FRANCE: Murder, My Pet?

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In the Gare de Lyon flashbulbs flared. Newshawks elbowed each other to catch a glimpse of the glamorous prisoner. The door of a third-class compartment in the Riviera express swung open and out stepped three gendarmes. Between two of them, walking daintily in her high, furred boots, her shoulders draped with mink, and her charming features concealed behind a heavy black veil, stepped Marga, the Countess d'Andurain, 51, globe-trotter and alleged secret agent. She had come back to Paris, this time charged with murder.

Daughter of a notary in southern France, Marga escaped from the tiresome tranquillity of middle-class life by marrying (1911) a rich Basque count much older than herself. Patient Pierre d'Andurain paced her docilely as she darted through Spain, Morocco, Algeria and South America. In 1923, the pair settled in Palmyra, Syria, where Queen Zenobia once ruled the desert caravan routes. There the count owned the Hotel Queen Zenobia, a mud-walled but lavishly furnished caravansary, catering to visiting oilmen, desert chieftains and casual Syrian commercial travelers. Within a few years Marga had turned this oasis into a haven of intrigue and flirtation. Emir Fawaz el Sha'lan was said to have squandered his tribe's treasury on Marga. Even indefatigable King Ibn Saud was reported attentive. Marga soon amassed a personal fortune of some £20,000.

19 Knife Wounds. In 1932, Marga decided to visit forbidden Mecca. Without further ado, she divorced her count and married a devout Moslem. As the couple started on their pilgrimage to the Holy City, her husband's tribe—resentful of his marriage to an infidel—kidnaped them both. For weeks Marga was held captive in the mountains. Then one day her sheik was found poisoned. The Moslems promptly found Marga guilty and ordered her stoned to death. Only the intervention of Ibn Saud saved her life.

Then she remarried the count. Shortly afterward he, too, was found dead, stabbed in the back with 19 knife thrusts. Investigation failed to involve Marga (though two French officers who had cast doubt on her testimony charged that she later tried to run over them in her car). Just before the outbreak of World War II, Marga turned up in a French villa close to the Spanish border. Newspapers hinted that she was trafficking with the Nazis. But after the Nazi occupation, Marga went to North Africa. There rumors connected her with British and French secret operations.

In 1943, she was in Paris, comfortably settled in a small apartment, where her nephew, Raymond Clerisse, a young French lawyer, sometimes dropped in for an apéritif. One day Marga had an especially pleasant visit from Raymond. As he was going, she pressed a small piece of candy into his mouth. "Merci," said Raymond and departed. Later he was seized with fearful cramps. He had just enough strength to scribble on the back of a métro ticket: "The candy Marga gave me tasted strange." A few days later he was dead. Police called on Marga, but soon dropped the case.

Last fortnight, in the luxurious apartment in Nice which she shares with her son Jacques, a Communist editor, Marga and three friends were rudely interrupted at lunch by dead Raymond's ghost. Three gendarmes arrested Marga on suspicion of murder.