The Phantom of Rue Royale

by Jean-FranCois Parot

  ‘You’re right, there’s no doubt about it.’

  ‘The clues speak for themselves, my dear colleague,’ Semacgus said, ‘though we’ll know more after we’ve opened her up.’

  Nicolas looked at both of them questioningly.

  ‘This maiden of yours,’ Semacgus said, ‘was a maiden no longer. In fact, there’s every indication that she had already given birth. Further observations are sure to confirm that.’

  Sanson now also nodded. ‘It’s beyond dispute. The disappearance of the hymen proves it, even though some authors say this is not infallible proof. In addition, the fourchette is torn, as is almost always the case in women who have had a child.’ He again bent over the body. ‘Gravis odor puerperii. There’s no doubt about it, labour only took place a few days ago, and perhaps even more recently than that. These stretch marks on the stomach show how distended it was.’

  ‘Not to mention this brownish line from the pubis to the umbilicus,’ said Semacgus, pointing at what he was describing. As for the swollen breasts, they also speak for themselves. We still have to do a detailed examination. Hold her head steady.’

  ‘Notice,’ said Sanson, ‘that the joint with the first cervical vertebra lacks normal mobility.’

  Nicolas tensed as the scalpel entered the flesh. It was always the same: at first, you found it hard to watch, and you would drag desperately at your pipe or frantically take snuff, but gradually your profession would gain the upper hand over the horror of the spectacle. Curiosity was a strong incentive to succeed, to shed light on the shadowy areas of a case. The body was no longer a human being who had lived, but the object of precise, painstaking labour, with its strange sounds and its colours uncovered by the stylet or the probe. It was an unknown world in which the body was a machine, and the inner drama of a life was offered up for view like meat on a stall before the corruption of the flesh obliterated everything.

  Without exchanging a single word, understanding one another by look and gesture only, the hangman and the naval surgeon proceeded. Then, after what seemed like a long time, they put everything back in its place. The incisions were sewn up, the body was cleaned and wrapped in a large sheet which, once closed, was sealed with wax by Nicolas. When they had finished, they rubbed their hands with vinegar, and carefully dried them, still in silence: neither wanted to be the first to speak.

  ‘Monsieur,’ Semacgus said at last, ‘you are at home here. I won’t encroach on your jurisdiction.’

  ‘Unofficially, Monsieur, unofficially. I consent, but don’t hesitate to interrupt me. Please do me the honour of supplementing my words.’

  Semacgus bowed. ‘I shall, with your permission.’

  Sanson assumed that modest, calm air of his, which made Nicolas think of a Lenten preacher.

  ‘I know, Commissioner, that you would like to obtain as quickly as possible the information which will be of most use to your investigation. I think you will benefit from what we have been able to ascertain. Let me therefore sum up the basic points.’

  He took a deep breath and folded his hands.

  ‘We have here a member of the female sex, about twenty years of age …’

  ‘Quite pretty, by the way,’ Semacgus murmured.

  ‘Firstly, we ascertained that she had been strangled. The state of her trachea, the contusions and internal haematoma due to loss of blood – everything clearly pointed to that. Secondly, the victim recently gave birth to a child, although we are unable to fix a precise date.’

  ‘Undoubtedly no more than two or three days ago,’ said Semacgus. ‘That much is clear from the state of the organs, the breasts and other details of which I shall spare you the description.’

  ‘And, thirdly, it is difficult to ascertain the exact time of death. Nevertheless, the condition of the body encourages me to make a cautious estimate: between seven and eight o’clock yesterday evening.’

  ‘In addition,’ Semacgus said, ‘when we cleaned the body, we found … some traces of hay.’

  He opened his hand. Nicolas took the strands of hay and put them in his handkerchief next to the mysterious black pearl.

  ‘Where did you find them?’ he asked.

  ‘More or less everywhere, but especially in the hair, which is why they were not noticed, given that the subject’s hair is long and fair.’

  Nicolas was thinking. As always when he wanted to get to the bottom of things, he resolved to play the devil’s advocate.

