Distraction from Scandel
(See front cover)
For two months the bullet-riddled body of Alexandre Stavisky has mouldered in its grave. But the evil shadow of this arch-swindler continued to march on through the ranks of French politics, striking in the dark like a vampire at large. Paris newspapers, seldom more than 16 pages, are not given to over-writing the news. Of the 30 columns of news in last Sunday's Matin, 14 were definitely concerned with the Stavisky scandal.
No near solution was the murder of Albert Prince, the handsome hollow-eyed Appellate Judge who was lured to Dijon fortnight ago and slain on a railroad track just before he was to testify concerning several of Stavisky's protectors (TIME, March 5). Whether Judge Prince was still alive when tied to the track was unknown, although a doctor discovered poison in his body tissues which seemed to indicate that he was already dead. By then a new theory had arisen, wild as anything in the entire case: Judge Prince was murdered by a gang of professional criminals that had revived the name and the manner of the early igth Century Carbonari. The theory wras voiced officially last week by white-chinned old Henri Chéron, now Minister of Justice. Said he:
"We must succeed in finding the assassins of the unfortunate counselor Albert Prince. . . . The country has been the prey of a band of evildoers who have recoiled before nothing to achieve their crimes. That band must be completely unmasked and punished."
A bloodstained knife and a powder puff were found near the Prince body. Brushing aside the powder puff, police concentrated on the knife. In the 1820's, when pomaded romantics sniffed laudanum, read Lamartine and drank from skull-shaped mugs, a secret society known as / Carbonari (the Charcoal Burners) nourished in France and Italy. There was nothing criminal about the original members who were exiled Neapolitan Liberals, forced, like true charcoal burners, to hide in the forests. Soon they took to murdering their political opponents, and later their members were neither Neapolitan nor Liberal. Their mark was a bloody dagger, left beside each of their victims. If Albert Prince was killed by such as these they were still at large last week, despite a reward of 140,000 francs for their capture.
The Stubs, One who was arrested last week was the dead swindler's wife, lovely dark-haired Mme Stavisky. A onetime dress model known as Arlette Simon, she married Swindler Stavisky shortly after the police raided a gay little dinner they both attended in the suburbs in 1926, bore him two handsome children, and acquired some of the finest clothes, the richest jewels in Paris.
On Stavisky's death hundreds of checks that he had scattered about Paris to lubricate his crooked schemes were found. Nearly all had been made out to cash. The stubs of the checks, presumably with the recipients' names, were missing. When this was discovered Chief Inspector Bony was promptly suspended from the Sureté Generate. With a month to think things over, Inspector Bony decided last week that the Government really meant business in its efforts to solve the Stavisky mystery. Back to his superiors went he with a suggestion that if he were reinstated he could find the missing check stubs.