Harry S. Truman's office in the White House, gadget-poor by Roosevelt standards, grew richer by one plane model (of the presidential C-54), one gilded horseshoe (over the main door).

Venus de Milo was back at her old stand in Paris, after six years of wartime exile. Fresh from a castle in Valencay (with a smudge on her nose), she was uncrated and hoisted into her place in the Louvre.

Hermann Goring's private plane was taken over by the French Health Ministry for a new service: two-hour junkets for children with whooping cough. The Ministry has a theory that high altitudes destroy pertussis germs.

Princess Elizabeth, sporting the most becoming hat photographers have yet caught her in (see cut), visited a Sussex nursery for "blitzed babies," gathered up a six-months-old to pose for the most grown-up picture of her 19 years.

All in the Family

Mrs. Imogene Stevens, tiger-eyed Texas beauty, held in New Canaan, Conn, for the killing of a 19-year-old sailor at a neighbor's, house (TIME, July 9), had an emotional reunion at the county jail with her paratrooper husband, who flew in from Europe on a 30-day emergency leave to help her. Busy trying to get his wife's $50,000 bail reduced, Major George Ralsey Stevens III stoutly declared to reporters: "She did what any woman would have done."

Fiorello La Guardia's 64-year-old sister, Gemma, turned up in Berlin, after nearly a year in a Nazi prison. She had lost track of her Hungarian-Jewish husband, arrested with her in Budapest. Her captors, said she, had explained: "Your brother is a great friend of Roosevelt. When we catch this infamous relative of yours, we'll hang him in Berlin and you'll be there to watch it."

Sergeant William Thompson Jr., 27-year-old G.I. father of quadruplets born to Norah Carpenter a year and a half ago in Heanor, England, arrived home from the wars, changed into a neat blue suit with a discharge button, said to Pittsburgh reporters: "Nothing is important. . . . Let's drop the whole matter." Wife Eleanor, still refusing him a divorce, said, "I won't see him. . . . We have nothing in common to discuss. ... He made his bed; let him lie in it." Back in England, 24-year-old Norah, confident that the Sergeant would send for her and the three surviving, dumplingesque babies, looked forward eagerly to a trip to the U.S.: "They do things on such a bigger scale over there."

Words & Music

Felix Mendelssohn, the Nazi's No. 1 musical scapegoat, was back in open favor in Germany. In Munich his music led the program of the first symphony concert played in U.S.-occupied Germany. BBC reported meantime that records of both Mendelssohn and Offenbach (also blacklisted) had been found at Hitler's Berchtesgaden hideaway.

Louise Bogan, Manhattan poet-critic (for the New Yorker), moved into the Library of Congress' chair of poetry (term : one year; duties: comfortably vague), succeeding Southern Agrarian Poet-Critic-Novelist Robert Penn Warren (Night Rider).

Ernie Pyle won posthumous honors in Washington and on Ie Shima, where he was killed last April. His widow, Geraldine, accepted his Medal of Merit awarded for "outstanding services as a war correspondent." On the spot where Pyle died, the 77th Division unveiled a coral pyramid with a brass plaque (made of shell cases) bearing his name.

Just Deserts

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's name was given to two great European boulevards. The avenue des Nations in Brussels and the avenue Victor-Emmanuel in the city "where all good Americans go when they die" will be known henceforward as the avenues President Roosevelt.

Thomas Paine posthumously got back his citizenship rights in New Rochelle, N.Y. (election supervisors had denied him the vote in 1806 on the ground that he had forfeited his suffrage by accepting honorary French citizenship). New Rochelle's Mayor Stanley W. Church, squaring things 139 years late, observed that the author of The Rights of Man had done more than any other man to "make this a free and independent nation."

Derring-Do

General Douglas MacArthur escaped seven single-minded but bungling Jap conspirators who had been given guns, money, "special training," and careful instructions in a neighboring Philippine province. Heading MacArthurward, the would-be assassins apparently asked directions of the wrong people. Result: six Japs and one Filipino hanged.

Mary Astor Paul, onetime Philadelphia society belle (granddaughter of Anthony J. Drexel and niece of Mrs. William Waldorf Astor), turned out to be "Pauline," a member of the French underground. Now Mrs. Jacques Allez, she was once known to Main Line society as "The Butterfly Girl.* Some of her underground activities, disclosed last week: directing espionage, harboring Allied airmen who had been shot down, transmitting messages to U.S. officials in Bern, North Africa and England. "We still cannot talk too much about what was done," she told reporters. "The trouble in Europe is not finished."

Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, durable ex-New Jersey State Police Superintendent (famed in the Lindbergh kidnaping case) was home on leave, after three years of reorganizing Iran's gendarmerie. He reported that his 21,000 Iranian cops--scattered over 628,000 square miles--now do their bandit-chasing on foot, wheel, horseback and camelback, dressed in uniforms modeled after the Jersey state troopers'.

*At her debut (1909) 5,000 rare butterflies were released from a bag on the ceiling, but instead of flitting among the dancers, they all dropped to the floor, dead of suffocation.

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