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Next night Minister of Interior Albert Sarraut, Public Prosecutor Gomien, Examining Magistrate Ordonneau and "a Personality" whose name no reporter could learn, assembled in the home of Inspector Bony. With a bow the Personality produced the check stubs, 1,200 of them, to a total value of $13.000,000 and explained that "Sacha" Stavisky had given the stubs to his Secretary Anton Romagnino. Romagnino had given them back to Mme Stavisky, who had handed them to the Personality.
Mme Stavisky was promptly arrested "for obstructing justice." Her jewels and furs were taken from her and she was locked in La Petite Roquette prison to await trial. She sent a message to the nurse at her apartment:
''Don't tell the children where I am. If they cry very much tell them I have gone on a cruise."
The end of mystery was not yet. Stavisky Secretary Romagnino had disappeared. So had a pasteboard box crammed with 10.000.000 francs worth of jewels which Alexandre Stavisky is supposed to have salvaged from the collapse of his Bayonne pawnshop and hidden in his Paris apartment. At the week's end twelve persons were under arrest, 18 in all were charged with complicity or suspended from office, in connection with the Stavisky scandal or the Prince murder. Most important of the catch:
1) Joseph Garat, Mayor of Bayonne, a Deputy of France who helped Stavisky set up the ill-fated municipal pawnshop which cost investors $30,000,000; 2) Georges Pressard, Chief Prosecutor of Paris and brother-in-law of onetime Premier Chautemps who was charged with obstructing and postponing the trial of Stavisky for his various ante-Bayonne peculations; 3) M. Guidoud-Ribaud, onetime attache of the Minister of Finance.
Despite the roarings of the Press, authorities refused to publish the names on the check stubs or to say what was contained in the mysterious documents for which Judge Prince had been murdered. The documents were not lost. Before Judge Prince was called away on his fatal trip to Dijon he was smart enough to have each one photostated.
No man knew better than Gaston Doumergue that the crisis that still grips France will not end until the entire Stavisky rottenness is exposed, explained and paid for in the penitentiary. Gaston Doumergue was called from sunny retirement in Southern France a month ago to save France. The country was on the verge of violent revolution. Hundreds were wounded and more than a score killed in the bloodiest riots Paris has seen since 1871. The plump little Premier came and a distraught people cheered him to the echo. He whipped together a cabinet drawn from every party but the Socialists, Royalists & Communists. He promised sweeping reforms. He soothed frayed nerves by beaming with vast good nature on everyone in sight. But Gaston Doumergue knew and every French politician knew that the barricades would rise again amid the crack of rifles, the clatter of charging troops and the dreadful roar of marching mobs if the Stavisky scandal is not blotted out of memory by an era of honest government.