The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (13 page)

vi

“O Paris! O Paris! You are the true Babylon, the battlefield of the spirits, the temple where evil welcomes its worshippers and disciples, and I believe that you feel the eternal breath of the archangel of darkness upon you, as the high seas tremble upon the winds of the storm.”
⁴⁰

So wrote Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail in 1857 in his novel
L’héritage mystérieux
(
The Mysterious Inheritance
), the first of a series featuring a new type of fictional character. Ponson, who had written Gothic novels in which horror was the chief attraction, sought to duplicate the success of Sue’s
The Mysteries of Paris.
Indeed, the major characters in
L’héritage mystérieux
closely parallel those in Sue’s book. However, the work took on a life of its own as readers responded favorably to a character named Rocambole, who initially appears as a fourteen-year-old orphan but by the story’s end is a strapping sixteen-year-old who helps the main character expose the villain. So popular was Rocambole that the following year he appeared as the twenty-one-year-old hero of another novel and continued to star in what became an eight-book series, published from 1857 to 1870, in which the action carries over from one volume to the next.

Rocambole is very much like Vidocq, except that Ponson’s fictional creation stays far more on the criminal side of the line. He is what modern critics would call an antihero, but to the French he was an irresistible rogue. Motivated by sheer greed, Rocambole becomes a cynical and ruthless murderer. Among his victims are his adopted mother (strangled by Rocambole’s own hands) and his mentor in crime, the Irish lord Sir Williams. Ponson apparently felt his villain-hero must be punished, so at the end of the second book, Rocambole, his face horribly scarred with acid, is imprisoned at the hard-labor camp of Toulon. His beloved stepsister does not even recognize him when she sees him.

Readers demanded more, however, and in his further adventures, Rocambole acquired colorful criminal allies and combated equally fantastic evildoers, such as a gang of Thugees who have come to France from India to kidnap virgins for their goddess, Kali. (In literary circles, the word
rocambolesque
came to refer to any fantastic adventure.) Like his predecessors, Rocambole was a master of disguise and used modern science to achieve his goals.

Rocambole’s adventures were ended by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Ponson du Terrail fled Paris to his country estate near Orléans, where he gathered friends to wage a guerrilla war against the Germans, just as his fictional character might have done. One of his friends exclaimed before dying, “Ah, if only Rocambole was here to save us!”
⁴¹
There was no savior, however; the Germans burned down Ponson du Terrail’s mansion and executed many of his friends and even his dogs. Ponson du Terrail managed to escape but died soon afterward.

The Rocambole series marked the beginning of a type of crime novel that the French made particularly their own. It reflected the ambivalent attitude of Parisians toward the forces of law and order. Whereas Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s
Les misérables
is an escaped convict, he is not really a criminal, but Rocambole is truly a malefactor, and not one who occasionally aids the police or helps damsels in distress. French readers liked him for his cleverness and resourcefulness and elaborate adventures — and also because he lived outside the law. This sympathy for the devil had deep roots in French literature, starting with François Villon, the great poet and criminal of medieval Paris, whose works celebrate the pleasures of life — wine and women — at the same time that they lament illness, poverty, old age, and death. It was in this spirit that other Belle Époque writers developed further the idea of criminal as hero.

Maurice Leblanc (1864–1941) had wanted to be a serious writer but was forced to work as a journalist; as a police reporter he learned about the procedures of the courts and the methods of those who were brought before the judges. In 1905, the editor of a magazine,
Je Sais Tout,
asked him to write a crime story, and the result was the first tale featuring Arsène Lupin,
gentleman-cambrioleur
(“gentleman burglar”). Leblanc met with immediate acclaim and would write twenty-one more stories with the character.

Lupin, in the French tradition, is completely amoral. He steals for himself, not for the poor. (Leblanc is said to have modeled him after the anarchist Marius Jacob, whose trial had made headlines only a year earlier.) Lupin is young, handsome, and daring — a dandy, frequently portrayed in high silk hat and evening dress, sporting a monocle. Fastidious, he sends his shirts to be laundered and starched in London. He enjoys the company of beautiful women, who are fashionably attired in the latest in French couture. He finds crime amusing and fun — staging some of his exploits just to show that he can, which was why newspapers in 1911 half-jokingly suggested that he was the only man who could have stolen the
Mona Lisa.

