Fourth International

Near suburban Barbizon, spiritual home of the world's greatest landscape painters, Mayor Roger could contain himself no longer last week. The village plumber had been to the Villa Ker Monique to repair pipes. He had found it barricaded with barbed wire and guarded by two fierce watchdogs. He had been locked in the room in which he worked. The village postman added the sinister fact that no mail ever came to Ker Monique. A courier on a motorcycle came there every day from Paris. With Stavisky, international spy rings, and rumors of brewing civil wars to inflame French imaginations, an official raiding party called at the Villa Ker Monique.

Upstairs they found a bespectacled little man with a grey goatee busily working at a desk on which lay two large revolvers.

"I am M. Sodrov,'' said he in a strong Russian accent. Prosecuting Attorney Cerede, an ardent reader of illustrated papers, looked at him severely.

"You are not," said he. "You are Leon Trotsky."

M. Trotsky shrugged, produced papers from the French Ministry of the Interior granting him permission to live in the Department of Seine-et-Marne.

"I am hiding myself here for fear of White Russian vengeance," said the former partner of Nikolai Lenin. "I am an old conspirator, you know. At this very moment I am plotting a Fourth International."

The Fourth International* actually exists, with an accredited representative even in New York, one Arne Swabeck. The chief difference between it and the orthodox Third International of Communism is that members of the Fourth take their orders from Leon Trotsky instead of from Josef Stalin. But last week French citizens did not worry about these niceties. To them the Trotsky incident was just one more black mark against the fallen government of Camille Chautemps. The Chautemps Cabinet was in office during the bloody riots of Feb. 6; Camille Chautemps' brother-in-law has been charged with complicity in the murder of Judge Albert Prince (TIME, April 23); now it appeared that it was the Chautemps regime that granted Conspirator Trotsky permission to settle within 35 miles of Paris. Even French papers of the Right had difficulty blaming Conspirator Trotsky for the original Feb. 6 rioting, but Le Journal charged, possibly with justice, that he and his Fourth International were responsible for the serious fighting around the Place de la Republique three days later. Trotsky's permission to remain in France was promptly cancelled, but police were slow in moving him from Barbizon.

"One cannot condemn him to death," said a secret service agent. "That is what his immediate departure would mean. We are letting him find a haven."

But where? While shag-haired assistants morosely packed up the assorted Trotsky belongings, no country in Europe showed any inclination to give asylum to the U. S. S. R.'s onetime Commissar of War. The U. S. was suggested.

"Why not?" said one of the book packers. "The United States has changed its opinion toward the social revolution. Look at President Roosevelt's program. It is even more socialistic than Stalin's."

Better informed. Conspirator Trotsky's private secretary clipped this hope.

"The United States refused us once last June when we were in Istanbul," said he, "and I don't see the sense in asking again."

Meanwhile France's White Russian emigres, for whom Conspirator Trotsky kept his big black pistols, made no attempt on his life, but did make his nights hideous. Strange dark figures darted from the shadows, rang the doorbell hour after hour. Tiring of these annoyances other parties organized glee clubs in the street, sang the "Volga Boat Song" until dawn.

* The First International was founded in London in 1864 under the aegis of Karl Marx, lasted ten years, disintegrated through lack of centralization. The Second International (Labor & Socialist) started in 1889. It went to pieces during the War, was resuscitated in 1923. Pale pink, and hated by Communists, it still exists but with small prestige. Famed oldtime members: Ramsay MacDonald; onetime Burgomaster Seitz of Vienna; Friedrich Ebert, first President of Germany. The lusty Komintern or Third International was founded by Nikolai Lenin in 1919, controls and directs Communist activities in 46 countries, despises Internationals Two and Four.

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