The Golden Moments of Paris by John Baxter

Author:John Baxter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Golden Moments of Paris: A Guide to the Paris of the 1920s
ISBN: 9780984633470
Publisher: Museyon Inc
Published: 2014-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

Victor Lustig, 1937 and Serge Stavisky, 1934

SCHEMERS AND SWINDLERS

Serge Stavisky is buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery (20th). The French police are not anxious to remind the public of how its most slippery swindlers operated under their very noses. The official Musée de Police at 4, rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève (5th) mentions neither Lustig nor Stavisky. The Maison de Barreau or headquarters of the French bar, the association of lawyers, is slightly more revealing. Its handsome museum on rue de Harlay (1st) contains documents preserved by lawyers from many famous cases. Among the trials covered are those of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the novelist Emile Zola, whose broadside “J’Accuse” defended the wrongly convicted Alfred Dreyfus, writer Robert Brasillach, the Nazi collaborator whose last words before the firing squad were “Vive la France quand même!”—Long live France anyway!—and Marshal Philippe Petain, who headed the puppet Vichy government during World War II and, though sentenced to death, was never executed. It’s fitting that Serge Stavisky is also represented in this ragtag aristocracy with documents relating to his criminal career and the trials of his accomplices. Victor Lustig has no such memorial, though in 1964 Claude Chabrol directed L’homme qui Vendit la tour Eiffel in the omnibus film Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du Monde, released in English as The World’s Most Beautiful Swindles.

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