The Bonbon Affairs

"Would you like a chocolate, mad-ame?" asked the elegant Oriental as the overnight express to St.-Gervais in the French Alps pulled out of Paris' Gare de Lyon. Even though she should have been careful--after all, she and the stranger were alone in the compartment --Mme. Huguette Munck accepted a bonbon. It tasted bitter.

The bonbon was doped, of course. As Mme. Munck, wife of a gendarme, later told police, "after a while I became sleepy." Across the compartment Truoc Nguyen Huu, a well-to-do Vietnamese businessman who had spent half of his 45 years in France, removed his shoes and socks. "When I woke up," Huguette told police, "I found my fellow traveler's toe in my left hand. I moved my hand at once. Then I seemed to go off to sleep again, and when I came to I discovered that man's toes in my mouth." That, of course, was only the beginning.

Huguette Munck was one of many female passengers on the St.-Gervais express to whom Huu was similarly attentive. For a year Huu was a regular weekend commuter on the train. Half a dozen women lodged complaints at various French police stations, but the police did not take them seriously, and Huu remained toe-loose and fancy-free. The end came with a statuesque 23-year-old divorcee named Simone Boullin. Chocolates, toes, seduction--and poor Simone had ridden past her stop. Instead of disappearing, as was his practice, Huu gallantly accompanied her to a hotel room in Le Fayet to comfort her while she recovered from the dope. There she managed to notify police, who found a loaded bonbon in Huu's pocket and locked him up.

Last week in the grey stone courthouse at nearby Bonneville, Huu was found guilty of "outraging public decency" and "administering substances dangerous to the health." Sentence: ten months--one for each toe. When he gets out, remarked Defense Attorney Joseph Faletti cheerfully, he should have no trouble at all finding a job: "Monsieur Huu is a very bright man, a very mysterious one. He will make a fine candidate for Premier of South Viet Nam."

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