Ding Dong Fric-Frac

Rarely in his cunning career had The Saint been so brazenly flouted. At the very moment that the goateed detective of the U.S. comic strips was trying to solve a wave of Riviera art heists, a band of thieves last week made off with the biggest haul of masterpieces in modern French history: 57 canvases lifted off the unguarded, uninsured walls of the Annonciade Municipal Museum in chic Saint-Tropez. Value of the fric-frac, as a robbery is known in France: $1,500,000, including Matisses, Derains, Dufys, Vlamincks and a pair by Dunoyer de Segonzac, curator of the museum, who was away at the moment to supervise a big show of his own works in Geneva.

The Saint's cartoonist was inspired by an actual string of unsolved Riviera thefts --four in the last 18 months. So, probably, were the crooks, who simply turned a key in an iron grille gate, jimmied an inner door, and, in less time than it took to catalogue the loss, cleared the ground-floor walls of the converted 18th century chapel of all but four paintings.

Clues were scarce. The typical whine of the burglars' Citroen truck was heard at about 3 a.m. as it pulled away from the scene; but police were still looking for the truck itself. The museum's semiofficial watchman had spent the night with a sick relative. Local police were snugly in bed until the next morning, when Charwoman Incarnation Olivares arrived, took one look at the bare walls, shrieked: "Mon Dieu, they have pulled off the museum!"

Flics, who raced to Saint-Tropez from Marseille, wondered how the picture poachers expected to dispose of easily recognized works. Reputable dealers and patrons would shun them. There was no insurance company to bargain with, since the city had no funds for $30,000 annual premiums that would have been necessary. The burglars' only hope of reward seemed to be in ransom, and Saint-Tropez has no blood money to spare.

Yet Curator Dunoyer de Segonzac refused to be alarmed. "Everything will be fine," he declared imperturbably, "and our museum will be famous."

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