FRANCE: Evil Ghost

Of all the cancers that ate at the vitals of the Third Republic none was more conspicuously malignant than the “affaire Stavisky.” It took its name from Mystery-Millionaire Alexander Stavisky, who one day in 1934 was found shot to death in a snowbound Alpine hideout (TIME, Jan. 15, 1934 et seq.). Sûretée agents had trailed him there to ask him about the failure of the municipal pawnshop at Bayonne, in which Stavisky held the controlling interest.

Within a fortnight French taxpayers knew that, with the connivance of Government officials, they had been bilked of some $18,000,000 in pawnshop bonds. Soon some 50 Parisians were killed rioting against “the swindlers and assassins in the Chamber of Deputies.” Half a dozen bureaucrats fled, or, like Stavisky, were “found dead.” Two French Cabinets crashed. Whatever else he may have done, Stavisky revealed France’s inward rottenness to the watchful eye of Hitler.

Last week, like an evil ghost, the “affaire Stavisky” haunted the news again. French taxpayers were cheered by a decree of the Fourth Republic’s Cabinet: the Government and the city of Bayonne would make good a majority of the fraudulent Stavisky bonds. But the fortune in jewels, which Stavisky gave to his wife, Arlette, an ex-mannequin and dancer, was still untraced. The former Arlette Stavisky, her terpsichorean tittups long forgotten, recently settled down with her husband, a U.S. Army captain, to a tranquil life in Puerto Rico.