The Stavisky Scandal

REPUBLICAN France is once more in the throes of an affaire of the kind which have periodically convulsed her during the last half century. The series began with the Dreyfus case, so far the most famous, the most far-reaching, and the most romantic of these episodes. There the central figure was an innocent man, unjustly accused and later rehabilitated; the alleged crime was military and international; the honor of the army and the defense of the country were at stake. The affaires which have followed (with the exception of the Bonnet Rouge case during the war) have been for the most part sordid financial scandals on various scales, in which political institutions and personalities were more or less heavily implicated. In this latest instance the real extent of the financial damage is still doubtful; it is probably less than in other cases that have made less noise; but the political and moral consequences are already considerable.

I

The Stavisky case centres round the scandal of the Bayonne bonds, in itself a simple and rather shortsighted piece of fraud. Bayonne is a provincial town of about 40,000 inhabitants near the Franco-Spanish frontier, in the Basque country. It has a municipal pawnbrokery (founded in 1931) where the citizens can get cash advances against movable property. But pawnbroking in France has this peculiarity, that it is a public institution carried on by municipal bodies under the supervision of the state. It is one of the few instances where the social legislation of France (who, in spite of her revolutionary tradition, is generally backward in such matters) is in advance of common practice in other countries. The business has been brought under public control to make it an equitable form of money lending for the benefit of the poorer classes of the community — those who can offer no security for loans other than their personal effects. A private individual may not be a pawnbroker as he may in other countries. The rules of the municipal establishments are strict and favorable to the public. A fair estimate of value must be given for every article offered as a pledge; the amount advanced depends on the circumstances, but it is a declared percentage of the estimated value. The goods cannot be sold as long as the interest on the advance is paid, and there is no time limit to the transaction. Care is taken to prevent and detect traffic in stolen goods. Customers must prove their identity and must be resident in the municipal area.

Under these conditions pawnbroking becomes an affair of long credits and needs a good deal of capital. But, since it is supervised by the state, the state gives it an implied guarantee, and on the strength of this guarantee the credit of the pawnbroking establishments is good. Unlike the private concerns elsewhere, the municipal pawnbrokeries of France are allowed to raise capital by issuing bonds against the goods they have on deposit. The bonds carry the implied guarantee of the municipality and the state, and they are regarded as a good investment. Insurance companies, for instance, are allowed by law to invest in them without a limit. But of course the capital value of the bonds issued must not exceed the capital value of the property on deposit. The treasurers and directors of the municipal pawnbrokeries are responsible for seeing that this rule is observed; and it was through disregard of this rule, apparently criminal, on the part of a director or his treasurer or both of them, that the Stavisky scandal became possible.

Bayonne, as I have said, is a modest provincial town. The assets of the municipal pawnbrokery, whose operations are limited to its own administrative area, cannot be very large. They may be estimated roughly at a maximum of 25,000,000 French francs ($1,000,000 at par rate of exchange). Therefore the total value of Bayonne Credit Municipal bonds in the hands of the public at a given moment should not exceed $1,000,000. But about six months ago the rumor went round that bonds for a much bigger face value — from ten to forty times as much — were in circulation. Apart from those held by private persons, three insurance companies were believed to have large holdings. At first the rumors were not widespread and had no public effect. An obscure weekly paper that had printed them was threatened by the mayor of Bayonne, M. Garat, with a libel action, and it withdrew its charges. But toward the end of the year one of the insurance companies grew suspicious and presented its bonds for redemption. Bayonne asked for time to pay and offered higher interest in the interval. The offer was accepted, but a warning was sent to the Ministry of Finance, which started investigations. A state inspector soon found that Bayonne had issued unsecured bonds for at least 200,000,000 francs. A magistrate opened an inquiry, and at Christmas he issued a warrant for the arrest of Serge Alexandre Stavisky, a Polish Jew but a French citizen, who had founded and organized the Bayonne pawnbroking establishment, with the consent of the mayor, in 1931. Stavisky was nowhere to be found, but Tissier, the treasurer, was arrested, and Garat, the mayor of Bayonne, a Deputy in Parliament and a vice president of the Radical-Socialist Party — the party of the government in power — followed him to jail a few days later.

