Droll Fellow

Not since the R.A.F. bombed the gates in 1944 to free a batch of Resistance fighters had anyone escaped from France's grim, grey Amiens prison. It was just the quiet, safe place to send hulkingly handsome Leon Meurant, to await the summons to the guillotine.

Leon was a droll and imaginative fellow, the bored guards agreed. The French police had first become acquainted with Leon's imagination six years before, after they had found the nude body of a White Russian countess lying in the Paris-Brussels road. The countess, who had been strangled with a nylon stocking, was known to have left Brussels with a young French medical officer named Count Vernier de Miraumont. The police finally found the man practicing gynecology in occupied Germany. They soon learned that he was neither a count, a doctor, an officer nor a Frenchman. He was a Belgian metal worker named Leon Meurant, and he had a long police record.

A Missing Mongol. Arrested, Meurant promptly confessed to both his identity and the murder. Then he changed his story. The killer, he swore, was a Mongol, a Soviet agent in U.S. uniform, otherwise known as Operative B 13. He himself, Meurant obligingly told the police, was in reality Soviet Operative B 17. The Mongol, he went on, had hidden in the trunk compartment of his car, stripped the countess to find some secret papers she was carrying, and strangled her, all before Meurant could interfere. "Brassieres and panties," Meurant told an Amiens court informatively, "are excellent for hiding microfilm." After searching high & low for the Mongol, French justice finally condemned Leon Meurant to death.

At Amiens prison Murderer Meurant flabbergasted the prison censors by writing cozily intimate letters to an ex-Premier and an archbishop, addressing the statesman by his first name. He so charmed the prison guards that they regularly let him put on his own leg irons and handcuffs (required for men condemned to death) each evening When Meurant offered to show Part-Time Guard Jacques Gauvin "how they used to put on silencers in the NKVD," the guard was so flattered that he promptly passed his revolver through the bars to the prisoner. The second time he did it, Meurant refused to give it back. "Oh," he soothed, "here we're just one happy family; keep quiet, now, and I'll see that you're promoted."

A Vulgar Criminal. Soon afterward, his leg irons resting comfortably against the grill of his cell, Meurant was enjoying a game of belote with two guards. Suddenly he whipped out the revolver. "One move," he said pleasantly, "and I'll burn you." While Meurant brandished his weapon, his cellmate, Murderer Michel Courtin, got the keys and unlocked the door. Meurant rounded up two more guards, locked them in the cell with the others, rummaged through the clothes locker for his good suit, and then calmly sat down to finish a letter. "I am escaping only to prove my innocence," he wrote. "I am obliged to leave with Courtin, a vulgar criminal. I am giving him 10,000 francs, but he won't get far on that." Donning the caps and capes of the prison guards, the two then departed, and, when running into someone, put on a brave show as guards seeking the missing prisoners.

Two days later the police, bristling with Tommy guns, caught up with them in an abandoned railway station where Meurant was busily reading the tale of his exploit in a stolen morning paper. Convict Meurant was more than a little irked at the abruptness of the capture. "I never had time," he complained later, "to get to the end of the article." Guard Gauvin, who himself was jailed on Meurant's return, was less collected. "Well," he stammered in excuse for handing over his revolver, "maybe he really did have important connections."

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