  ‘Is it possible, even if the time of death were much earlier than the tragedy in Place Louis XV, that you could be mistaken – forgive me – and that the wound to the neck, the apparent cause of death, was due to the removal of the body?’

  ‘No,’ Sanson replied. ‘We’re positive that the wound was inflicted prior to death, and was indeed the cause of it. I shan’t bore you with details, but the evidence is irrefutable. And the clothes are intact, which would be unlikely if the opposite were the case.’

  Semacgus expanded on this. ‘It would also be hard to explain the facial expression and the presence of black blood in the lungs.’

  ‘From what you can see, was the labour normal?’ Bourdeau asked. ‘In other words, is there any possibility that there was an attempt at abortion?’

  ‘Hard to say. The folds in the skin of the abdomen are undoubtedly similar to those found on a woman who has given birth. However, the marks resulting from a late abortion are generally the same as those following labour, especially when the pregnancy is advanced.’

  ‘So,’ Bourdeau concluded, ‘there’s nothing to prove that there wasn’t a late abortion?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Sanson said.

  Nicolas began thinking aloud. ‘Were we right to move the corpse and perform this unofficial procedure? If we’d left her where we found her, a spy could have stayed there and informed us if anyone recognised her. We may have interfered with the normal order of things and made our task more complicated …’

  Bourdeau reassured him: ‘We’d have arrived on her family’s doorsteps with our accusations, and can you imagine the fuss they would have made? Forget about an autopsy! They’d simply have told us she was crushed in the disaster. And, what’s more, we wouldn’t even have known the poor girl had given birth! I prefer the truth I find for myself to the truth other people expect me to believe.’

  This vigorous outburst dispelled Nicolas’s doubts.

  ‘And besides,’ Bourdeau concluded, ‘as my father, who looked after the dogs for the King’s boar hunts, would have said, at least now we can be sure we won’t mistake the front of the prey for the back. Still, the case doesn’t look as if it’s going to be easy.’

  ‘My friends,’ Nicolas said, ‘how can I thank you for all the useful information you’ve given me and for the light you’ve thrown on this case.’ Then, addressing Sanson, ‘I’m sure you know that Monsieur de Noblecourt has long wanted you to dine with him, and you’ve long refused.’

  ‘Monsieur Nicolas,’ said Sanson, ‘the mere fact that he has thought of me is a great honour, which fills me with joy and gratitude. Perhaps a time will come when I can accept.’

  He left Semacgus and Sanson deep in an animated discussion on the comparative merits of Beckeri4 and Bauzmann,5 two precursors of the new science of forensic medicine. The commissioner and his deputy walked in pensive silence to the gateway of the Grand Châtelet. The storm had finally broken, and the roadway was inundated with streams of muddy water carrying rubbish along with them. Bourdeau sensed that something was troubling Nicolas.

  At last the commissioner spoke. ‘There’s one thing that puzzles me,’ he said. ‘Why did the young woman lace up her corset so tightly?’

  NOTES – CHAPTER II

  1. French baroque painter (1644–1717).

  2. Cf. The Châtelet Apprentice and The Man with the Lead Stomach.

  3. A name given to Madame de Pompadour, who owned this chateau near Paris.

  4. Author of Paradoxum médico-légal (1704).

  5. Author of Vernünftig
es Urteil von tödtlichen Wunden (1717).

  III

  THE DEUX CASTORS

  The past is gone, the future yet lacks breath,

  The present languishes ’twixt life and death

  J.-B. CHASSIGNET (1594)

  Nicolas whistled for a cab. They had to get back to Place Louis XV, more specifically to the place where the corpses had been gathered together, to find a grief-stricken family searching for a young girl – or young woman, although the corpse lying in its sack at the Basse-Geôle bore no ring.

  Their carriage reached Rue Saint-Honoré by way of the quais and the cesspools of Rue du Petit-Bourbon and Rue des Poulies, which ran alongside the old Louvre. Nicolas looked out at these foul clusters of hovels, so close to the palaces of the kings and so conducive to every sickness of body and mind.