II

Who and what was Serge Stavisky? By origin, a nonentity; by nature, a pathological crook; by his perseverance, audacity, and long success, a romantic and sinister figure behind the scenes of French finance and politics. Serge Alexandre Stavisky was the son of a Polish Jew dentist, Emmanuel Stavisky. He was born at Sobodka, near Kief, in 1886. His father came to France in 1890 (he was naturalized later) and settled in the ghetto of Paris, a maze of crooked little streets behind the City Hall. There, with the pertinacity of his race, he worked and saved, first at the artisanship and mechanics of dentistry, later as a dental surgeon with premises of his own. The father’s struggle for existence, gradually rewarded by a certain measure of success, went on for ten or fifteen years. Meanwhile little Serge — or Sacha, as they called him, — was growing up in Paris. By saving and scraping, his parents gave him a college education, first at the school of the quarter, then (triumph of paternal devotion!) at one of the big colleges of Paris, the Lycee Condorcet.

Sacha’s people wanted him to be a doctor; but his early ambitions outran their dream. Clever with the precocious intelligence of the Jew, filled with the unheroically adventurous spirit of a nomadic but unmartial race, the schoolboy Sacha knew the underworld of Paris and learned its lessons. At sixteen he had amorous adventures. A woman of means whom he met by chance outside his lycee fell in love with his youth and whisked him away to Deauville for the week-end. That was the beginning of the life that destroyed him — his first glimpse of a world that called to both the gambler and the vulgarian in his heart. Still in his teens, he attached himself to the garish fringes of the theatre and the gambling den; money and the limelight, by hook or by crook, must be his. He frequented a sinister pothouse near the Porte SaintDenis, a haunt of drug traffickers and souteneurs. He made love to the filles de cabaret and theatrical down-and-outs of his day, who were more picturesque but tougher than their modern successors. One night he was arrested in a police drive; his father bailed him out. Too late, the hard-working dentist and his wife reasoned and scolded; the path of the adventurer lay open before their son. They kept him short of money, as indeed they must; he stole from them and from his fellows. The arriviste in him devoured his mind. When he left school he earned a living for a time at all sorts of precarious and doubtful trades — bookmaker’s clerk, money lender’s clerk, call boy, ‘super.’ At eighteen he made his first appearance on the stage as a topical singer at the Concert Wagram. He was hissed, but not discouraged.

In 1910 — he was then twentyfour — Stavisky married a Frenchwoman, Armande Sever, who divorced him soon afterward. And about then he was caught in his first swindle. The sum was not large, and again his father came to the rescue. Stavisky went on living from hand to mouth as before, but now the police had their eye on him. In 1912 they caught him in a little matter of worthless checks and he served his first sentence — fifteen days in jail with a fine of twenty-five francs ($5.00). Two years later he was ‘ wanted ‘ again — a swindle this time — and he fled to Brussels, only to be swept back into France by the German invasion of 1914. But our Sacha was nothing if not adaptable. A la guerre comme a la guerre — a little patriotism would be good for his record, and army service would mean an amnesty after the war, if he survived, as he could take care to do. Anyway, he had to disappear for a while, and the classic road to oblivion lay open. Stavisky joined the Foreign Legion and was posted to a transport column in August 1914.

But the rigors of the Legion were too much for the physique of a little Jew boy, already undermined by a vicious youth. In three months he was discharged from the army and once more had to live by his wits. He promptly started a tinpot ‘bank’ in Paris, and six months later he was in court again on a charge of fraud. This time he did not get off so lightly — six months in jail and a fine of one hundred francs.

Stavisky served this sentence, was released, and for a time kept away from the capital, living by various expedients in provincial towns. But in 1917, when authority had little time to give to swindlers, he turned up once more. With a middle-aged compatriot, Jeanne Bloch, he opened a cabaret, the CadetRousselle, in the Rue de Caumartin. The worthy Jeanne put her savings into the venture; Stavisky, without her consent, added her jewels. She had, poor soul, a weakness for le bel Alexandre, — Stavisky’s Oriental good looks had their power, — but the pair soon fought like cats and the Cadet-Rousselle was short-lived. It was there, though, that Stavisky first tried his hand at the dope traffic, and here his quarrels with Jeanne were unwise, for it was she who in the end denounced him.

