Raids and Inquiries

Looking like a cross between Santa Claus and Socrates, M. Cheron is one of the few people in the world who was a friend of a legitimate Saint. Years ago in his native Normandy he used to play the guitar while Therese Martin, the "Little Flower" of Lisieux, sang hymns. This intrepid Norman was Minister of Finance immediately after Premier Poincare's famed stabilization of the franc, served in three cabinets and retired in 1930, leaving a treasury surplus of 19,000,000,000 francs. Because Papa Cheron was never one to become needlessly excited, Frenchmen knew that things were bad indeed last week when he gave weight to wild stories of impending civil war in the Paris Press. At his order a special inquiry was started into the existence of secret arms depots of various political parties. With the assistance of Minister of the Interior Sarraut, he also drew up a new decree, instantly signed by President Lebrun, putting teeth into the old law of 1834 regulating the sale of weapons.

Raiding parties of French police, each one accompanied by a magistrate, descended on the homes of seven junk dealers. Only two of the raids were productive. In suburban St.-Ouen police found 50 rifles and automatic pistols, and a table drawer full of cartridges in the home of Leopold Dancart, "collector." Even so the Dancart Collection was not what it was in 1926 when police ferreted out 350 rifles, 20,000 rounds of ammunition and a few machine guns. In the junkshop of one Beranger Gruyer police found 27 automatic pistols.

Meanwhile in separate rooms of the Palais Bourbon two unwieldy parliamentary committees continued their respective investigations of the causes of the rioting on Feb. 6 and of the Stavisky scandal. In the room generally reserved for the committee on the army and handsomely decorated with battle pictures, sat the 44 members of the Commission d'enquete sur les evenements du 6 Fevrier et jours suivants, better known as "The Committee of the Bloody Days." Its chairman, Deputy Bonnevay of the Rhone, boasts a pair of the finest sidewhiskers in all France. He heard things last week to make them curl:

From Radical Socialist Gaston Bergery, accused of begging money to arm the Left against the Right: "I said: 'Unless the Government disarms the Fascist, Royalist and Nationalist organizations it will render inevitable the arming of the Left and extreme Left forces'. . . .Tomorrow it won't be an uprising, but a coup d'etat. The forces which are being armed will descend together into the streets and the working class also will descend the same day. What can be predicted is not the issue of the struggle but the destruction of part of Paris."

From Royalist Maxime Real del Sarte, organizer of the famed Camelots du Roi: "Perhaps you do not realize to what extremes of dislike you have reached. The Chamber of Deputies is for the country something that resembles what the Bastille used to be. Your privileges and your immunities represent for the country a fortress that it would like to see demolished. . . . The Royalists should arm for defense, because at present there is no talk of anything but an approaching revolution and the sacking of Paris. I have been told that starting Friday, one will not be able to go out at night without being attacked. I do not know if that is true, but among the French bourgeoisie there is anxiety."

Down the corridor the Stavisky committee was also hearing things from an honest inspector of the Surete Generale to make its ears burn. Snapped Inspector Simon :

"Even a child would know that the affair was not handled normally from its beginning in December. . . . You ask if I think the Stavisky case might involve only simple negligence? Messieurs, you cannot be naive after 20 years in the Surete. . . . In the organization of the police, the most compromised employes are those enjoying the most favors."

Outside the committee room progress on l'Affaire Stavisky was limited to two main developments: 1) After four doctors, in the presence of four members of the parliamentary committee, had performed a second autopsy on the battered body of Handsome Alex, it was announced once and for all that Swindler Stavisky had committed suicide when trapped by police in Chamonix. There was only one bullet wound in the body, in the right temple. From the way the bone was shattered the pistol must have been fired almost touching the head.

2) Stung by charges of connivance and corruption, the Surete suddenly sprang to life and arrested three French gangsters charged with the murder of Judge Albert Prince, Stavisky witness, on a Dijon railroad track.

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