International: Lover's Leap

Near the edge of a precipice on the outskirts of Escragnolles in the French Riviera one day last week Albert Sauvant, 28, climbed into the cockpit of an ancient Farman biplane named Amour. The ''plane'' had neither wings nor motor.* Police had confiscated them to prevent Inventor Sauvant from doing what he proposed to do—deliberately crash, with himself in the plane, to demonstrate a shock-absorbing device which he said would save his life. Mechanics took hold of Amour (so named by Inventor Sauvant "because the experiment had become so dear to my heart''), pushed it across the field, over the 500-ft. cliff. . . .

Six times the wingless body turned over in space, then—Crash! Witnesses ran to the wreck, fearful of what they were about to see. A mechanic opened a steel casket in the pile of debris and out stepped M. Sauvant with the smiling grace of a circus acrobat. Later the inventor told-the-world:

". . . I may state that my invention is a double steel-plated box fitted about the pilot seat. It is about 2 ft. wide and 6 ft. long, specially riveted and equipped with shock absorbers. It has a door worked by levers so that as the machine is crashing a pull may close this door, hermetically sealing the pilot as if in a diving bell, with freedom from danger of fire or explosions. . . . Everyone knows that in a fall in a hydraulically operated elevator the force of the shock is absorbed as the elevator strikes the bottom of the shaft. . . . My plane might have been falling 5,000 ft. instead of 500. . . .

"I knew that the worst that could happen to me was a broken leg. As I have broken legs twice, am still young and my bones soft, that would not make a great deal of difference."

Previously M. Sauvant had compared the construction of his pilot seat to the position of a hen's egg contained within an ostrich egg. If the ostrich egg were dropped and smashed, he said, the hen's egg would remain intact. He once dropped a sheep and six eggs safely from 500 feet in a model of his ship (TIME, Dec. 14). Several times he tried to make the test himself but could not elude police until last week. Before undertaking his cliff dive he let a motor truck ram Amour with himself inside it.