M. Faralicq, a former director of the Paris ‘special police’ (those who look after the morals of the French metropolis, and they have their hands full), has told the story of this episode. Jeanne Bloch, moved apparently more by jealousy and unrequited love than by cupidity, poured out her woes to him, — stolen jewels, lost savings, — but the cabaret was closed and Stavisky had vanished. One day, however, two protesting prisoners (one with a handle to his name) appeared in M. Faralicq’s headquarters on a charge of trying to pass forged five-pound notes of the Bank of England. They admitted fast enough that the notes came from Stavisky, who had asked them to get them changed. Stavisky was laid by the heels and swore he had the notes from Berlin. The police made inquiries in Berlin, but failed to trace the forgers, and Stavisky and his two dupes appeared in court. There, to the astonishment of the good M. Faralicq, the police inspector who had made the investigations testified that in his opinion the banknotes were genuine, and the case was dismissed. Stavisky may have been innocent in this affair. It seems more likely that he had given a first taste of his way with authority.

Not long afterward he was in trouble again. In a Montmartre cabaret he bought or was given as change a check against the establishment for 800 francs. When the check was presented a few days later it was made out for 48,000 francs, and it just cleaned out the balance of the cabaret owner. This little coup had the Stavisky neatness. A check for any sum over 50,000 francs cannot be cashed in France without the express sanction of the drawer.

A ‘4’ put in before the ‘8’ and a ‘0’ at the end made things just right; Stavisky probably knew the amount of the cabaret owner’s balance, for he left nothing to chance. Once more the police made inquiries, and soon were assured that Stavisky was the culprit. What happened afterward is not very clear. M. Faralicq says that on the very day when the case was complete and Stavisky was to be brought into court the inspector in charge found to his amazement that the check had vanished from his files. Some friend of Stavisky’s inside the police organization had made away with the evidence, and the case had to be dropped. But this person was never identified, and according to another version a relative of Stavisky’s who occupied a diplomatic post in Paris found half the money (under suitable pressure) to avoid a scandal, and Stavisky paid back the balance.

III

M. Faralicq’s two stories give us the key to the most baffling and most eagerly discussed aspect of the Stavisky mystery (for mystery it still is) — the extraordinary way in which this man, a well-known and several times convicted crook and swindler, evaded justice and carried on his operations with immunity. By his changes of name — he was known at various times as Serge Alexandre, Sacha Alex, Doisy de Montel, and Victor Boitel — he deceived acquaintances and innocent accomplices in high positions, who did not know his true identity and were too careless or too busy to make inquiries. How he defeated the heads of the police, again and again, when they had him within their grasp; how he avoided arrest when he was detected, avoided trial when he was arrested, and avoided imprisonment when he was sentenced — this is a mystery which time and diligence (assuming that diligence is brought to the task) will make clear. The popular theory of the moment is that judges, prefects, Deputies, even Cabinet Ministers, were in his pay. The probability (allowing for the ‘happy disorder’ which reigns in France in these matters) is that Stavisky had a few good friends among the lower ranks of the police who shielded him without the knowledge of their chiefs. That is a less exciting explanation than many that have been repeated from mouth to mouth in Paris for the last three weeks; but the Stavisky case is not really romantic, and it is, I fear, on some such unromantic note that it will close.

The story of Stavisky’s early beginnings shows clearly that he was what I have called a pathological crook. The truth was not in him; from his childhood he suffered from dishonesty as other men suffer from a chronic disease. He could not put through a money transaction without cheating on it. When he had plenty of money he was caught cheating at cards (as we shall see later) and barred from the casinos and gambling clubs of France. At one time he kept a racing stable, and one day he appeared at MaisonsLaffitte, one of the big training centres near Paris, and called on a trainer of race horses. ‘See here,’ said Stavisky, ‘I have a horse in the big race tomorrow and my horse must win. The only horse I’m afraid of is yours. What’s your price?’ The trainer, an honest fellow, showed him the door; but Stavisky’s horse won the next day; and a month later the trainer found out by accident that Stavisky had bribed his jockey. He had backed his own horse in three other European capitals besides Paris, to bring up the odds. Only a financial genius or a born swindler would have taken so much trouble for so small a thing.

