FRANCE's best loved citizen, champion of the homeless Abbe Pierre, has stepped back from a nasty little controversy which threatened to tarnish his immaculate reputation.
Half a century ago the Catholic priest, now aged 83, was smuggling Jews across the Swiss and Spanish borders to save them from Nazi concentration camps. Since the war he has been the scourge of the political establishment on behalf of the poor and the homeless.
Only last month he successfully intervened with the Prime Minister, Mr Alain Juppe, on behalf of a group of illegal African immigrants sheltering in a Paris church.
Regular opinion polls show him to be France's most popular public figure.
However, last week he astonished people by appearing to ally himself with that dubious group.
"revisionist" historians of the Nazi era who claim that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust has been greatly exaggerated.
He came out in support of an old friend of 50 years standing, the ex Communist, ex Catholic, now Muslim philosopher, Dr Roger Garaudy.
Dr Garaudy, once a prominent and open minded Communist intellectual, last year published a book, The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics, in which he queried the figure of six million Jews as having been killed by the Nazis, and asked whether the term "genocide" was appropriate for what they had suffered.
Today Dr Garaudy will appear before a preliminary hearing in a Paris court to present arguments as to why he should not be prosecuted for "denying crimes against humanity" - an offence under a 1990 French law.
Last Thursday he published messages of support from several prominent people, including Abbe Pierre.
The latter, while admitting that, he had only glanced through the book, denied that his friend was a revisionist, deplored the charges against him as calumnies, and said, it was natural that there had been some exaggeration of atrocity figures after the war.
Abbey Pierre said he had recently been to Auschwitz, where there was a plaque saying that four million had died in the camp. However, he said, it was now accepted that the death toll had been "only" one million.
Commentators on both left and right expressed incredulity and consternation that the "apostle of the homeless" should, at the end of such a stainless life, get involved in such a foul fight".
Two days ago Abbe Pierre pulled back from the brink. He issued a statement deploring revisionism as "an intellectual and moral deceit".
But he repeated his belief that Dr Garaudy's work could in no way be described as such.