Seven in State

In Paris arrived last week seven bodies that had lain for days in the wreckage of a French plane in the Great Congo Forest, had been mauled by leopards, lions, jackals and wolves, had been punctured by the proboscises of poisonous flies and mosquitoes, had been stripped of valuables by Banda Negroes and finally had been found by a Belgian search pilot, shipped down the Congo River to French Equatorial Africa's capital, Brazzaville, thence by rail to the seacoast, thence by sea to France. No. 1 of these seven corpses was the body of French Equatorial Africa's new Governor General Edouard Renard. Last year he indignantly resigned a snug Parisian job as president of the Paris Municipal Council when his good friend Jean Chiappe was forced to quit as Chief of the Paris Police. Soaring with him over the steaming, noisome jungle went his swank second wife, Dutch relict of a U. S. soap manufacturer, Michael Winburn (Omega, Cadum). So far as could be learned, the $390,000 contents of Mme Renard's jewel case are either lost in the Congo or stolen by some ignorant black. In Paris last week undertakers mended the seven mangled bodies. This week M. Le Gouverneur General will lie in state with his wife and airmen.

With its customary zeal in reminding Frenchmen of the glorious hazards of life in the French colonies, the Paris Illustration hastened to print photographs of the jungle tragedy, taken on the scene by the Belgian Congo's official photographer. L'Illustration's cover showed the great white gash the plane had cut in the forest. Inside was a meticulous chart showing the contours of the plane's debris and the exact positions to which the crash hurled the bodies of Governor and Mme Renard and their five companions.

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