Grey Rats

With her first load of doomed human freight in two years, the famed French convict ship La Martiniere slipped last week out of St. Martin-de-Re, out of the Bay of Biscay, bound for the three little "Isles of Safety'' off French Guiana in South America, of which the most famed is Devil's Island. Her entire passenger list of 673 was below, locked in great iron cages. Over their heads was a network of pipes ready to pour out killing live steam in case of mutiny. With their blankets cowled over their heads, the more confident "grey rats" were already plotting escape. Their chances are better now than when Devil's Island first earned its dread name. In the past year a daring ring of smugglers has earned fat fees by helping 100 prisoners escape from the Isles of Safety and the penal camps on the mainland.

Among grey rats shipped out last week were: a hot-tempered Frenchman who killed a motorcyclist for passing too close to him; the notorious Dentist Laget who poisoned two wives; the Parisian ne'er-do-well Guy Davin who murdered the U. S. ne'er-do-well Richard Wall for $300; a multitude of arch-crooks, killers and underworld rabble. Fortune's fool was there too, a murderer named Boyer who was to have been executed the morning after an assassin killed France's President Paul Doumer (TIME, May 16, 1932). On the technicality that Boyer thus lost his last-minute chance of pardon, his sentence was automatically commuted to life imprisonment.

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