hydrodynamic hull. His concepts worked wonderfully in scale models, confirming the design's performance advantages. The French engineers were impressed and asked Yourkevitch to join their project. He also approached Cunard with his ideas, but was rejected because the bow was deemed too radical. The CGT commissioned artists to create posters and publicity for the liner. One of the most famous posters was by Adolphe Mouron Cassandre, another Russian emigrant to France. Another poster, by Albert Sébille, showed the interior layout in a cutaway diagram long. This poster is displayed in the Musée national de la Marine in Paris. Construction and launch Work by the Société Anonyme des Chantiers de Penhoët began on the unnamed flagship on 26 January 1931 at Saint-Nazaire, soon after the stock market crash of 1929. While the French continued construction, the competing White Star Line ship (intended as Oceanic, and started before the crash) was cancelled and Cunard's was put on hold. French builders also ran into difficulty and had to ask for government money; this subsidy was questioned in the press. Still, the ship's construction was followed by newspapers and national interest was deep, as she was designed to represent France in the nation-state contest of the great liners and was built in a French shipyard using French parts. The growing hull in Saint-Nazaire had no formal designation except "T-6" ("T" for "Transat", an alternate name for the French Line, and "6" for "6th"), the contract name. Many names were suggested including Doumer, after Paul Doumer, the recently assassinated President of France; and originally, La Belle France. Finally Normandie was chosen. In France, boat prefixes properly depend on the boat name's gender, but non-sailors mostly use the masculine form, inherited from the French terms for boat, which can be "paquebot", "navire", "bateau", or "bâtiment", but English speakers refer to boats as feminine ("she's a beauty") and the GCT carried many rich American customers. The CGT wrote that their boat was to be called simply "Normandie", preceded by neither "le" nor "la" (French masculine/feminine for "the") to avoid any confusion. On 29 October 1932 – three years to the day after the stock market crash – Normandie was launched in front of 200,000 spectators. The 27,567-ton hull that slid into the river Loire was the largest launched and the wave washed up the shoreline and over several hundred spectators, but with no injury. The ship was