After the check incident, Stavisky, who knew now (or thought he knew) how to manage the police, grew bolder. He carried on his drug traffic on a bigger scale, ran a shady meeting place in Montmartre, and made money. He had a hand in all kinds of peculiar deals, buying on credit and selling for cash, always fishing in troubled waters with the night life and the theatrical demi-monde of Paris for his background. As an associate of the notorious Himmel, he floated bogus cinema companies in Paris with American money; but when Himmel’s companies collapsed Stavisky was not prosecuted. Like many other clever ex-jailbirds, he was now a police spy or indicateur, and that, perhaps, without the knowledge of the higher authorities. As long as he did not go to extremes, he would be protected by his acquaintances in the police. A charge of swindling involving 100,000 francs failed against him for this reason.

In 1926, Serge (or Sacha) Stavisky, otherwise known as Serge Alexandre, Sacha Alex, Doisy de Montel, or Victor Boitel, was entering on the last and most impressive period of his career. The petty shifts of the Porte SaintMartin, Montmartre, and the Rue de Caumartin were beneath his dignity. ‘Monsieur Alexandre,’as he called himself, had made money and was intent on making more — very much more — and making it quickly. He had become a well-known and, in his way, a popular figure in the fashionable centres of pleasure and extravagance — Deauville, Cannes, Biarritz. He had married a woman whom, to give him due credit, he adored until the end — Arlette Simon, the pretty mannequin for whom M. Paul-Boncour, Chautemps’s Foreign Minister, had acted as advocate, free, gratis, and for nothing, when she was involved in some scrape of Stavisky’s, years before. (She was the daughter of an old friend of M. Paul-Boncour’s who was killed in the war; but this little episode, like many others of like nature, serves to-day as a stick to beat that poor dog the government.) Deauville, the scene of Stavisky’s earliest temptations, was the setting of his highest success. He had always been a gambler, and he owed it to himself now to gamble on the grand scale, for his world was watching. He stood up to the Greeks at baccarat, played for maximum stakes, and won or lost big money with equal composure. His expensive, well-groomed, overscented, altogether too perfect person, his pretty wife, winning elegance competitions in her pale blue automobile (gown to match) and picture hats, his white-uniformed chauffeur, were familiar figures on ‘the boards.’ Not many knew, fewer still would admit that they knew, his history. His own circle — paupers and plutocrats equally suffused with false chic, and living on others or on one another — were not particular, and those who dismissed him with a glance at his shoes and his jewelry did not care to inquire. He gave expensive dinner parties, attended by the newly rich and the arrivistes of the season, at the Guillaume le Conquerant. In the autumn he moved down to the Riviera and entertained lavishly at the Reserve at Beaulieu.

That was the time of the post-war boom in France, when the real prosperity of the country was matched only by the poverty of the public treasury, emptied by government extravagance and crippled by the evasions of the taxpayers. It has been reckoned that Stavisky, by one swindle or another, made over $250,000 in 1926. But his expenses were enormous, and, though a great deal of money went through his hands, he had little in reserve. He and his wife between them had only about $3000 in cash at the time of his death. A journey which he made to Budapest (to buy up the Hungarian bonds, which he tried to put on the French market) cost him $22,000. He was supposed to spend on the average $400 a day or nearly $150,000 a year — a great sum for a European. He set aside $4000 a month for his wife and children; the rest went mainly in fees to his agents, bribes to his accomplices, and subsidies to his newspapers. Though a millionaire several times over, he worked hard for his living, and when he was not peacocking at Deauville or Cannes his habits were as simple as those of any busy city man.

IV

The Stavisky campaign of 1926, like his appearance at the Concert Wagram as a boy, was a false start. He soon roused the suspicions of the judiciary (from whom his useful friends could not always protect him), and on his return from Deauville in the fall he was arrested at Marly-le-Roi, near Paris, after a gorgeous party in the house he owned there. The charge was again one of fraud; and this time Stavisky was in custody for eighteen months. This time, also, the poor old dentist of the Jewish colony gave way to despair at the repeated disgraces of his son; he was found dead on the railroad track a few days later. But in December 1927 the son was released on the ground of ill health. A police doctor had examined him and reported that he could be taken care of in the prison infirmary, but the prison doctor would have nothing to do with him. So they released him on bail, and later, so it was said, the requirement of bail was withdrawn.

