paris,” Colonel House later wrote, “in the minds of many as an incongruous figure, whose place was on the concert stage, and not as one to be reckoned with in the settlement of a torn and distracted world. He left Paris, in the minds of his colleagues, a statesman, an incomparable orator, a linguist, and one who had the history of Europe better in hand than any of his brilliant associates.”
One of the delegates, a smooth, professional orator, summed it all up rather nicely after a particularly wonderful speech by Paderewski. “Ah,” he sighed to a group of his colleagues, “if we could play as Paderewski speaks!”
The gains that Paderewski eventually won for his country were not all that he had hoped for, but they were far greater gains than any other man in the world could have made. They represented, as one statesman put it, “a triumph of personality.” Matters of boundaries, perhaps, left something to be desired, but these were not the major issue. The establishment of Poland as a nation, free and independent among the nations of the world—this was the major issue, and this was finally brought about on June 28, 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles was at last presented to the delegates for their signatures.