The Phantom of Rue Royale

by Jean-FranCois Parot

  ‘I should have known! It would have surprised me if in the midst of so many dead bodies you hadn’t managed to find one for your personal delectation! Why are so interested in this particular victim?’

  ‘It could be, Monsieur, that one tragedy is being used to conceal another. Who knows?’

  Sartine was thinking. Nicolas had the feeling that he had touched the right chord.

  ‘And how do you propose to pursue this case, Commissioner?’

  ‘I’d like Sanson to open up the corpse in the Basse-Geôle. We need to determine if the death occurred as the result of last night’s disturbances or if it was a domestic crime. Finally, may I suggest that this investigation could usefully serve as a cover for the more discreet general investigation you wish me to conduct into the tragedy of Place Louis XV? No one will be able to see the wood for the trees.’

  It was doubtless this last argument that swayed the Lieutenant General of Police.

  ‘You present your case so skilfully that I cannot refuse you. Let us hope it doesn’t drag you into one of those criminal imbroglios whose mysteries you love to complicate even further, so that we never know where they may lead us! With that, Monsieur, I bid you farewell. I suspect the King and Monsieur de Saint-Florentin are waiting to hear my explanations. After all, I’m supposed to be keeping order in the capital of the Kingdom.’

  Nicolas smiled inwardly at this refrain. He had heard it many times before, whenever he had had to force Sartine’s hand to let him loose on a case. Monsieur de Sartine turned on his heels and quickly walked out of the library, leaving Nicolas to reflect on the surprising things he had heard and the delicate mission with which he was now entrusted. For a moment he stood there, motionless, staring into space. By the time he got back to the stables, a coach was already speeding out of the building. Through the window he caught a glimpse of his chief’s sharp profile, the very image of despondency. He had never seen him in such a state, he who was always so in control of his emotions, and so anxious not to lose face before his visitors. He seemed weighed down with anxiety, and it was not only, as a superficial observer might have supposed, because he feared for his position. Nicolas knew him too well to think that such selfish matters were all that preoccupied him. He had been wounded by the King’s decision. That this decision had had fatal consequences the previous night merely increased his profound sense of abandonment. He was right to feel aggrieved by this absurd chain of events, so alien to his sense of duty and his total devotion to the monarch whom he had been serving selflessly for so many years. Sartine enjoyed the exceptional privilege of a weekly interview in the small apartments at Versailles, often in that secret study, which even those close to the King knew nothing about, where the monarch studied his agents’ dispatches and reports. In one night, this whole world had come tumbling down like a house of cards. To Nicolas, it seemed as though the image of an infallible chief had disintegrated, to be replaced by that of an unhappy man, a man worthy of pity. This merely strengthened his own determination to see this thing through. Yes, he would do all he could to find those responsible for a tragedy which the city authorities should, in the normal course of events, have anticipated and avoided.

  He chose a frisky young chestnut gelding, which stretched its slender head towards him, and had it saddled by a groom. The streets had recovered a little of their animation, but everyone still looked grim and groups were forming. The air, matching the mood of the day, was oppressive. Nicolas could feel his clothes sticking to his body, and his horse gave off a strong odour, as if it were overheated. Slate-blue storm clouds were gathering in the sky. It was almost dark by the time he rode in beneath the archway of the Grand Châtelet. As he was handing over the reins of his mount to the stable boy, a familiar voice hailed him.

  ‘Ah, there’s my Nicolas, in a hurry as usual!’

  He recognised the individual who was addressing him with such familiarity as his fellow countryman, a Breton called Jean, better known on the streets by his nickname, ‘Tirepot’. He was a singular character, a godsend to a populace deprived of privies. He carried two pails that hung from a bar resting across his shoulders. This contraption, hidden beneath a length of tarred canvas, allowed his customers to relieve themselves unseen. Nicolas often used the services of this friendly helper, who was always well informed.

  ‘What’s new, Jean? What are they saying this morning?’

