Foreign News: Existentialist Murder?

In a crude wooden hut 20 miles from Paris, agents of the Paris police studied a fantastic corpse. It was the bloated body of a white man, but it had turned a ghastly, gleaming black. On each side of the torso, from rib to groin, the flesh had apparently been burned by a powerful chemical.

The police knew who the dead man was, and who owned the hut. Both were Existentialists—followers of the morbid postwar philosophy which holds that man is nothing but the sum of his experience and that all experience is inexplicable and tragic (TIME, Jan. 28). Was this an Existentialist murder? The police asked that question of the hut's owner. "An interesting problem," he answered tranquilly.

Living by Larceny. The dead man was François Vintenon, a habitué of Paris' Latin Quarter. The sensitive, introverted son of a well-to-do merchant, François had joined a group of Left Bank surrealists. He was tall and thin; his friends said he had the face of a "perverse angel." He wrote poems which nobody understood. He lived by stealing. After the German invasion, François' father, who had turned collaborationist in order to save his business, persuaded his son to write for a Nazi publishing enterprise at 10,000 francs a month. After eight months, François quit.

Googoo, Gobgoo, Googoo. During the German occupation, some of the surrealists escaped labor battalions by pretending insanity. One howled like a wolf, another barked like a dog, a third capered about like a ballet dancer, gurgling "googoo, googoo, googoo!" But François joined the Resistance, carried messages and dropped underground pamphlets.

After the liberation, drab life closed in again, and he started taking eubine, a morphine derivative. It increased his boudoir prowess. His girl, Jeanne, lived with her family and saw him only on weekends. So at first he took the stuff only when he was with Jeanne. Then he began doping during the week. Soon he was forging doctors' prescriptions for eubine in tremendous quantities.

For eight months the police, alerted by druggists, tried to track him through the blizzard of fake prescriptions. François eluded them. One day, unable to get eubine, he dosed himself massively with a soporific, and dozed on a public bench. François landed in a public hospital. There his story came out.

Toxicologists were amazed at the quantities of the drug he had absorbed and survived. Psychiatrists were sympathetic. Criminal charges were deferred while he took the cure. But François soon broke off his treatment and sought help from a doctor friend.

Dr. Satan. This doctor, Pierre Roumeguere, was as extraordinary as François Vintenon, but in a different way. He had never practiced (except for wartime duty in the Navy), but kept on studying for years while he collected more degrees and diplomas. Three times after they had sentenced him to death, he escaped from the Nazis. He had a weather-browned, bearded face, black eyes, a long, pointed nose. The Maquis called him Dr. Satan.

Once a pupil of Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism's founder, Roumeguere had branched off into "psychophysiological" investigations of esthetic principles. In a wood near Gif-sur-Yvette, Dr. Satan had a hut he called "the House of the Good God." It was used for amorous frolics.