Foreign News: Widow’s Mite

In a brown ermine coat trimmed with blue fox, France’s famed Widow Stavisky last week stepped off the He de France in Manhattan to keep an engagement in a Broadway night club. The onetime mannequin said that she is all but penniless, having given her jewels to her late husband Sacha, the Great Swindler who did Frenchmen out of $18,000,000 and nearly provoked a French Revolution amid the stink of official corruption (TIME, Jan. 15, 1934 et seq.). Excitedly from Paris the faithful old nurse of the Stavisky children, Claude and Micheline, cabled that swindled persons are “threatening the dear babies.” The nightclub doorman announced : “No stage door johnnies have asked for her yet.” Other girls in the show exhibited bare breasts but this Mme Stavisky was not asked to do “in deference to her matronhood”. She does not dance, sing or act, simply walks around. Somewhat awed in the presence of the tranquilly beautiful widow, a curious Broadwayite ungrammatically asked : “Madame, avez-vous nostalgia pour France?” She withered him with a slight shake of the head and he afterward explained, “I was trying by innuendo to induce her to speak of The Affair.” The widow’s mite: $50 per week.