  ‘Oh, certainly not good things! Everyone’s licking their wounds and mourning the dead. They’re saying this marriage has got off to a bad start. They’re blaming the watch and’ – he lowered his voice – ‘cursing the police and Monsieur de Sartine for not doing their job properly. People are complaining and gathering together, but things won’t go far – the poor have seen it all before!’

  ‘Is that all?’

  The man scratched his head. ‘I was in Place Louis XV, doing my job …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I quickly put down my trinkets and lent a hand. I heard some things, I can tell you!’

  ‘Really? What?’

  ‘Men from the city accusing Sartine early this morning. According to them, he’s to blame for the tragedy.’

  ‘From the city, you say? Aldermen?’

  ‘No. City Guards in all their finery. A lot of them were coming out of taverns, hardly able to stand, stinking so much of wine they could have killed flies with their breath. One big fat fellow, who seemed to be their officer, was urging them on, getting them all stirred up.’

  Nicolas rewarded him with a crown, which Tirepot caught in mid-air, at the risk of dropping his pyramid.

  ‘You could do something for me,’ Nicolas said. ‘Go back to the Saint-Honoré district and try to find out where those guards spent the night. As you can imagine, I’m really interested to know that.’

  Tirepot winked, loaded everything onto his back, adjusted it and disappeared beneath the archway. For a long time his voice could be heard receding into the distance, yelling his insistent cry: ‘Come one, come two, you all know what you need to do!’

  Nicolas was still thinking about Tirepot’s words as he entered the commissioners’ duty office. Bourdeau sat slumped at the table with his head on his arms, snoring loudly. He looked at him tenderly. There was someone who never spared himself! He called Old Marie, the usher, who immediately fetched two cups of coffee liberally laced with Lambic beer, which he smuggled in and which smelled of cider apples. It was this smell that woke the inspector. He shook himself, seized one of the cups, and drank the coffee noisily because it was piping hot. A long silence followed.

  ‘Methinks,’ said Bourdeau, in a mockingly pompous tone, ‘this coffee is merely an invitation to more solid refreshment.’

  ‘Methinks,’ Nicolas said, ‘I’ll follow you on that path. I’ve had nothing in my belly since midday yesterday except a brioche. I’m all ears. What do you propose?’

  ‘The usual place we go when we’re hungry and we don’t have much time, in Rue du Pied-de-Boeuf. I think that’s the perfect choice.’

  ‘I’m hungry, therefore I follow you. That’s my cogito for this morning.’

  ‘Especially as I’ve been to see Sanson,’ Bourdeau went on. ‘He’ll join us in the Basse-Geôle on the stroke of noon for the opening of the corpse. Not something to watch on an empty stomach – it might give us the hiccups …’

  He laughed, and Nicolas shuddered at the thought of this grim prospect. He agreed, though: opening a corpse was like a journey by sea – both required a full stomach.

  Their usual tavern was only a short distance from the Châtelet. The proximity of the Grande Boucherie, although a source of sanies and foul odours, also offered the advantage of fresh products. As soon as they entered the low, smoky room, Bourdeau called to his old friend – they were both natives of a village near Chinon, in the Touraine – and asked him what the kitchen could offer them at that hour of the morning. The fat, ruddy-faced man smiled.

  ‘What can I possibly serve you?’ he said, giving Bourdeau a di
g in the ribs that would have knocked over anyone less steady on his feet. ‘Hmm … What do you say to a calf’s breast pie? I just made one for a neighbour of mine who’s christening his baby. I’ll go and heat it up for you. With two pitchers of red wine from our region, as usual.’

  Nicolas, who loved inside information, asked him the recipe for this promising-sounding dish.

  ‘Only because it’s you, Commissioner. Otherwise, I wouldn’t say a word, even under torture. Here goes. You cut a decent piece of calf’s breast – choose it well: it has to be plump and pearly. Then you cut it up into slices, which you lard with one or two pieces of fat. Make a crust pastry out of lard and lower it into the pie dish. Put in the slices of veal, after seasoning them with bacon, salt, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, herbs, bay, mushrooms and artichoke ends, and cover the whole thing with pastry. Two good hours in the oven. You take it out and, just before serving, you cut a little hole in the top and carefully pour in a white sauce made with lemon juice and egg yolks.’