Now began the last and most fabulous phase of Stavisky’s career; now also appeared most clearly the defects of the judicial system which is so criticized in France to-day. The slowness of the French law is notorious. Judgment in quite simple cases is often not given for five or six years after their opening, and when money payments are involved it is not executed for several years longer. Lawyers may and commonly do delay cases for years by applying for adjournments on behalf of their clients; it is a recognized method of defense. In time the ‘civil parties ’ (the private plaintiffs in a case) get tired of the business or run out of money. Then they drop their charges or accept a compromise, and when that happens the public authorities seldom go on with the case, even in criminal proceedings.

There are men at liberty in France to-day, carrying on business as bankers or financiers, who have been charged with all kinds of offenses but never brought into court; others have been sentenced to terms of imprisonment but have never served them. The principal reason is not dishonesty or even slackness on the part of the authorities, but a shortage of judges and of magistrates, old-fashioned methods, and the contradictory provisions of the law itself. The slowness of the French system in bringing prisoners to trial is well known; often they are in prison for a year or more before they appear before a jury, while the juge d’instruction or examining magistrate carries on, single-handed, an elaborate inquiry which is really a hunt for incriminating evidence. The juge d’instruction may have several cases in hand; if so, the late comers must wait. But the time they spend in prison awaiting trial is subtracted from the time they are sentenced to serve if found guilty, and they are released automatically when, as may easily happen, they have spent in prison a time equal to the maximum sentence that could be imposed for their offense.

The result is that innocent persons in reality serve prison sentences of a year or so without ever being convicted, while others who are clearly guilty avoid imprisonment and even trial. So the distinction between innocent and guilty is obscured and the law is brought into contempt. Under such conditions it is not surprising if honesty in business matters tends to be thought quixotic, just as, for similar reasons, citizens who pay their income tax honestly in France are laughed at as dupes.

Serge Stavisky, ‘provisionally released’ in 1927, succeeded with the help of his lawyers (two of whom were also Deputies) in putting off the trial of his case for six years; nineteen adjournments of the trial were granted. Whenever the case was due for hearing, Stavisky produced a medical certificate to the effect that he was not fit to stand his trial. The adjournments were granted automatically by the lower courts as a matter of routine; the machinery of the law was so complicated and so cumbersome at the best of times that this kind of delay did not attract attention at the top. But all this time Stavisky was at large and committing or preparing new depredations on a scale bigger than any he had devised before. A few conscientious officials who had kept an eye on him tried to warn their chiefs. M. Pachot, a director of the Surete Générale, wrote no less than fifteen reports about Stavisky which should have gone straight to the Public Prosecutor; but either that official did not read them when they arrived or they went astray among the innumerable pigeonholes of the Ministries of the Interior and Justice, and no action followed.

‘Monsieur Alexandre’ — le bel Alexandre of the flashy salons — was at the height of his power. His gambling now went farther afield than the green tables of Deauville and the Riviera. Floating fraudulent companies was his specialty. The gem of his collection was the ‘Caisse Autonome des Reglements et des Grands Travaux Internationaux,’ a title which seemed to promise great things, but merely sheltered Stavisky’s scheme to plant the Hungarian bonds at a fictitious price on the French market. (M. Daladier, who was then Premier of France, had wind of this in time and warned his Ministers, and the scheme fell through.) Then there was the ‘Compagnie Fonciere d’Entreprises Générales de Travaux Publics,’ remarkable for the fact that its chairman was a former prefect of police, M. Hudelo, and one of its board of directors a retired general. On the board of the ‘Caisse Autonome des Reglements, etc.’ were M. de Fontenay, a former Ambassador; M. Petitjean, a Belgian Senator; M. Ceccaldi, an honorary prefect; and the Vicomte de Guichen, a diplomatist. As M. Monnet, a young Socialist Deputy, said very well in the French Chamber on January 11: —

‘If the police had really wanted to unmask Stavisky, they would have warned these people against going into this concern. . . . The directors each invested only 2500 francs. The company was floated with a capital of 1,000,000 francs. What was the first act of the board of directors, at their first general meeting? They decided to issue 500,000 shares at 1000 francs each. So here are these gentlemen putting 15,000 francs between the six of them into this business and thinking that this entitles them to ask the public for 500 millions. Is it not a perfect illustration of the system under which we live? In the capitalist world of to-day the men whom we see at the head of affairs have very little money, and it is public credulity that gives them decisive and really feudal power.’

