Transport: Jinx

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Champion jinx in French shipping, which has had more than its share of bad luck and inept seamanship, has roosted on the red-and-black funnels of the 34,569-ton luxury liner Paris. Since her launching in 1921, she has run aground in New York harbor, broken her back on Eddystone Rocks off the English coast, rammed a Norwegian freighter, twice been damaged by mysterious fires.

One night last week, while she was being loaded at her dock in Le Havre with art treasures for New York's World's Fair, $15,000,000 in gold for American depositories, fire struck France's third largest ship again. Because the Sûreté Nationale had been warned by an anonymous letter writer that saboteurs were out to sink French Line ships, because fires have become too frequent on French ships to be accidental, Frenchmen felt positive that the burning of the Paris was the work of foreign agents who do not want her used for military purposes if and when war comes to Europe.

The fire first broke out in the bakery. Before firemen could chop down the door, it was licking up through the gleaming white superstructure. Other blazes had mysteriously broken out from her cutwater to her overhanging stern. While wharf crews took off her cargo, including ten U. S. warplanes not yet unloaded; fireboats poured tons of water into her blazing bowels, rigged webs of cables to keep her upright at the pier. Toward morning, with her red-hot sides sending out great clouds of steam, the Paris crankily listed to port, snapped the cables like twine, heeled over on her side and slowly settled in six fathoms, where at week's end she lay, gutted and disheveled, with her starboard screw out of water.

She was the fourth French liner to be destroyed by fire in seven years. While the Sûreté Nationale appealed for the author of the anonymous note to come forward, Mobile Guards were put on the big Normandie, just ready to leave dry dock near by. The masts had to be sawed off the Paris before the Normandie could be taken out to her dock. This week, while the Paris' passengers (and also Mrs. Charles A. Lindbergh and two sons) were on the way to the U. S. on the Champlain the Sûreté had another mystery dumped into its lap. Tied up at her dock in Toulon, the 9,847-ton S. S. Angers was destroyed by fire.