Lupin does stop short of murder and has moments of remorse. Occasionally he uses his knowledge of the underworld to solve crimes committed by less savory outlaws. Lupin likes to masquerade as different characters and for four years, posing as Lenormand, the head of the Sûreté, actually directs operations against himself. But unlike Vidocq, nothing inspires him to permanently reform.

Above all, Lupin takes pleasure in outsmarting the authorities, which was one of the qualities that most endeared him to readers. When he solves crimes, he often chooses those that have stumped others, so that he can show off his quick mind and vast knowledge of the criminal world. Leblanc felt so confident of Lupin’s abilities that he even pitted him against Sherlock Holmes, who appears in several of the stories as Herlock Sholmes. In one, Lupin captures Sholmes and ships him back to England on a ferry. Sholmes tricks the captain and confronts Lupin, turning him over to the police. Lupin returns the favor, escaping just in time to bid farewell to Sholmes. He was one French detective that Conan Doyle did not allow his creation to comment on.

vii

At the time the
Mona Lisa
was stolen, Paris was fascinated by a new fictional criminal, whose exploits had been appearing monthly since February 1911. For the previous six months, Fantômas, an aristocratic villain with seemingly supernatural powers, had been thrilling and delighting readers. More terrorist than criminal, Fantômas is a ruthless killer who decapitates people, blows up ocean liners, spreads plague germs through Paris, fills perfume bottles with acid in a department store, and hijacks a Métro train — all with no apparent reason.

Fantômas is virtually impossible to capture or stop. His strength lies in his very elusiveness. As one of his chief adversaries says, “I am frightened, because Fantômas is a being against whom it is idle to use ordinary weapons; because he has been able to conceal his identity and elude all pursuit for years; because his daring is boundless and his power immeasurable; because he is everywhere and nowhere at once and… I am not even sure that he is not listening to me now.”
⁴²

Fantômas’s crimes often seem to be committed out of a desire for sheer anarchy and on a scale far beyond that of any previous character in crime fiction. His spectral infamy — and the fear it inspired — were clear from the very first lines of the series:

“Fantômas.”

“What did you say?”

“I said: Fantômas.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Nothing.… Everything!”

“But what is it?”

“Nobody.… And yet, yes, it is somebody!”

“And what does the somebody do?”

“Spreads terror!”
⁴³

The Fantômas novels were published by Arthème Fayard, who specialized in low-priced books intended to attract a large number of readers. In 1905, Fayard started a line of books with sensational full-color covers, called Le Livre Populaire. Most of them were reprints of novels that had been
feuilletons,
including works by Gaboriau and Ponson du Terrail. But in 1910, Fayard approached Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, both of whom wrote for magazines intended for automobile and sports fans, to see if they could write an original four-hundred-page novel a month. Souvestre, the elder by ten years, had met Allain when looking for an assistant. The younger man amazed his boss by being able to churn out in two hours a seventeen-page article on a new truck about which he knew nothing. Thus began their collaboration.

The title for the series had come to the two men while riding on the Métro to meet Fayard. Souvestre had suggested the title
Fantômus,
a mock latinization of the French word
fantôme,
or phantom. Fayard, hearing it in his office, wrote it down incorrectly. Fayard’s other contribution was to suggest the cover art, based on an advertisement that showed a masked, elegantly dressed man. An Italian illustrator, Gino Starace, put a dagger in the man’s hand as he brooded over Paris. Starace continued to provide lurid and imaginative cover illustrations that did much to ensure the series’ popularity.

The decision to make the hero evil was inspired by the success of fictional antiheroes such as Arsène Lupin and the master criminal Zigomar, created by Léon Sazie. Zigomar, who wore a hood and always escaped from the police, had first appeared in a
feuilleton
in 1909, but now was the lead character in a Pathé movie studio series that was packing in audiences. Fayard was hoping to capitalize on Zigomar’s popularity, not guessing that Fantômas would surpass it.