V

In his last phase Stavisky — now known only as ‘Monsieur Alexandre’ — added racing to his other activities, running his horses under the nominal ownership of M. Dorny y de Alsua, a penniless and harmless old beau, formerly Ambassador for a South American Republic, who lent his name to the venture (to avoid awkward questions by the Jockey Club) in return for a salary. But there were times when Stavisky was short of money, and then he had to revive the methods of the Rue de Caumartin. Twice he narrowly escaped disaster. The first time, after winning 780,000 francs in three games at baccarat (M. Zographos holding the bank), he was suspected of using marked cards and barred from the tables. Yet not long afterward he was gambling again, after having indignantly overcome the objections of the Cannes Casino. It was said that he held a special card from the Surete Générale which gave him the entry as a police agent, but this was not strictly correct. According to an interview given to a newspaper by M. Ducloux, who is in charge of the supervision of gambling by the Surete Générale, what happened was this: When he was released from prison at the end of 1927, he visited the Surete ‘to thank the inspectors for the way they had treated him,’ and, by way of gratitude, he offered to act as an agent or indicateur. In accordance with the dangerous and demoralizing practice of the French police, the offer was accepted and Stavisky was helpful from time to time. (This connection of his was, of course, just what he wanted to protect him from police interference.) But it happened that while traveling he was detained for twenty-four hours at the Italian frontier as a man who was ‘wanted ’ by the police. He was released on the strength of a telephone call from the Surete, but on his return to Paris he asked for a written laissezpasser and this was given to him. The ticket-of-leave man was thenceforth under police protection! Indiscreetly, he used this personal letter from a Surete inspector to force his way into the gaming rooms at Cannes. The Surete heard of this and took back the letter.

Stavisky’s second gaffe was made at Orleans, where he first turned his attention to municipal pawnbroking but was defeated by a vigilant mayor. Here he overreached himself and had to find 15,000,000 francs in a hurry to cover his liabilities. He realized that sum within forty-eight hours and escaped by the skin of his teeth.

These events brought Stavisky to his last and fatal gamble, the affair of the municipal bonds at Bayonne. (The Hungarian bonds deal might have made bigger money, but it was nipped in the bud.) At Bayonne the master crook found what he wanted: a gullible or dishonest mayor and an opening for municipal credits. By some process which has not yet been explained, he became entrusted in 1931 with the organization of a municipal pawnbroking and credit establishment, with a state recommendation and the right to issue bonds to the amount of its deposits.

The process he employed for the swindle was simplicity itself; it needed only a complacent treasurer and a little inattention on the part of the authorities. The bonds were made up in the form of checks, each with two counterfoils: an ordinary counterfoil on the left, the bond itself in the middle, and a second counterfoil (for the ‘control’ or audit department) on the right. But the bonds and counterfoils were printed blank; the amounts were filled in by hand, ad hoc; and there was no guarantee that the amounts on the bond and on the counterfoils would be the same. M. Garat, the mayor of Bayonne, who was ultimately responsible, was in the habit (so it is alleged) of signing a whole book of blank counterfoils (those on the left) beforehand, leaving the rest to his treasurer. It was easy for the person who made out the bonds, if he had any reason to please ‘Monsieur Alexandre,’ to make out the two counterfoils for, say, 500 francs and the bond for 5,000,000. . . .

I need not recapitulate the further details of the fraud and its discovery. The responsibilities and collusions involved are now subject to judicial inquiry. After two years of these operations, bonds nominally worth many times the assets behind them were held by investors. An accountant gave the first warning last June; the overlapping and general slowness of the state services prevented prompt action. Some months later an insurance company presented bonds which could not be promptly redeemed, and the warning was repeated. This time it was heard, and by the end of December the Stavisky scandal was in full blast.