  ‘That seems to me perfectly adapted to the emptiness of our bellies,’ said Bourdeau with a gleam in his eye and his lips all aquiver with anticipation.

  ‘And, to whet your appetite, I’ll serve cherries, the first of the year, cooked in cinnamon wine.’

  ‘Ideal for a little eleven o’clock meal,’ Nicolas said ingratiatingly.

  A pitcher of purple wine was quickly brought. They drank many glasses, calming their raging hunger with a salad of beans mixed with slices of lard. Nicolas informed Bourdeau of the night’s events as he and Semacgus had experienced them, as well as the gist of his interview with Monsieur de Sartine, emphasising the fact that it was their chief who had appointed the inspector to assist him in this delicate case.

  ‘Let me see if I’ve got this right,’ said Bourdeau, turning red with pleasure. ‘We’re going to concentrate on the case of the strangled girl in order to divert attention from what we’re really up to.’

  ‘Exactly. But the credibility of our alibi will depend on the result of the autopsy. The marks on her neck could have been caused by attempts to free the body from where it lay with the others.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Nothing in the state of her clothes or her appearance indicated that there had been any kind of struggle to free her.’

  Nicolas was convinced that it was a good policeman’s duty to obey his instincts. From snippets of information, sometimes unformulated impressions, clues, coincidences and assumptions, a policeman used his common sense to organise all the elements of a case. He needed an open mind, a good memory for precedents and the barely conscious ability to refer to a whole collection of human types and situations. Beneath his good-natured appearance, Bourdeau had all these qualities, as well as a remarkable sensitivity. How many times had one of his apparently innocuous remarks sent an investigation along a new line of inquiry which had not previously been explored in depth?

  The smell of veal simmered in its spices drew Nicolas from his reflections. Carefully, their host placed his golden pie on the uneven wooden table. He disappeared, only to reappear immediately with a small pan that had seen better days, having been seasoned by hours of exposure in the oven. From it he took a sharp knife and nimbly cut a small hole in the pastry. Steam rose through it, enveloping them in its aroma. The innkeeper gently drizzled white sauce into this opening, so that it soon reached the smallest crannies of the pie. He put down his pan, picked up the dish, moved it from side to side, and set it down again. Nicolas and Bourdeau were already leaning forward when he stopped them.

  ‘Go gently, my lambs, let the sauce do its work. It has to imbue the meat with its aroma and make it tender. The thing to remember is that I call it calf’s breast pie, but to make it particularly mellow and plump I add a little cartilage. And the sauce! It’ll make your mouth water! It’s not like that miserable stuff that tastes like plaster, put together in a hurry by kitchen boys. It takes hours, gentlemen, for the flour to rise. I may be an insignificant little innkeeper, but I put my heart into my work, just like my great-grandfather, who was sauce chef to Gaston d’Orléans under the great Cardinal.’

  Inspired no doubt by this glorious memory, he served them ceremoniously. The dish and its flavours lived up to his introduction. The hot crust, crisp with caramelised meat juices at the edges, enclosed meat perfectly tender from the sauce melted over it. They spent a long time savouring this piece of work so simply and eloquently presented. The cooked cherries were refreshing, acid and sweet at the same time. The two men were overcome with a pleasant drowsiness, made all the stronger by brandy served in porcelain bowls as a precautionary measure. They blissfully let this infringement of the regulations pass without comment. Their host had no licence to serve spirits, the sale of which was reserved for another guild. His modest business allowed him only to supply wines from the cask, not from sealed bottles. Bourdeau, always alert to detail, suddenly realised that they did not have any snuff. It was an old joke between them. They always resorted to snuff when attending autopsies, in order to blot out the musty smell of decomposition pervading the Basse-Geôle. The host obligingly lent them two earthen pipes reserved for his customers, and a pro portionate amount of snuff.

  Back at the Grand Châtelet, they went straight to the torture chamber adjoining the office of the clerk of the criminal court. It was in this sombre Gothic room, on one of its oak tables, that bodies were opened up. The operation was still fairly uncommon: the regular doctors attached to the court refused to perform it unless specifically ordered to do so and, even when that was the case, they did not follow the rules, thus rendering the examination imperfect and completely useless from the point of view of an investigation.

