Brilliant, But

Collaborationist The Career of a Caledonian Writer

From Our Own Correspondent At atxt t NOUMEA, May 9.

LAIN LAUBREAUX, former contribu tor to the French pro-Nazi weeklies, Je Suis Partout” (“I am everv where”) “Gringoire,” and the daily Candide.” is reported to have escaped to Barcelona.

America’s “Newsweek” said that Laub reaux’s job was to direct prooaganda in Spam for the benefit of French colla borationists now in Germany. If so, he does not seem to have had much success.

Laubreaux is a New Caledonian author and journalist of considerable talent, but anti-democratic leanings who left this island as a young man after having given considerable offence to his Pacific Island compatriots. The reason is not far to seek. Their manner of life, he hits off in a series of clever novels in which the Caledonian atmosphere, situations and characters—sea cantains, gendarmes, Noumea business people, half-castes and full-blooded popines—are authentic.

But in spite of his cynicism he is a natural and attractive writer whose plots are quite in keeping with the lives of the people he describes, and one has no hesitation in recommending “Wara” (a novel about the Isle of Pines), “Rocher a la Voile” and “Yan le Metis” (“Yan the Half-caste”) to anybody interested in French Pacific life who can read the French language.

The title of “Rocher a la Voile” is taken from one of the most visited beauty spots in the Colony, the sail rock at Anse Vata Beach; but the portrait he paints of the sea captain and his Australian wife who make the regular run between Sydney and Noumea served to increase the author’s local unpopularity.

“Yan le Metis” also brought trouble in its wake, for G. Baudoux, author of “Legendes Canaques,” the one immortal book about New Caledonian native life, went to Paris and charged Laubreaux with having lifted certain passages from his, Baudoux’s, own works.

IN France Laubreaux wrote other novels, “Le Corset Noir” (“The Black Bodice”) and “Diane la Goule” among them, but these have other settings. Losing his youth, Laubreaux developed enormous girth, was fond of food and drink and of writing about both in the daily papers in an individual style that was skilled and fascinating. Too fascinating, for the author’s pre-occupations surely help to explain his reactionary tendencies, always those of a Fascist in the making.

When this war started “Gringoire” was in full blast as a fifth columnist and re actionary publication, and so were many other once-proud papers like “LTllustra tion.” Shortly before the downfall .of France, Laubreaux was held for ques tioning by the Daladier Government, and ,there seems no reason to doubt that he was one of the familiars of Otto Abbetz, the envoy of Hitler.

On the main gateway of the Laubreaux mansion in a Noumea suburb in the stouter days of Henri Sautet, the local lads revenged themselves on Alain and another of the Laubreaux family who had counselled against the Colony’s join ing de Gaulle by painting in tar a huge Croix de Lorraine. Splashed on with a huge brush in the dark age of 1940, it was left standing for many months, like a defiance to Fascism and a pledge to the belief of democratic New Caledonians in an Allied victory, and the rebirth of La Patrie,