The two writers followed a grueling publication schedule, which led them to produce twelve thousand pages of fiction in a little under three years. They used all the modern methods, dictating to secretaries and even recording their words on wax rolls. Usually they started with a basic plot outline and divided the chapters between themselves. During the final week of each month, they exchanged chapters and wrote transitional paragraphs. Fantastic plot twists and developments were often more imaginative than realistic — or even coherent. Fantômas performs superhuman acts and switches identities at will, going well beyond the bounds of physics in the process. Yet the readers, carried along by the spirit of the books, did not mind. It was an age in which anything seemed possible. Fact or fiction? With Fantômas, there was no division between them.

A recent critic, Robin Walz, summed up the improbability of the series: “One of the fundamental characteristics of the
Fantômas
series is the ability to swerve the story through space and time. Narrative coherence depends upon the title character’s ability to be anyone and anywhere, at any time, in order to sustain the action. It is a further condition that the reader set aside the question of what happens to one or another of his identities when Fantômas is yet someone else.… To enjoy the story, the reader has to accept these fundamental incoherences of time, space, and character.”
⁴⁴

And readers did. The books were an immediate hit, their popularity cutting across all classes. Bourgeois shopkeepers, countesses, bohemians, and poets devoured the Fantômas stories as soon as they were published. The masked man in evening clothes who towered over Paris appeared on kiosks and billboards and the walls of the Métro. The image was everywhere, like Fantômas himself, showing that no one was safe. The two authors ultimately produced thirty-two novels before Souvestre’s death in 1914; Allain then did eleven more on his own, marrying his ex-partner’s widow as well.

The reader always knows that the criminal will be Fantômas. The puzzle is in seeing through his disguises and finding him among the other characters. He could be in the guise of a nun hiding a weapon under her habit or posing as a physician arriving at a patient’s bedside not to heal but to poison. Sometimes he is the lover of a beautiful woman; at other times, a doddering old man or a professor.

Fantômas’s many guises reflected a particular concern of the French police: to establish with certainty the identity of those people who were arrested. Bertillon had in the 1880s worked out a scientific method of enabling law enforcement officials to penetrate disguises. With Fantômas, there seemed to be no real person underneath: he had taken the power of disguise that Vidocq possessed, and extended it to his essential nature. Part of the appeal of the series, especially to Apollinaire and other avant-garde thinkers who embraced it, was that it asked readers to search beneath the surface to find the nature of things — a common theme of modernism in both art and science. Just as Fantômas disregards the conventions of morality, so too does he defy ordinary logic. He has entered that elusive fourth dimension that mathematicians, scientists, and artists were then trying to discover.

It was, of course, easier for fictional characters to break old patterns and shatter rules, but Paris’s real-life crime fighters were taking note of what their make-believe counterparts (and make-believe villains) were doing. They too were pushing forward, creating new tools and methods. For better or for worse, they would soon have plenty of opportunities to experiment with these innovative techniques.

4

SCIENCE VS. CRIME

V
idocq, the first head of the Sûreté, had begun the practice of taking a scientific approach to the detection of crime, even though his primary tools were his phenomenal memory and his psychological insight into the criminal mentality. As the nineteenth century advanced, however, the police increasingly used new scientific discoveries in their work. Chemistry and physics, as well as statistics, physiology, biology, psychology, and the new social sciences of anthropology and sociology all made contributions to crime fighting. Developments in technology, such as the microscope and the camera, gave detectives even greater power. Over time, a science of criminology was born and the modern detective came into being.

i

Émile Zola’s description of a naturalistic novelist’s work could be used equally well as a pattern for the criminologist: “The novelist starts out in search of a truth… he starts from known facts; then he makes his experiment, and exposes [the character] to a series of trials, placing him amid certain surroundings in order to exhibit how the complicated machinery of his person works.… The problem is to know what such passion acting in such a surrounding and under such circumstances would produce from the point of view of an individual and of society… Finally you possess knowledge of the man, scientific knowledge of him, in both his individual and his social relations.”
¹
It was just such knowledge that enabled one relentless detective to bring to justice the most celebrated criminal of his time.

“To kill without remorse is the highest of pleasures,” wrote Pierre-François Lacenaire. “It is impossible to destroy my hatred of mankind. This hatred is the product of a lifetime, the outcome of my every thought. I never pitied any one who suffered, and I don’t want to be pitied myself.”
²
These were the words — written as he faced the guillotine — of the most notorious criminal to appear in the decade after Vidocq’s retirement from the Sûreté in 1827. At heart a dandy with literary pretensions, Lacenaire sought to project himself as the greatest criminal of his generation. Though most of his crimes were petty ones, his self-promotion invited others to attempt to use him as a doorway into the criminal mind.

