PARIS PRE-WAR SCANDAL

Evening Post, Volume XCII, Issue 148, 20 December 1916, Page 8

PARIS PRE-WAR SCANDAL

ROCHETTE AFFAIR REVIVED

A memory of old pre-war scandals was revived by a romantic story of today (telegraphed the Paris correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph on 19th October) The Rochette affair was still going on a few months before the war, though it now seems a century old. Emile Rochette was sentenced for swindling in 1910, appealed, and was by a final jurisdiction again sentenced in July, 1912. He then disappeared to reappear only yesterday. After his conviction in 1912 innumerable financial and political scandals cropped up, which seem now to belong to the year one. The press, law courts, and Parliament rang with the "affaire Rochette," secret documents were brought out, high Magistrates and Ministers resigned, and the Rochette affair seemed an affair of the State. The centre figure was a picturesque type of swindler. Rochette began as a cafe runner in a little hotel near Brabizon.. In ten or fifteen years he rose to be a power in .shady pre-war Parisian finance, and finally absconded, having floated dozens of bogus companies and done his gullible backers out of about £8,000,000. Now that all values of events have changed, or, rather, that great tragedy has given to everything its real value, the figure-head of former scandals which seemed of world-wide importance, is reduced to the figure of an obscure military motorcyclist.

Georges Bienaime, a military motorcyclist since August, 1914, who seems to have done his duty obscurely but faithfully, turns out to be Eochette, the swindler, who once made an upheaval in the Paris financial and political world, almost equal to that of the Panama. Rochette, alias Bienaime, was suddenly discovered and arrested at Granville, whither he had gone on leave, to see his wife and children. Now comes a romantic story, which gjves to Rochette a deeper human interest than he ever had before. It is Gnstave Herve who tells the story. When the war broke out Gustave Herve, who had been more or less an outlaw himself, but rallied instantly to his country's flag, took upon himself to send to the front all the black sheep who might come to him for help. His operations were scarcely legal, but they were patriotic. He borrowed the military papers of numbers of his friends over military age. When any reprobate anarchist or common thief came to Herve and said he wanted to volunteer, Herve lent him somebody else's papers, and he enlisted thus under a false name. Among the black sheep who came to Hervs was Hochette.

"Are you a- ticket-of-leave man also?" asked Herve, who did not Ihiow Rochette.

"No," said the latter, "but I am Rochette, the financier. I was sentenced' to three years' imprisonment. I was safe abroad, but I may be a swindler, though I hope one day to prove the contrary. lam a Frenchman all the same. I have three children, and I want them to know that whatever else I was, at least I fought for my country."

„ Herve discovered among his collection of other people's military papers those of Georges Bienaime. With these Rochette enlisted on 26th August, 1914. The famous swindler ha-s been serving since then in various capacities as a motor-cyclist, and also as a motor-lorry driver during the Battle of Verdun, and finally on the Somme; The other Jay he was given a week's leave, and went to Granville to see his faimly. He was recognised at last ,and is now in prison at Rouen.