Invitations to the Paris gala benefit prescribed: "Smoking pour les hommes et pour les femmes," which in this case did not mean that everyone should light up a Gauloise. Smoking meant le smoking, French for dinner jacket, and nearly all the girls, falling in with a trend started by Designer Yves St. Laurent last year, showed up looking like either Marlene Dietrich or a headwaiter. Well, almost. Certainly no one would have taken Singer Francoise Hardy, 23, for a captain. Still, the men in the crowd at the Moulin Rouge party seemed more fascinated by the barely clad dancers onstage than they did by le smoking.

During more than 50 years in the business, Society Bandleader Meyer Davis has gone bouncing along, adapting his sidemen to such mysterious rites as the shimmy, the black bottom, the big apple and the lindy. Now Meyer and his boys are constrained to blare out frug and watusi beats to accompany the debutantes. But the end is in sight, he says hopefully. "A lot of younger people are getting tired of that terrible noise," he remarked in Manhattan. "It's the death of conversation. Besides, boys are beginning to realize that it's sort of pleasant to hold a girl in their arms when they dance."

"Shut up, you moron!" roared Gaston Defferre, 56, a Socialist Deputy and mayor of Marseille. Those were fighting words to Gaullist Deputy Rene Ribiere, 45, and after all the political caterwauling had died down in France's National Assembly, he confronted the Socialist to demand satisfaction. Despite friends' pleas to forget the nonsense, Ribiere chose swords, they both chose seconds and met next day at noon in suburban Neuilly. "This is not a comedy," growled Defferre. "I am not going to stop until I'm hors de combat." "Oh, really?" gulped Ribiere, who had never even held a sword before.

For four minutes the gallants scuffled and grunted, until Defferre nicked Ribiere on the wrist and then opened a small cut on his forearm. At that point, the loser allowed as how honor had been satisfied. "He's still a moron," said Defferre. "It's congenital."

Something like 4,000 folks turned out to meet Georgia's Governor Lester Maddox, 51, at an open house at the executive mansion in Atlanta, and everybody was having a real fine howdy when suddenly a Negro lady whispered to Mrs. Maddox: "These four men here are convicts--and one of them is my son." Indeed, the next four guests in the receiving line had just escaped from a prison work camp in Wilkinson County, and they had a lot more to say than just hello. After he'd uncricked his neck from the double take, Maddox led them to an office to hear about the camp where, they said, guards amused themselves by threatening to shoot the prisoners' legs off, the barracks were overcrowded, and the toilets never flushed properly. Maddox ordered an immediate investigation.

As soon as he got his driver's license, Britain's Prince Charles, 18, picked up a sedan from the royal carpool, and set off for a night on the town. Beside him in the front seat of the Rover when he pulled up to London's Vaudeville Theatre was a tall, smashing blonde; so naturally next day all of Fleet Street was front-paging hot items about "the mystery girl" and gasping that for the first time ever Charlie had a girl friend. Actually the mystery girl was just a friend of the family, Angela Rau, 27, an Australian who was in fact being escorted by Anthony Tryon, 26, son of Lord Tryon, keeper of the privy purse. The Prince was still squiring his sister Princess Anne.

Boarding the plane at Burlington, Vt., Mrs. Marlene Chasnov, 23, had an uneasy feeling that her 19-month-old son Craig was ill. And as the plane approached New York, the child began to have convulsions. "I stood up and screamed for someone to help me," she said. "There was only one passenger who didn't look at us as if we had leprosy. He got up and put his thumb in Craig's mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue. Craig bit him and took a hunk out of his thumb and the man said, 'Your baby has strong teeth. He just bit me.'" Craig recovered from the convulsions brought on by a fever, but it was several days before Mrs. Chasnov found out who the good Samaritan was. An aide casually telephoned from New York's City Hall to say that Mayor John Lindsay was interested in knowing how the lad was getting along.

Harpo and Chico have passed away, and Gummo stayed home in California. But the whole wonderful family was there on film as Manhattan's Gallery of Modern Art unreeled a three-week retrospective devoted to the Marx Brothers' comedies. Groucho, 71, now a distinguished man of letters with the publication this month of his correspondence, still looked very much like Hugo Z. Hackenbush or Wolf J. Flywheel when he dropped by for a night in the theater with his wife Eden, his brother Zeppo, 66, and Mrs. Zeppo, Barbara Marx. After watching himself lope through A Day at the Races and A Night at the Opera, Groucho fired up a stogie and remarked: "I didn't realize I was so talented and agile then."

She has always been a complicated mixture of arrogance and defensiveness. Now, Diva Maria Callas, 43, and her good friend, Greek Shipping Millionaire Aristotle Onassis, were embroiled in a London lawsuit against Greek Shipowner Panaghis Vergottis over just how many shares each owned in a $3.3 million tanker called Artemision II. Maria told the court she thought Vergottis was double-dealing her out of a $168,000 interest in the tub. It was a curious thing for him to do, too, she added characteristically, because "Mr. Vergottis respected me and loved me. There are quite a few people who do that once they know me."

The birds were singing, the trees were budding, and the floriated rhetoric of Senate Minority Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen, 71, was in full bloom. "It is as sprightly as the daffodil, as colorful as the rose, as resolute as the zinnia, as delicate as the carnation, as aggressive as the petunia, as ubiquitous as the violet and as stately as the snapdragon," hymned Evin his Hammond Organ voice. "It beguiles the senses and ennobles the spirit of man." With that he continued his perennial crusade by presenting to the Senate his annual resolution asking that the marigold be designated the U.S. national flower.

For a quarter of a century under the command of the late Henri Soule, Manhattan's Le Pavilion was the shrine of haute cuisine in the U.S. Helas, since Restaurateur Soule's death last year, the eatery has slipped a bit--at least to the palate of the New York Times's fastidious Gastronome Craig Claiborne, who dropped in a few times to see how the fare was faring under the new management of sometime Hotelman Claude Philippe. Aside from the prices ($173.90 for a relatively modest dinner for six) Claiborne sadly reported that "Le Pavilion does not exist in all its former grandeur." For one thing, he wrote, "the shrimp were tough, and so was the lobster in the bouillabaisse. The maitre d'hotel walked around with a red pencil sticking out of his breast pocket." And, invraisemblablement: "On a recent evening, the rolls were stale."

When she died in 1960 at the age of 72, Tobacco Heiress Mary Duke Biddle left an estate of $60.6 million to be divided between her family and various charities. Last week in New York's Westchester County Surrogate Court, her lawyers filed papers stating that the fortune has now dwindled by 58%, with $34.6 million going to pay off inheritance taxes, and $1,100,000 for legal and executor fees.

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