Young Dr. Carl Weiss, his wife, and his baby son occupied a modest home on Lakeland Drive, not far from the capitol, and therefore likewise conveniently near Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium, where he did most of his surgical work. The capitol had been built on what was formerly the state university campus. From its north faÇade the windows of the governor’s office looked out across a small, artificial body of water, still known as University Lake, to the big hospital on the opposite bank.

Thus Dr. Weiss, Jr., and Huey Long were within but a few blocks of one another when they rose early Sunday morning. Yvonne Pavy Weiss rose early too. Together she and her husband woke, fed and dressed their three-months-old son, Carl Austin Weiss III, and went with him to the home of Dr. Weiss, Sr., where two doting grandparents fondly took over the baby’s care, while the young couple went to Mass. As the elder Dr. Weiss put it in a subsequent statement:

“I was with [my son] practically all day. He and his wife came with their baby to our house early in the morning. They left the baby with me and my wife while they went to St. Joseph’s Church for Mass. After that, his wife returned to our house, while my son went to Scheinuk’s [a Baton Rouge florist] to inquire about a patient who had consulted him the day before.

“Mr. Scheinuk gave my son a bouquet of flowers, saying he had not sent any flowers when the baby was born, and my son came home saying: ‘Look what Mr. Scheinuk sent the baby.’ My son and his wife then went to their home, and returned to take dinner at my house at 1 P.M.”

Dr. Weiss, Jr., was twenty-nine years old. He had been graduated at fifteen from Baton Rouge High School and had begun his premedical work at Louisiana State University, transferring to Tulane, where he received his academic degree as Bachelor of Science in 1925, and his degree as Doctor of Medicine in 1927.

“He served as an intern at Tulane,” his father once related, “and then at the American Hospital in Paris. He studied under the masters at Vienna, and after completing his work in Paris, served at Bellevue Hospital in New York. The last six months of his stay at Bellevue he was chief of clinic. He then came to Baton Rouge to practice here.”

He had sailed from Hoboken on the George Washington on September 19, 1928, and returned to New York on May 19, 1930, aboard the American Farmer. On his customs declaration, filed when re-entering the United States, he listed $247 worth of purchases made during his twenty months abroad, including twenty dollars’ worth of surgical instruments, a forty-five dollar camera, five dollars’ worth of fencing equipment, old swords for which he had paid six dollars, and a pistol for which he had paid eight dollars, a small Belgian automatic, made on the Browning patents.

In college and in his postgraduate work he devoted himself to his studies with a single-mindedness that excluded athletics, though he seems to have taken up fencing while abroad, a sport of many European surgeons. One may therefore take it for granted that while at Tulane he neither shared pilgrimages to the wide-open gaming establishments just across the parish line from New Orleans in adjoining areas, nor patronized the peep-hole Joe-sent-me establishments where needled beer, home-brew, raisin wine, and cut whisky were retailed in the sanctified era of national prohibition.

At one time a story was current that he had met Yvonne Pavy while both were students in Paris. This was not the case. She did not leave for France until a year after he had returned to the United States. An honor graduate of Tulane University’s Newcomb College for Women, she had been immensely popular in the social and sorority life of her student years. In 1931 she was selected as one of a group of girls who were sent to Paris to represent Acadian Louisiana. At the same time she was awarded on a competitive basis a French-government scholarship to the Sorbonne, and extended her Parisian sojourn to pursue language studies there.

Returning to Opelousas, she was appointed to a teaching position in the grade school at St. Martinville, where Emmeline Labiche, who according to Louisiana tradition was the prototype of Longfellow’s Evangeline, had died nearly two centuries before. The following year she went to Baton Rouge to study for her master’s degree at the state university, where she taught a French class at the same time.

Short-lived as it then was, her professional teaching career did follow a Pavy family tradition. Her sister Marie taught in one of the Opelousas grade schools, and one of her father’s brothers, Paul Pavy, was principal of the high school there until Huey Long, as inflexible in his attitude toward the Pavy family as Judge Pavy was in his attitude toward him, dismissed them out of hand by invoking one of the “dictatorship statutes”—the one requiring the certification of every public-school employee by a Long-controlled state board.