The first victim was the treasurer at Bayonne, who had made out the bonds. From his cell in the Bayonne jail he vehemently accused the mayor, M. Garat, who was arrested in his turn. (Two days earlier he had been mercilessly interviewed in his pyjamas, at two o’clock in the morning, by four ruthless newspaper men who saw him creeping home from Paris and insisted on being let into his house at that hour.) M. Garat, in his turn, threw suspicion on M. Darius, the editor of the weekly newspaper that had attacked him and later withdrew its charges, and M. Darius involved M. Dubarry, the editor of a Paris daily, the Volonté, which is alleged to have received a big subsidy from Stavisky. But M. Dubarry had persuaded the Minister of the Colonies, M. Dalimier, when he was Minister of Labor, to write two letters recommending municipal pawnbroking bonds to insurance companies as safe investments. This indiscretion cost M. Dalimier his portfolio and nearly brought down the government; M. Dalimier resigned before the debate of January 11. MM. Garat, Tissier (the treasurer), Dubarry, Darius, and Aymard (a newspaper director and contributor) are all in jail as I write. The fat is in the fire with a vengeance; the government, the civil services, the law courts, and the police have to defend themselves against the angry suspicions — and the French can be quick both in anger and in suspicion — of Jacques Bonhomme.

VI

And now, what of Stavisky? On December 23, according to published reports, he was called to the Surete and questioned, not on the Bayonne affair, but on the last case against him, which was once more to come up for hearing on January 26. It has been said that he was deliberately warned, and he may well have heard from his friends the inspectors that his arrest was imminent. However that may be, he waited no longer, but left Paris by road soon after that interview in the company of a faithful friend, M. Pigaglio, a writer on the Volonte. They drove to Servoz, near the Swiss frontier, where Pigaglio had a villa, and arrived there just as the warrant for Stavisky’s arrest was issued in Paris. The next day, Stavisky and Pigaglio moved to another villa which they hired for a fortnight; the heating apparatus of Pigaglio’s villa was out of order. Here Stavisky was carefully hidden; the servant who brought in his meals was not allowed to enter his room. But after two days of this Pigaglio apparently took fright (he may not have known, at first, what Stavisky was in for), and he went back to Paris, while Stavisky went on to Chamonix in a hired car. There he found another protector waiting to hide him — one Voix, whom he had employed in his offices in Paris. In a villa hired (under a false name) by Voix, he lay now for four days more, and there, on January 8, he was discovered and surrounded by the police, and (in the official presumption at any rate) shot himself as they broke into his room.

The death of Stavisky only added to the storm of public condemnation which now raged in Paris and through all France. The French public neither loves nor trusts its police; that is the penalty the force pays for being an irresponsible body, not answerable to the common law. Of late years there have been too many ‘ suicides ’ of prisoners who knew too much; now, when they occur, the Frenchman in the street assumes as a matter of course that the police killed their prisoner. The arguments for and against this assumption in the case of Stavisky have been thrashed out at length in the daily press, and they are still the subject of inquiry. Suffice it to say that there are three rival theories: (1) that the police shot Stavisky dead when they broke into his room, having been ordered from Paris to silence him at all costs; (2) that they drove him to suicide by moral pressure, keeping him under threats and suspense for an hour or more before they broke in; (3) that the police told the truth, that Stavisky really did shoot himself, and that the delay in breaking into his room before the shooting and in taking him to a hospital afterward — he was alive, though unconscious, for nearly twelve hours — was due simply to stupidity or hesitation on the part of the inspectors and to their anxiety to get proofs of his suicide in the form of photographs, statements by witnesses, and so forth, before they moved him. Of these three theories, pending further information, I prefer the last.

The life history of Serge Stavisky shows him in a sordid rather than a romantic light. The interest of the affair, since the removal of its central figure, lies rather in the reactions of French opinion. The Chautemps Government, after some uncertainty, crashed to destruction to the accompaniment of vicious rioting. The audacities of Stavisky crop up every day in unexpected directions. M. PaulBoncour, the Foreign Minister, has had to justify himself for having once, as an advocate, defended the future Madame Stavisky when le bel Alexandre involved her in one of his early schemes. M. Bonnet, the Finance Minister, strenuously denies a story that Stavisky was present, and was on intimate terms with the French delegation, at the Stresa Conference.

