Foreign News: Prince's Enemy

Only two things have kept the incredible theatricalities of L'Affaire Stavisky from becoming a truly great detective story: lack of a conclusion and lack of a suitable villain. The conclusion was as far off as ever last week, but to the great joy of Sunday supplement writers a possible villain was produced, an officer of the Legion of Honor, a lawyer formerly of great influence.

Evidence against him was flimsy, yet if Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes should go before a Senate investigating committee indirectly to charge Tammany District Attorney Thomas C. T. Grain with responsibility for the disappearance of Judge Crater, it would be of more than passing interest. So it was in Paris. Before the Parliamentary committee investigating the Stavisky scandal came the holder of the highest judicial post in France, Judge Théodore Lescouvé. First President of the Court of Cassation, to tell what he knew about Stavisky, what he knew in particular about the murder of his colleague Albert Prince (TIME, March 5. et seq.).

Judge Lescouvé testified that he had drawn up two reports on Sacha Stavisky's strange success in dodging trial for fraud for eight years. In the second of these reports Judge Lescouvé directly charged Chief Prosecutor Georges Pressard of the Seine, lean-faced brother-in-law of onetime Premier Camille Chautemps, with negligence, a report that forced Pressard's removal from office.

Judge Lescouvé's report was based in turn on a report of a police inspector named Gripois who pointed out Swindler Stavisky's criminal record in 1930 and handed his report to the murdered Judge Prince. The latter quite properly turned it over to Prosecutor Pressard. Last January Prosecutor Pressard denied that he had ever seen the Gripois report. Continued Judge Lescouvé:

"Judge Prince came to me and said, 'I want to see that man Pressard. I know too much about the Stavisky affair and others.' Afterwards he said to me with profound emotion, 'I have just freed my conscience.' He had without knowing it signed his own death warrant.