  A man of Nicolas’s age, dressed in a puce-coloured coat, breeches and black stockings, was laying surgical instruments out on a bench. They glittered in the torchlight. Daylight never entered this room: the casement windows were fitted with metal hoods to prevent screams being heard beyond the walls of the fortress. Charles Henri Sanson was an old acquaintance of Nicolas from his earliest days in Paris. They had begun their careers at about the same time, and both served the King’s justice. An unexpected sympathy – one quite unhoped-for by Sanson – had drawn the young commissioner to this shy, temperate, highly cultured man. Nicolas always found it hard to imagine him as an executioner. He thought of him more as a doctor of crime. He knew that Sanson had been given no choice, but had been forced to take over the family profession. Nevertheless, he accomplished his terrible task with all the care of a compassionate man. Sanson turned, and his grave face lit up when he recognised Nicolas and Bourdeau.

  ‘Greetings, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I am at your disposal. My one regret is that the pleasure of seeing you again has only been afforded me by last night’s tragedy.’

  They shook hands, a custom on which Sanson always insisted, as if this simple gesture admitted him back into the community of the living. He smiled when they lit their pipes and started puffing on them. Semacgus suddenly made his entrance, and his ribald laughter introduced a touch of joviality into the heavy atmosphere of the crypt. The two professionals carefully lined up their instruments and examined them one by one, checking the cutting edges of the scalpels, scissors, stylets, straight knives and saws. They also put out curved needles, string, sponges, tenacula, a trepan, a wedge and a hammer. Nicolas and Bourdeau observed how precise their gestures were. At last they all gathered around the large table on which the unknown girl lay. Sanson nodded towards the commissioner and gestured towards the corpse.

  ‘Whenever you wish, Monsieur.’

  Nicolas began: ‘We are in the presence of a body brought to La Madeleine cemetery on Thursday thirty-first May 1770, presumed to have perished in the disaster of Rue Royale.’

  Bourdeau was taking the minutes.

  ‘It was noticed by Commissioner Le Floch and Inspector Bourdeau on the stroke of six. Their attention was drawn by what were clearly marks of strangulation on the victim’s neck. In these circumstances, the order was giv
en to transport the body to the Basse-Geôle, where, at’ – he consulted his watch before putting it back carefully in the fob of his coat – ‘at half past twelve on the same day, Charles Henri Sanson, executioner to the viscountcy and generality of Paris, and Guillaume Semacgus, naval surgeon, proceeded to open it in the presence of said commissioner and inspector. First, the clothing and objects belonging to the victim were examined. A loose dress of good quality, with a straw-coloured satin bodice …’

  Sanson and Semacgus undressed the body as Nicolas spoke.

  ‘… A white silk corset, very tight over the hips, fitted with whalebones and laced at the back …’

  The corset was in fact so tight that Semacgus had to use a penknife to cut the lace.

  ‘… two petticoats, one of thin cotton and the other of silk, with two pockets sewn inside the first …’

  He searched them.

  ‘Empty. Stockings of grey yarn. No shoes. No other objects, no jewellery, no papers, no clues of any kind seen on the body. Apart from …’

  Nicolas took a handkerchief from his pocket and carefully unfolded it.

  ‘… apart from a black pearl of a mineral resembling obsidian, which was found in the victim’s clenched hand when the corpse was discovered in La Madeleine cemetery. We seem to be in the presence of a young girl of about twenty, of slender constitution and with no distinguishing marks, except for those previously noted at the base of the neck. The mouth is twisted and the face contorted. The blonde hair is clean and very well groomed. The rest of the body is equally clean. Gentlemen, you may now proceed.’

  Nicolas had turned to Sanson and Semacgus. The two practitioners approached and meticulously examined the pitiful, recumbent body. They turned it over, observed the purplish tinges on its back, then laid it flat again. Nodding, Semacgus passed his hand over the stomach and looked at Sanson, who bent to do the same. He turned to pick up a probe for a more intimate examination.