Vu's Views

Sextuplets Arrive! FRENCHWOMAN BEATS DIONNE MOTHER

Fortnight ago these epic headlines blared forth from the front page of the London Sunday Referee, lurid weekly beloved by Britain's masses. Billed as a "Sunday Referee Special," the startling story related how "a peasant woman, forty-two years of age, sits in Triboure, a lonely little village on a spur of the Pyrenees. Her foot rocks a cradle in which lie--SIX FULL-SIZED NORMAL BABIES. SHE GAVE BIRTH TO THEM IN ONE DAY SEVEN MONTHS AGO." The reason this amazing news had been so long reaching the world, explained the Referee, was that "there is no cable line in the little village. . . . There are no telephones." Pictures of the sextuplets Jean-Pierre, Jean-Paul, Jean-Marc, Jean-Luc, Jean-Marie and Jean-Claude Vicogne were published to clinch the yarn's authenticity.

Those U. S. citizens whose ears were reached by various versions of the London tale and who wondered why the U. S. Press did not rush to feature it were answered last week in the current number of Vu, weekly Parisian picture-paper. In its April 1 issue, Vu had devoted a full page to an account of the sextuplets' fabulous birth, pictured the six bouncing boys, told how Nestle's milk had made them grow. When the last child was born, gay Mme Vicogne was reported to have said: "Let's call him 'Jean-Ai-Assez.' [I've had enough]." This number of Vu also offered a page of photographs of some extraordinary animals. There was a cow-pigeon, a sheep-duck, a zebra headed like a rhinoceros, a monstrous swan wattled like a rooster. "Nature is an inexhaustible mystery," reflected Vu, explaining that the pictures had been obtained in "The Wild Forests of Brazil." Elsewhere in the issue were text and pictures showing how "the famous German Professor Julius Lirpa" had perfected a method for extracting gold from the scales of fish.

Gallic tongues in cheek, Vu's Publisher Lucien Vogel and Editor Philippe Boegner last week confessed that these sensations were no more authentic than the hoaxes annually perpetrated in the April Fool number of German Illustritre Zeitung (TIME, April 23, 1934). According to Vu, the Referee's gullible and light-fingered editors were not the only dupes of the sextuplet yarn, which had been illustrated with six views of the same infant. To an inquiring U. S. doctor, Vu solemnly replied that the six little boys now had a sister, born three months after the multiple delivery.

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