Born Pierre-François Gaillard, the son of a wealthy iron merchant in Francheville, he grew up with a profound sense of resentment. In his memoirs he recalled that his older brother was the favored son in the family. When Pierre was sixteen, he and his father had passed through the town square with the guillotine looming over it. “Look,” his father had said, “that is how you will finish up if you don’t change your ways.”
³
Lacenaire saw this moment as a turning point in his life. “From that moment,” he wrote, “an invisible bond existed between me and the frightful machine.”
⁴

As a young man, he went to Paris to study law; it was at this time that he adopted the name Lacenaire. Because the money his father sent him was not enough to survive on, he worked at many jobs, never achieving the success that he believed he deserved. Inspired by the Greek war for independence, Lacenaire went off to join the rebel forces. When he returned to France in 1829, he found that his father was bankrupt. Lacenaire had to fend for himself.

According to his memoirs, around this time Lacenaire fought a duel with the nephew of Benjamin Constant, a politician and writer. Lacenaire was the victor, and though the duel was not fatal, he claimed that the experience made him see how he could kill a person without remorse.

It was also in 1829 that Lacenaire served his first jail term, having been convicted in a swindling scheme. He was soon on the street again, and for the next three years he wrote lyric poems, songs, and essays. As no one would pay much for his literary creations, he continued his career of petty fraud, which brought him a second short prison sentence. After his release, the editor of
Bon Sens,
a radical political journal, asked Lacenaire to write an exposé of French prison life. This gave him a chance to express his contempt for authority and brought him some fame as well. “In this atmosphere… the wretched youth finds himself blushing at the last remnant of innocence and decency which he had still preserved when he entered the prison; he begins to feel ashamed that he is less of a scoundrel than those about him, he dreads their mockery and their contempt; for, make no mistake, there are such things as respect and contempt even in the galleys, a fact that explains why certain convicts are better off in jail than in a society which has nothing for them but contempt.”
⁵

Working for
Bon Sens
brought Lacenaire a forum but little money. Few others shared his delusions about his artistic talent, so in 1834 he embarked on the path of crime yet again. As a career choice, it was a mistake, for he was often inept in carrying out his criminal plans. At the time, banks sent messengers to their customers’ homes and offices to collect deposits. Since the messengers often carried large sums of money, Lacenaire thought they would make fine victims.

He took on a partner, Pierre Victor Avril, a former carpenter. “I was the intelligence, Avril the arm,” Lacenaire wrote later.
⁶
He requested a bank to send a messenger to a certain address, giving a false name. When the messenger arrived, however, the porter of the building told him that no one of that name lived there. On Lacenaire’s second attempt, no messenger showed up.

Coming up with a new plan, Lacenaire remembered a former friend from prison, a man named Chardon, who now lived with his bedridden mother. Unwisely, he had once told Lacenaire that she had saved a hoard of money. One December morning, Lacenaire and Avril knocked at Chardon’s door. Chardon, too trusting, allowed his former prison mate inside. Without a word, Lacenaire stabbed him with a dagger and Avril used a hatchet to deliver a deathblow.

A low moaning in the next room attracted Lacenaire’s attention. It was the bedridden mother, and the two thieves showed her no more mercy than they had the son. Looking for hidden valuables, they overturned the mattress on which she was lying, suffocating her. They ransacked the house, taking everything that looked valuable. Despite what Chardon had said, the loot was worth no more than seven hundred francs — far less than they had expected. But the killers celebrated what they considered a “perfect crime” by washing off the evidence of their crime at a Turkish bath, followed by a dinner at a fancy café.

Emboldened by this success, Lacenaire struck again two weeks later, trying the messenger scam again. Posing as a M. Mahossier, he appeared at a bank and arranged to cash a forged check. The teller told an eighteen-year-old messenger named Genevay to take three thousand francs to the address Lacenaire had given. Because Avril was not available, Lacenaire’s accomplice this time was a man named François, also known as Red Whiskers. After the messenger put the bank notes on the table and turned to leave, François attacked him from behind with a file. He was as inept as his partner, failing to kill Genevay, whose screams brought neighbors to the scene. Both of the would-be robbers fled.

