FRANCE: Fire

Waterfront riffraff and cheap gangsters of all nations, plus open and tawdry vice, are typical of famed Marseille, but so too is the soaring, indomitable spirit of its sunny French citizens. The true Marseillais is bold, humorous, boastful and greathearted. Last week stout, jovial, bearded Louis Frichet, one of the most popular citizens of jostling, neighborly Marseille, became the hero of a holocaust which made news the world around.

As the dynamic personnel manager of Marseille’s largest and showiest dry goods store, Les Nouvelles Galeries, bearded M. Frichet recently succeeded in persuading the owners to protect the lives of clerks and customers in their gaudy firetrap by ordering a modern sprinkler system. The gossiping Marseille plumbers and their helpers were maddeningly slow; but by last week they had put in all the pipes and sprinkler heads, promised by this week to get the system connected to the water mains.

Personnel Manager Louis Frichet last week had a busy time keeping his magpie clerks from hanging out the windows to watch French Premier Edouard Daladier and Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet as they came & went from the Hotel de Noailles across the street, for Marseille was playing host to the Radical Socialist Party Congress (see col. 3). It was in session when fire inexplicably burst forth in the women’s dressmaking department on the second floor of Les Nouvelles Galeries. Into swift action went the bearded personnel manager. With smoke and flames spurting from Les Nouvelles Galeries and the whole second floor blazing, rotund Louis Frichet rushed panting up the stair case to the roof, carrying an armful of blankets.

Three fear-crazed salesgirls stared dumbly at their personnel manager. They could not understand at first that he was saying their only chance for life was to wrap the blankets around their heads, dash downstairs through the flames. He was seen to offer to lead the way. The three salesgirls took the blankets and followed for a short distance, then their nerves cracked. Although brave Louis Frichet kept pleading with them and trying to hold them back, all three salesgirls finally, rather than face the flames, leaped off the roof to death. Alone with his blanket, the personnel manager began his delayed trip downstairs. It was too late. Not even the bones of Louis Frichet were found.

Exactly 40 minutes after the fire started Les Nouvelles Galeries collapsed, its walls bursting outward and setting fire to the Hotel de Noailles across the street. Into the hotel rooms of the absent Premier and Foreign Minister rushed firemen who had just time to gather up their papers, later taken to a police station for safe keeping.

Meanwhile, red-hot embers of Les Nouvelles Galeries settled down on the fuel storage tanks in the basement. Suddenly these exploded with a blast heard for miles, set fire to other hotels and buildings on famed La Cannebiere. This is the street of which all Marseille has boasted for generations on postcards sold to tourists: “Ah, if Paris only had a Cannebiere it would be a ‘Little Marseille!’ ”

From the Old Port at the foot of the Cannebiere a fireboat squirted water as far as it could, striving to wet down as many roofs as possible, but it was soon evident that the city fire department was no better than the police. Four years ago the assassination of Yugoslav King Alexander together with French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou at Marseille was “on the police.” Last week, although a Marseille fire brigade chief gave his life recklessly fighting the flames, the holocaust was “on the fire department.” The conflagration got completely out of hand.

Fortunately the No. 1 French Mayor, famed Edouard Herriot of Lyon (220 miles up the Rhone above Marseille), was attending the Radical Socialist Party Congress. Huge Mayor-and-former-Premier Herriot, who looks as though fit to burst with the famed cuisine of Lyon, promptly rang up his city hall, ordered: “Put some of our Lyon fire engines on railway flatcars and rush them here.”

This drastic measure saved Marseille. By 11 p. m. the fire was under control, by next morning damage was estimated held down to $1,500,000. The death toll at latest reports was 75.