FRANCE: Scandal Obliterated

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Because Minister of Interior Jean Louis Malvy fell in a swoon (TIME, March 29) while enraged Deputies shrieked, "Traitor! Pig! Lover of Mata Hari!" and because he subsequently resigned from Premier Briand's Cabinet (TIME, April 19), many Frenchmen had been strengthened in their belief of the nine-year-old charge that he was once the lover of Mata Hari, a Javanese-Dutch dancer, who allegedly secured and sold to Germany secrets concerning the British tank (1917) and was shot as a spy on French soil a few months later.

Last week, doddering old General Adolph Messimy (in 1914 Minister of War) created a sensation by calmly announcing that he, not M. Malvy, was the lover of Mata Hari. He said: "During many months, she, by all the means of seduction she knew how to employ in incomparable fashion, tried to acquire the right to call herself my mistress. I found her charming, but full of mystery, enticing, disquieting. I had the imprudence not only to tell her that but to write it to her."

Since Mata Hari's secret trial it has been known only that her lover was "a Cabinet Minister whose name begins with an M and ends with a Y"— both of which qualifications apply to both M. Malvy and General Messimy. The General has apparently held his peace all too long.