Genevay survived and gave the police a description of his attackers. He noted that Mahossier had a copy of Rousseau’s
Social Contract
hanging out of his pocket. Vidocq’s successor at the head of the Sûreté, M. Allard, assigned his chief inspector, Paul-Louis-Alphonse Canler, to the case.
⁷
Canler had won a reputation as the Sûreté’s best detective because of his uncanny ability to read the minds of criminals and because he was incredibly persistent. He was a shoe-leather detective at heart — which he had to be: a social scientist named Honoré-Antoine Frégier had published a lengthy work in 1840 in which he claimed some sixty-three thousand criminals were living in Paris — nearly 10 percent of the population.
⁸

Canler assumed that Mahossier was not the real name of the man he was after, but he also knew that criminals often used the same alias many times. So he began to visit lodging houses, looking through registers for the name. After a tedious search, he found a seedy place with the name Mahossier in the register. The concierge’s description of him sounded like the man who had stabbed the bank messenger — a distinguished-looking man with a high forehead, silky mustache, and smooth manner. She also remembered that he had stayed there once before under the name Bâton.

Canler interviewed five hundred people before he found a thief named Bâton and arrested him, even though he did not match the description of Mahossier. The inspector clung to his theory that following the trail of names would lead him to the culprit. Bâton, given plenty of brandy during questioning, revealed that he knew someone who fit the description of the man Canler was looking for — a nattily dressed man with a high forehead. Bâton knew him as Gaillard, Lacenaire’s real name.

Canler went back to checking the registers of flophouses. When he found a Gaillard, the innkeeper remembered that the man in question had left some papers behind. These included some republican songs and poems — a link with Canler’s only other clue: the copy of Rousseau that the perpetrator had carried.

The detective was sure he had identified his man, but he still had to find him. He got a break when Avril, Lacenaire’s accomplice in the double murder, was arrested on another charge. Hoping for leniency, he offered to help Canler. He told him that the man known as Gaillard had a rich aunt who lived in the rue Bar-du-Bec. When Canler went to see her, she admitted she had a disreputable nephew whom she feared. Indeed, she had put a grille on her door because she feared that he would murder her someday. The aunt gave Canler his quarry’s current name: Lacenaire.

Canler issued a general alert throughout France with Lacenaire’s description. On February 2, 1836, the police arrested a man at Beaune. It was Lacenaire, trying a new scam: selling forged bonds. He was brought back to the Paris Prefecture, where he greeted Canler politely. He admitted that he had robbed the bank messenger but at first refused to give the name of his accomplice. When told that his cohort in the double murder had cooperated in his capture, he confessed to that as well, revenging himself on Avril and Red Whiskers for good measure with further incriminating testimony. When Canler pointed out, “You realize, of course, that it will finish you,” Lacenaire replied, “I know that. It doesn’t matter so long as it finishes them too.”
⁹
His sense of grievance had overcome self-preservation.

The trial of the three criminals — Lacenaire, Avril, and Red Whiskers — began in the Cour d’Assises
¹⁰
of the Seine on November 12, 1836. The highlight of the trial was Lacenaire’s speech to the court. Dressed in a stylish blue coat, he reached heights of self-dramatization, portraying himself as an alienated genius at war with society. He mesmerized those present in the courtroom, and reporters wrote everything down for the next day’s newspapers. Since Lacenaire had already declared that he was eager to meet his fiancée, the guillotine, the death sentence for him and Avril was almost anticlimactic.

Lacenaire became a celebrity, and while he awaited execution, visitors flocked to his prison cell, where he presided over a virtual salon for writers, doctors, scientists, and journalists. He gave visitors calling cards bearing the inscription “Pierre-François Lacenaire, fiancé of the guillotine.”
¹¹
Gifts of fine food and wine as well as messages of goodwill flooded into the prison from ladies of the highest society. One man offered Lacenaire an expensive coat, which he refused on the grounds that he would not be able to give it much wear. The literary world fawned on him; both Victor Hugo and Théophile Gautier came to visit and listen to him recite his poetry.