  The western end of Rue Saint-Honoré consisted of a long row of shops selling fashion, shops which dictated style in the city. At the beginning of each season, the master artisans of this luxury trade dispatched porcelain dummies all the way to distant Muscovy in the north and to the very interior of the Grand Turk’s seraglio in the south. These dummies bore the latest wigs and were carefully dressed in the season’s novelties. The other half of the street, towards La Halle, was given over to more down-to-earth pleasures, such as the Hôtel d’Aligre, a celebrated temple of delicacies, which had been open for a year, its window filled with hams and andouilles. One evening, Bourdeau had given him a fashionable new ragout to taste: choucroute from Strasbourg. This dish, which was now much in demand, had won acclaim from the Faculty, which had declared it ‘refreshing, a cure for scurvy, producing a refined, milky liquid that makes the blood bright red and temperate’. The establishment’s trout au bleu came directly from Geneva in their own court-bouillon, and rumour had it – a rumour confirmed by Monsieur de la Borde – that the King himself sometimes delayed his dinner if this special delivery was late in arriving at Versailles.

  Already the wet slate roofs of the Capuchin monastery near the Orangerie flashed grey on their left. The fiacre turned into Rue de Chevilly, then briefly into Rue de Suresnes, and at last neared the cemetery belonging to the parish of La Madeleine. Here, it slowed down, blocked by a dense, silent, grim-looking crowd, which was itself barred from the parish and its dependencies by a cordon of French Guards. Nicolas banged with his fist on the front of the box to stop the vehicle and stepped out. A man in a magistrate’s black robe, whom he recognised as Monsieur Mutel, Commissioner of the Palais-Royal district, came forward and shook his hand. The two men with him bowed. One was Monsieur Puissant, the police official responsible for performances and lighting, and the other was his deputy, Monsieur Hochet de la Terrie. Both were old acquaintances.

  ‘My dear colleague,’ Mutel said. ‘These gentlemen and I have been organising the identification of the bodies. There’s so little space that, if we let it, the crowd would come rushing in and we’d have a new disaster on our hands. I assume Monsieur de Sartine has sent you to help us?’

  ‘Not exactly, although we are at your disposal. We’re here to carry out a preliminary investigation following a suspicious death noted last night. We need to consult … I assume you have lists?’

  ‘We have three. A list of bodies having means of identification on them, a second list of those already identified by their nearest and dearest and a final list with descriptions of missing persons to help our assistants try to find the relative or friend in question. But the faces are often terribly disfigured, which makes it quite difficult to recognise anyone. What’s more, there’s a storm brewing and we won’t be able to preserve the bodies for too long … Even the Basse-Geôle couldn’t contain them all!’

  The commissioner came closer to Nicolas and, in a low voice, enquired after Monsieur de Sartine’s state of health.

  ‘Well, you know him, my dear fellow, simplicitas ac modestiae imagine in altitudinem conditus studiumque litterarum at amorem carminum simulans, quo uelaret animium.1 But without touching his wigs …’

  Both men were fond of the classics, and occasionally, when they needed to be discreet, they enjoyed conversing with the help of Latin quotations.

  ‘Bene, that’s certainly an interesting symptom! I’m reassured, though. This is a grave crisis, but he’ll get through it. The truth will out, and sooner rather than later. We just have to let the stupid and the envious stew in their own juice!’ He winked. ‘Don’t worry, anything I find out about last night’s incompetence I’ll pass on to you.’

  Nicolas smiled and made an evasive gesture with his hand. His brilliant entry into the corps of commissioners at the Châtelet in 1761 had impressed his colleagues. By now, most had learnt to appreciate him for his particular qualities and readily opened their hearts to him about their problems, confident that he would be able to bring pressure to bear on the Lieutenant General. Without exaggerating his natural charm, Nicolas had been able to honour some of the older veterans with his services.

  The registers had been laid out in the church. All around them rose the cries and weeping of the families. They shared the task among themselves. After a moment, the inspector pointed out a line to him.

  ‘… a frail young girl,’ Nicolas read aloud, ‘in a pale yellow satin dress, fair hair, blue eyes, aged nineteen …’

  He questioned the police officer who was keeping the register.

