Four Furies

Plump and ever smiling Gaston "Gastounet" Doumergue, bachelor President of France, had brutal murderesses on his hands last week and didn't know what to do with them. If any woman deserved the bloody office of the guillotine, here seemed four worthy candidates:

Junka Kures, a Serbian (TIME, Nov. 19), strangled a little girl with a shoelace and then abused the corpse.

Rawboned Marie David crammed a sponge down the throat of a neighbor's baby that cried too much.

Blanche Vabre, even bigger and more forbidding than Mme. David, chopped off the ten fingers which her 16-year-old stepson had raised in terror to protect his throat, and with another slash almost severed the boy's neck.

Juliette Brucz, with a passion for Dumas novels, turned the gas on her sleeping husband and went upstairs to read The Count of Monte Cristo.

So brutal were these crimes that the French press was led to believe that the long-standing tradition might be broken, whereby no woman has been guillotined in France since 1887. But kindly "Gastounet" ended by commuting all four death sentences to penal servitude for life. They will never go free. "Life imprisonment" in the U. S. often means 20 years in jail, with time off for good behavior. In France it is a sentence that means just what it says.