ARBITRARY INTERNMENTS
Mr. J.-L. Blocq, former Chief of Staff of several Ministers, complains of being sequestered.
After the resounding internment of the Countess of Chateaubriant, will other sequestered persons, from the depths of their prison, make their heartbreaking appeal heard to us?

Emboldened by the pitying interest that public opinion currently has in them, unfortunate victims, we do not know too much of what low family intrigues or of certain obscure and terrible vengeances, begin to hope, finally, in the justice of men.
And their voices deceiving the surveillance of their guards and their letters thwarting the perspicacity of doctors reach our editorial offices, as the cry of the castaway resounds towards the island of salvation.
It was to the Press that the Countess of Chateaubriant addressed herself to ask for compensation and freedom, it was to the Press that Mr. L.-J. Blocq, former Chief of Staff of Mr. Pams and former attaché to the Cabinet of Mr. René Renoult, Minister of Justice, today extended his desperate arms.
Interned for seven months, journalist and man of letters, Mr. Blocq sent several of our colleagues urgent missives.
The first, Mr. Paul Lévy, director of the weekly Aux Écoutes went to the nursing home where, for seven months, the former Chief of Staff of the Presidency of the Council has been kept against his will and despite the fiercest resistance.
And yet, Mr. Blocq boasts of the highest connections and the most powerful friendships. He has had ministers act to hasten his release. It was a complete waste and they persist in refusing him the medical expertise requested by him and his wife, moreover, that Doctor Heuyer, the same one who concluded to his internment, was the doctor who signed his counter-visit bulletin.

At the Château de Suresnes

It was in one of the rooms of this mysterious château de Suresnes, a neurology house that often hit the headlines in the courts, that Mr. Blocq was locked up last spring.

A car came one day to fetch him from his home. Vigorous and resolute nurses seized the former collaborator of Messrs. Pams and Renoult and, restrained, Mr. Blocq was driven at high speed towards the strange dwelling buried in the trees of the park of Suresnes where so many tragedies already faded into oblivion and silence.
Who could count all the unknowns that through caprice or greed were led into this new Bastille, whose doors no longer reopen for many unfortunates.

Mrs. Blocq's Protestation

Anne Blocq, although divorced from the former chief of staff, told us that moved by her husband's distress, she went to Suresnes every day to pity and console him.

A perfectly sane man is being odiously sequestered, she told us. I cannot explain to you all the interests around which this affair of internment moves. It is a terrible scandal! Come to his aid by calling with me for judges and doctors.

Is it then so easy, under the obsolete legislation of 1838, to make a man disappear from the number of the living?

Mr. Blocq, it will be said, committed a regrettable extravagance in applying to the Académie Française; he also pursued some of his political adversaries with implacable hatred. So, is that, I ask you? a reason to refuse him the guarantees of individual freedom that all citizens should be able to claim.

If Mr. Blocq is mad, let an impartial commission composed of personalities above all suspicion decide.

If Mr. Blocq is not mad, let him be released so that he can pursue his tormentors in court.

ROBERT BOUCARD.