  ‘This entry is at the end. It can’t have been long since these particulars were given. Do you remember the person who gave them?’

  ‘Yes, Commissioner, it was only a quarter of an hour ago. A gentleman of about forty, accompanied by a young man. He was looking for his niece. He seemed in a very emotional state and gave me a seal from his shop so that we could reach him in case we found the girl.’

  He noted the number of the entry and looked through a cardboard box in which various papers were being stored. ‘Let’s see … number seventy-three … Here we are!’ He took out a leaflet. ‘At the sign of the Deux Castors, Rue Saint-Honoré, Paris, opposite the Opéra. Charles Galaine, furrier, manufacturer and purveyor of furs, muffs and coats.’ The girl’s name was apparently Élodie Galaine.

  The decorative seal showed two beavers facing each other. Their tails framed an engraving representing a man in a fur coat and hat reaching out his hands towards a fire. The commissioner wrote down the address in pencil in his little black notebook.

  ‘Let’s not waste time,’ he said. ‘We’ll go straight there.’

  As they were getting back into their carriage, Tirepot appeared and held Nicolas back by a button of his coat.

  ‘Here’s what I can tell you. The City Guards were having a merry time of it last night. They happily got through a lot of bottles in the taverns round about, celebrating their new uniforms. They went to lots of different places, but in particular to the Dauphin Couronné. La Paulet will be able to tell you more. She asked me to tell you and Monsieur Bourdeau that she waited for you, that your food got spoilt, but that she realised what was happening. She went on and on about a piece of news she said was sure to please you. She’s expecting you tonight at about ten; it’ll be worth your while …’

  Nicolas was once more about to climb into the carriage when Tirepot again detained him.

  ‘Not so fast! Have a look at what they’ve been hiring people to distribute. The city lot are behind this. I heard from a proofreader who was using my convenience that it was produced in a workshop that prints adjudication announcements for the aldermen. Sorry about the state of it!’

  He handed the commissioner a stained poster. Nicolas threw him a coin, which he made as if to refuse, while seizing it in mid-air. The lampoon was crude and obscene. Its target was Monsieur de Sartine and beyond him, the First Minister, Choiseul. They certainly were not losing any time at the Hôtel de Ville, thought Nicolas. As a loyal subject of the King and a magistrate, he was shocked by these accusations. Not that he wasn’t used to such hate-filled writings: he had been hunting them down for ten years, under two royal mistresses. He
kept seizing them and destroying them in disgust, but the hydra possessed a hundred heads and was constantly reborn.

  Their carriage set off and again went through the cordon of French Guards. Nicolas had the coachman ask an officer for permission to go along Rue Royale. The cab slowly moved those few hundred fateful yards. Nothing remained of the previous night’s tragedy except for scraps of clothing and scattered shoes, which would soon provide a harvest for the second-hand clothes dealers. The rain that had fallen during the storm was gradually erasing the brown stains on the ground. In the crude afternoon light, the immediate causes of the tragedy were like so many accusing witnesses: trenches, blocks of stone, the unfinished street. Place Louis XV was emerging from the disaster, and teams had already started to clear the remains of the structure from which the fireworks had been launched. The ambassadors’ mansion and the Garde-Meuble stood resplendent in all their hieratic solemnity. The wind was chasing away the last miasmas of the night. Tomorrow, everything would be back to normal, as if nothing had happened. And yet Nicolas could still hear the cries of agony. As they went past the Garde-Meuble and along Passage de l’Orangerie to Rue Saint-Honoré, he thought with anguish of how the evening’s merriment had turned sour. Before long, their carriage stopped near the corner of Rue de Valois, outside a fine-looking shop with the sign of the Deux Castors. The window, in its frame of carved wood, displayed scenes of trappers and savages hunting animals native to the various continents. The glass was protected by a grille with gilded points in the shape of pine cones. Through it, in the gloom of the shop, a number of stuffed animals could be seen. Nicolas pointed out some naked dummies to Bourdeau.

  ‘At the end of spring, the hides and garments are taken down into cool cellars fumigated with herbs to protect them from insects.’