L'Impasse du Haha

Through the somber streets of Clermont-Ferrand ran a frantic youth. "Protect me! My organization is out to get me!" he shrieked when he reached a police station. He said he had been summoned to a nearby villa, "Chez Lisette," where the other members of the "organization" had condemned him to death for treason.

The police bristled and bustled; before they settled down they had discovered the Black Maquis, who were plotting to wreck the Fourth Republic.

"The Masons Have Got Me." The trail led from grey Clermont-Ferrand to a brooding chateau at Lamballe in grey Brittany. Last week, up to the forbidding doors of the chateau walked a plainclothesman. He walked straight into the revolver of the chateau's owner, Count Edme de Vulpian. Into the fray, toting Tommy guns, jumped other secret policemen who had been waiting in the shadows that enveloped the castle. Count Vulpian lowered his revolver and surrendered. A search of his chateau yielded the blue-bound revolutionary "Plan Bleu." It was found where any reader of conspiratorial fiction knew it would be--in the fireplace.

Ten other extreme rightists were arrested, among them Major Georges Loustaneau-Lacau, a former Petain aide who turned up at Petain's treason trial to defend the Marshal--even though Petain had not lifted a finger when the Nazis put Loustaneau-Lacau in a concentration camp. Another of the arrested plotters was General Maurice Guillaudot, who was about to go to a banquet when police came for him. Said he: "I understand what is involved. Just let me go to my banquet." The French police, who pride themselves on being raisonnable, let him go to the banquet. Immediately after dessert, he was arrested. "The Masons have got me," he muttered.

From Bastille to Reichstag. Father Roger Rault, curate of La Poterie, near Lamballe, was also accused of complicity in the plot, but was left in provisional liberty. A dozen machine guns were found in his house. When newsmen badgered him for an interview, he pinned a statement to his door: "The police have found in my attic the following: two 35-ton tanks, two batteries of 75-millimeter howitzers ... 35 engines of a type not yet invented, half an atomic bomb. . . ."*

The Blue Plan called for an attack, `a la Bastille,/- on the Vannes prison in Brittany and the Fresnes prison near Paris. They were scheduled to be stormed Aug. 6, and collaborationists kept there were to be armed. Commandos were to cut rail lines, seize communications centers. Anti-Communist fears were to be whipped up by a series of disasters on the Reichstag Fire model.

France's pudgy Minister of the Interior Edouard Depreux insisted that the plot was "widespread" and must be taken seriously. Said the Paris newspaper L'Aurore: "Lamballe? Why, there is, in that old Breton village, a street called 'L'Impasse du Haha.' . . ."** For reasons that will remain obscure to Americans this is regarded in France as a brilliant political crack, explaining everything.

* For another sarcastic "confession," see PEOPLE.

/- There is a widespread impression that when the Paris mob stormed the Bastille hundreds of peasants and intellectuals, imprisoned by lettres de cachet and other tyrannical devices, came streaming out into the sunlight. What the Bastille actually yielded up on July 14, 1789 was five criminals and two madmen.

** This haha is an ankle-high wall found in British gardens and French blind alleys. It gets its name from the fact that when people trip over it other people say "ha! ha!"

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