When Carl Weiss, Jr., returned to Baton Rouge, he joined his father in the practice of medicine. However, he was so determined not to capitalize on the wide esteem and affection in which the elder Dr. Carl Weiss was held that for a time he called himself “Dr. C. Austin Weiss.” It was not long, however, before he built up a substantial practice on his own account.

During the course of her postgraduate year at Louisiana State University, Yvonne Pavy had occasion to visit the office of the senior Dr. Weiss for treatment of some minor ailment. When the physician learned of her year at the Sorbonne he told her of his son’s studies at the American Hospital in Paris. So they met, Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, Jr., and the daughter of Judge Ben Pavy of Opelousas. They fell deeply in love and were married in December 1933. In midsummer of 1935 their son, the third Carl Austin Weiss, was born, and the sense of fulfillment this kindled in the happy young parents was no greater than the affection lavished on him by his grandparents.

That same Sunday morning Huey Long ordered breakfast sent up from the capitol cafeteria to his twenty-fourth-floor suite. He telephoned Earle Christenberry in New Orleans, reminding him of their engagement concerning the income-tax return that must be filed before another seven days passed. Earle had already packed all the necessary papers, the receipted bills, the canceled checks drawn by the Senator against his two accounts, one in the Riggs National Bank at Washington and one in the National Bank of Commerce at New Orleans. Earle customarily made out all the checks for Huey to sign, and deposited the Kingfish’s senatorial salary to Long’s account.

“Huey and I had signature cards on file at the Riggs bank in Washington and the National Bank of Commerce in New Orleans,” Christenberry explained. “The only checks he wrote were the ones he issued in New York, and the first I would know of it was when the cancelled check came with the monthly statement, or a call from the bank that the account was overdrawn.”

Many persons were under the impression that Long also had a large financial interest in a Win-or-Lose Oil Company but, says Christenberry, “to my knowledge as secretary-treasurer of the company, he had no interest in this corporation, and I so testified in federal court. Months after Huey’s death one of the stockholders testified that one certificate issued in his name in reality represented Huey’s holdings, but if he received dividends they were paid to him in cash by the holder of that stock certificate, by whom the canceled checks were endorsed and cashed.”

Earle reached Baton Rouge some time before noon, and prepared to go over all the papers with his friend and employer. But within a short time, the work being little more than well begun, Long threw up his hands in a characteristic gesture, as though brushing a distasteful matter out of existence.

“He said to me,” reported Mr. Christenberry, “‘You know what this is all about, don’t you?’ and I said I did. ‘Well, all right then,’ he told me, ‘you take all this stuff back to New Orleans with you and fill out the forms, and then bring the whole thing back Monday or Tuesday, and I’ll sign the damn papers and we’ll be rid of them. Look, I’m not even going to stay here till the end of this session. I’ll leave Tuesday, maybe even tomorrow, right after the House passes the bills, and come down to New Orleans and sign them there. And you know what we’ll do then? We’ll go on a vacation together, just you and me, no bodyguards or anything. We’ll get in your car and go wherever we want to go without making one single, slivery plan in advance.’

“After that, he and I went down to the cafeteria and had lunch. Naturally, there was the same steady procession as always of people coming to the table to say hello, but not so many as there would have been any other time except Sunday noon. Most of the legislators and out-of-town politicians would not be in till later that evening because the Senate was to be in recess till Monday and the House wasn’t going to meet till eight, and it was going to be just a short session to order the bills put on the calendar for the next morning.”

John Fournet was one of the out-of-town notables whose arrival that evening was expected. He had been a member of the Long peerage for years, but had refrained from political activity of that sort ever since his elevation to the state Supreme Court a year or so earlier.

None the less, he had been Speaker of the House for four years, he had been elected to the lieutenant-governorship on the Long-supported Allen ticket in 1932, and was one of those whose name was frequently mentioned as Long’s likely choice for endorsement to become Oscar Allen’s successor.

Senator Long had requested him to come to the capitol for a conference, and he had left New Orleans early that morning for the home of his parents in Jackson, planning to invite his father to accompany him to Baton Rouge. It would be a proud thing for the elder Fournet to see the deference paid his son as a state Supreme Court justice, as an intimate of the Kingfish, and perhaps as a candidate for governor of Louisiana.