Friday, November 16, 2007

"And you know what they call a... a... a
Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris? "

And he was eager to move up. After a promotion in early 1968, Mr. Romney complained that he was still subordinate to a fellow missionary.

“I went into the president’s office and said: look president, ‘ith eitha you orh me that is goin to run thith place,’” he wrote to a friend, again imitating a cartoon character. He said he got nowhere, adding: “Really, it’s not that bad — it’s just that I feel like I’ve been broken.”

Mr. Romney’s counterpart, Joel McKinnon, now president of a mission in Montreal, recalled: “He just had a million ideas a minute and couldn’t wait to try something new all the time.” When his suggestions were rebuffed, “He was a little frustrated, like he was working with a garden slug,” Mr. McKinnon said.

Just a few weeks later, though, Mr. Romney and Mr. McKinnon were thrust into new roles. Mr. Romney was at the wheel of car involved in a head-on collision on a country road, killing the wife of the mission president. Mr. Romney, who was not at fault in the accident, was knocked out — even mistakenly pronounced dead at the scene — but quickly recovered. When the president went back to the United States, Mr. Romney and Mr. McKinnon were left in charge of the other missionaries for three months.

The driver of the car that hit Romney, according to an account in a local newspaper at the time, was a 46-year-old man, Albert Marie, from Sireuil. Marie, according to French Mormons who responded to the accident, was a Catholic priest; in an interview this spring, a priest at the parish in Sireuil confirmed that the church's former pastor, now deceased, was Albert Marie. Many of the Mormons familiar with the accident say they believe that the priest was inebriated at the time of the crash but that assertion could not be confirmed. The priest was traveling with his mother, Marie-Antoinette Marie, and a 48-year-old woman, Marguerite Longué, neither of whom could be located.