Particularly interesting has been the reaction of the press. The law of libel in France does not seem to be quite so effective as elsewhere. It is slow and uncertain in its working, and a first-class scandal consequently finds the great polemists of the French press in their element. For sheer vituperation, going hand in hand with a certain humor, M. Leon Daudet, the leader of the Royalist Action Française party and director of the newspaper of that name, is unapproached. He has, of course, the advantage that he need not be civil to anyone among the political leaders of his day, since all Republicans are alike to him. Let us hear him on the Stavisky case: —

M. Camille Chautemps, Prime Minister, Minister of the Interior, shady and ingratiating person, is the leader of a gang. I use the word in its fullest sense: a gang of thieves and, when needed, of murderers of both sexes, from the former Minister of Justice Dalimier to Stavisky, Hayotte [Stavisky’s theatre manager], Dubarry, editor of the Volonte, and Xavier Guichard [director of the judicial police] — without counting a hundred secondary persons in the background, Senators and Deputies, blackmailers like Sartori and others — who live on the plunder of the gang under the high protection of magistrates of whom the finished example is the true master of the courts, the Public Prosecutor Pressard, brother-in-law and general agent of Camille Chautemps. . . . Dubarry, of course, should be thrown into jail, Dubarry the portfolio snatcher, fed with millions by that robber of the second power Stavisky. I promise you, Albert Dubarry tightens his buttocks at this moment! A few lines in the corner of his rag [the Volonté] on the second page, on ‘the Bayonne frauds,’ and that is all! He is no bolder than he was in times gone by, in the police court, in company with his collaborator Degoulet or Gohier.

I have quoted from the Action Françise to give the reader a taste of invective as it can be and is wielded in the Paris press. I do not suggest that M. Daudet’s assertions are true or even remotely near the truth, shrewd though they can be and entertaining though they always are. Whatever events may show regarding the present temper of the French people, it would be a mistake to take the Stavisky affair and its reactions as proof of any exceptional degrees of corruption or folly in French institutions or in French leaders. France is a remarkable nation; she is the most advanced democracy in Europe — I may add, without offense, in the world; she genuinely loves liberty, hates pretense and hypocrisy, and prefers to see and say the worst of herself and others. She has the defects of her virtues and pays the penalties of her institutions. Her administration, being a separate and half-secret thing, divorced from the daily life of the people and largely removed from the influence of their elected representatives, has not shaken off the habits of the Napoleonic era which gave it birth; it is excessively centralized, complicated, old-fashioned, careless, and perhaps, here and there, corrupt. But the very readiness of the Frenchman to raise the cry of ’Traitor!’ and to proclaim his own failings and his own absurdities in the hearing of other men is proof of the objectiveness and flexibility of the Frenchman’s mind, and of the pungent humor which, more often than anger, governs it. To take away the taste of M. Daudet and to make some little reparation to the memory of Serge Stavisky, let me close this study with a quotation from the ironic pen of M. de la Fouchardière: —

A correspondent of mine is of the opinion that we are too hasty in crushing le bel Alexandre (is it possible that my correspondent is a woman?). Stavisky seems to him or her agreeable in the sense that he robbed only financiers, which, after all, may be a sort of justice.

M. Georges Bonnet last Sunday denounced hoarding as the principal cause of the crisis. Who did more than Stavisky to make capital flow and to speed up business? A legitimate family, two irregular ’extras,’ a princely apartment at the Claridge, a villa at Saint-Cloud and another on the Riviera, two Hispano-Suiza automobiles, the encouragement of the equine race, the study of the centrifugal principle at roulette, the ownership of a music hall and five newspapers — these are activities well designed to support industry, art, sport, and literature. Stealing the Hungarians’ money to spend it in France represented, besides, the application of a patriotic method highly useful to our national commerce. . . .

In these times of unemployment, M. Stavisky will have done something to open up the profession of Cabinet Minister, making a little room for new arrivals, who were growing somewhat impatient at being held up too long by the real immobility of their elders, who changed their places only to play puss-in-the-corner.