MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
I4 AST week upon this page I discussed the murder of Georges Mandel. Certain further reports, which seem to be not without authenticity, have now been received. It seems that Darnand, the Himmler of Vichy, had decided to concentrate in the Sante Prison in Paris a number of prominent French patriots, who would be held as hostages for the lives of Petain, Laval and Darnand himself. Realising that Mandel was the most virulent and ferocious of these patriots, Darnand was most anxious to add him to the collection of hostages which he was accumulating at the Sante. He therefore begged the Gestapo to hand over to him the person of Georges Mandel ; the Gestapo consented, and after some delay the ex-Minister was transported under German guard from his prison in the Reich to the Gare de l'Est in Paris, which incidentally appears to be the only station in the French capital which is still functioning. Mean- while, however, Henriot had been killed, and Darnand was so impatient to exact immediate reprisals that he instructed his militia to murder Mandel on his passage from the Gare de l'Est to the Sante Prison. Such, more or less, is the story of this particular assassina- tion. I should not have reverted to this story, or inflicted upon my readers two successive studies of French statesmen, were it not that during the last week another great French patriot has died in the service of the common cause, a man of most exceptional quality, to whom I wish to pay tribute. On Thursday, July loth, Pierre Vienot, who had been with Mandel in the S.S. " Massilia," who had shared with him imprisonment in a Vichy fortress, succumbed to an attack of angina pectoris in London. And by his death, to quote the words of General de Gaulle, " France has lost a great servant and England a faithful' friend."
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