"American Methods!"

Scurrying Paris reporters sped back and forth, last week, between the pandemonium of their offices and the grim, still Prison St. Lazare. Caged there sat a tremendously dynamic and even fascinating new prisoner. What she is charged with doing may well rank her with the great swindlers of all time-- with fictional Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, with factual Signor Charles Ponzi. All week the story continued to break bigger and bigger. The name of a Cabinet Minister was dragged in. But always at the focus of sensation sat in her little cell Mme. Martha Hanau, the supreme swindleress. Even the angry mobs of people she had ruined dubbed her last week with a sort of awe "La Grande Catherine de Finance."

Simply and factually told the story of Swindleress Hanau is that of a clever woman who sold dull people worthless stock by promising them dividends of from 15 to 80 per cent. She went into bankruptcy, last week, with assets of 22,000 francs ($858) and known liabilities of 219,000,000 ($8,541,000); but even a hasty investigation showed that she had probably mulcted widows, small town businessmen and country priests of not less than half a billion francs ($19,500,000). This stupendous swindle was carried on from Paris through branch offices in almost every provincial city and town of consequence in France. During the past year fictional corporations with such vague names as L'Union Franc,aise d'Emission and La Societe Syndicate Fonciere were organized and floated at the rate of slightly less than one a day. When the crash came some 400 employes of Swindleress Hanau organized themselves into the "Society for the Defense of Honor," protesting that they had believed themselves to be engaged in selling absolutely legitimate securities to friends, neighbors, relatives, priests.

The astounding "Grande Catherine" of this orgy is a woman of 42. Her dark determined eyes seemed never to waver under police querying. When she had answered a question her straight almost lipless mouth shut in a thin, flat line. At her sumptuous estate in Boulogne, where she was arrested, she said disdainfully to the somewhat excited and strenuous investigators: "Here are my keys. You need not trouble to burst open my drawers and root in them like cochons." Even in jail she seemed undiscouraged. "My arrest, pouf! It is nothing," she said, "I work by American methods! It is no disgrace in the United States for a banker or a businessman to go into bankruptcy three or four times."

"American Methods!" Such was the glamorous slogan wherewith Swindleress Hanau dazzled and duped tight-fisted rural Frenchmen and took away their francs.

They thought her a female Ford. She always traveled by motor, in a long luxurious limousine, with a duplicate car following behind. "I have not an hour to lose on the road, in case of breakdowns," she would explain, "I say with the Americans, whose methods I follow, 'Time is money!' "

Cleverest perhaps of "Great Catherine's" maneuvers was to publish an imposing Parisian financial daily La Gazette du Franc et Des Nations, in which her bogus stock issues were gravely and "conservatively" analyzed and recommended. The pose of "American Methods" was played up to the limit in La Gazette, which from the first vigorously championed the Kellogg Pact Renouncing War (TIME, July 30) a document none too popular in France. During the last session of the League of Nations in Geneva, the Swindleress was dazzlingly present, offering and paying the unheard price of 25,000 francs ($975) for short feature articles for her paper by some of the leading journalists of Europe. Recently U. S. papers widely reprinted from La Gazette an elaborate expose of a Communist plan to seize Paris. So craftily thickened was La Gazette's plot that but for a rival newspaper the swindle might have kept booming for months.

People who like to sniff the famed perfumes of Franc,oisCoty will be glad to know that the paper of which he makes a hobby, L'Ami du Peuple, exposed the diabolic "Great Catherine." She had incautiously attacked in La, Gazette certain political schemes of Scent Tycoon Coty, and he fought back by putting smart reporters on her shady fiscal trail, exposed her. Amid the grand sensation of last week another purveyor of expensive liquids, Cognac Tycoon Jean Hennessy, was dragged into the mess. He has only recently been named Minister of Agriculture, and jealous enemies were quick to charge that because a newspaper in which he is largely interested, Le Quotidien, had made a joint circulation drive with La Gazette du Franc, he must have been at least privy to the swindle. Incomplete investigation seemed to show that this slur upon the Cognac Tycoon was baseless.

Among the few eminent persons thought to have been innocently gulled was mentioned His Eminence Louis Ernest Cardinal Dubois, venerable Archbishop of Paris.