Army into Lebanon were "purely military". A British attempt to persuade Coulondre to accept the authority of Shurki al-Ayubi, Faisal's governor in Lebanon, as a civil governor under French military authority, was unsuccessful while Coulondre insisting that mostly Christian Lebanon was in the French sphere of influence and he would not have Faisal's representatives from the Muslim Hejaz playing any role in Lebanon. Coulondre met with Field Marshal Sir Edmund Allenby, who apologised to him, insisting it was all a "misunderstanding", and ordered Ayubli out of Beirut on the night of 10 October 1918. The next day, the flag of the Hejaz was lowered while the French tricolor was raised over Beirut. On 16 October 1918, Coulondre told Gilbert Clayton that France wanted to occupy the Beqaa Valley in accordance with the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which was rejected by the British who assigned the valley to Faisal's agents. For the next two years, an uneasy truce prevailed with Faisal insisting that the Lebanese were Arabs and belonged in his state while the French argued that the Maronite Christians did not want to join a Muslim-dominated state. In May 1919, he married Pauline Meyer and was sent to Rabat, Morocco as the French consul. In November 1920, he went to Paris to join the Commercial Relations Sub-Department of the Quai d'Orsay. In January 1926 he was a delegate to Franco-Soviet economic negotiations. French investors have been by far the largest buyers of Russian bonds issued before 1917 and had invested the most capital in the Russian Empire, and thus were the ones most hurt by the nationalisations carried out by the Soviet regime and by the debt repudiation of 1918, the largest debt repudiation of all time. A key problem in Franco-Soviet relations in the 1920s was the French demand that the Soviet Union honor the debts repudiated in 1918 and paid compensation to the French investors whose assets in Russia had been nationalisated without compensation, demands that the Soviet government consistently rejected. From 1927 to 28 February 1933, he headed the Commercial Relations Department of the Political and Commercial Directorate and subsequently Deputy Director of the Political and Commercial Directorate at the Quai d'Orsay working under the Political Director René Massigli. Coulondre was a member of the "Protestant clan" that dominated the Quai d'Orsay in the first part of the 20th century. From 1920 to 1936, Coulondre had closely studied the