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Comedian Charlie Chaplin, looking much better fed than the lean tramp he used to be on the screen, emerged from his self-exile in the Swiss Alps, showed up in Paris waving a check for 2,000,000 francs ($5,700), part of the $14,000 prize which Multimillionaire Chaplin got last spring from the Red-sponsored World Peace Congress for his faithful party lining. He handed the check to France's famed priest Abbe Pierre (TIME, Feb. 15), a saintly man who has been virtually penniless ever since he gave away his sizable patrimony to charity 23 years ago. "It was an important decision for me to make, whether to accept Communist money as a Christian," said Abbe Pierre bluntly. "[But] if the 'peace partisans' want to stage a war with checks for the poor ... I hope the West will challenge them, and we will see the two worlds compete with each other to solve world misery."
On a house in London's Chelsea section where several famous poems and plays were written, a plaque was unveiled, thus restoring to the playwright, after some 60 years of disgrace in England, a semblance of respectability. Its terse inscription: "Oscar Wilde, 1854-1900, wit and dramatist, lived here." On hand were Wilde's son, Vyvyan Holland (who recently described his inherited stigma in Son of Oscar Wilde—TIME, Sept. 27), Actor Michael Redgrave, Poets T. S. Eliot and Sacheverell Sitwell, and Lord Cecil Douglas, grandson of the unforgiving ninth Marquess of Queensberry, whose grim insistence that Wilde go behind bars was the prime force that landed him, convicted of sodomy, in Reading Gaol.
At a Manhattan powwow sponsored by United Nations boosters to celebrate Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt's 70th birthday, Andrei Vishinsky, Russia's chief delegate to the U.N., dropped in as a surprise guest. When the festivities ended, Vishinsky warmly shook hands with one of his tablemates, a self-confessed Republican. "You are a very nice young man," glowed Communist Vishinsky. "If I were an American, I would be a Republican."