The Crimes of Paris

by Dorothy Hoobler; Thomas Hoobler

  The theater’s intention to shock the middle class, épater les bourgeois, made it popular with the intelligentsia, but it also attracted people from the working-class neighborhood in which it was located, slumming aristocrats, and tourists from all over the world. There were enough guignolers, regular customers, to guarantee that the performances were always sold out. They came not just expecting sex and violence, but also secure in the knowledge that the “good guys” would never win. Not all the sex was on the stage. Boxes in the back of the theater covered with latticework were trysting places, and janitors had to hose them out after performances. It was a place of taboo and transformation.

  Agnes Peirron, an expert on this form of entertainment, has written, “What carried the Grand-Guignol to its highest level were the boundaries and thresholds it crossed: the states of consciousness altered by drugs or hypnosis. Loss of consciousness, loss of control, panic: themes with which the theater’s audience could easily identify. When the Grand-Guignol playwrights expressed an interest in the guillotine, what fascinated them most were the last convulsions played out on the decapitated face. What if the head continued to think without the body? The passing from one state to another was the crux of the genre.” 48

  In literature as well as in the theater, Parisians were fascinated with evil for its own sake. The French literary tradition is studded with celebrants of the dark side of humanity: François Villon, the Marquis de Sade, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire. This preoccupation with evil also made itself felt in literature for mass consumption: in 1911 the most popular literary character in France was a criminal. Fantômas was the “hero” of a best-selling series of novels that sold as fast as their two authors could turn them out. Fantômas was no Robin Hood figure; he carried out ruthless crimes for his own pleasure, leaving the bodies of countless innocents behind. And in each book he outwitted the attempts of his nemesis, Inspector Juve of the Sûreté (France’s equivalent of the FBI), to apprehend him. The criminal is always triumphant, and readers loved it. Adding to the appeal of the books were their full-color covers, which rivaled even the Grand-Guignol in their graphic detail. In the very first book in the series, the cover shows a masked man clad in evening dress and top hat towering over the landscape of Paris. A second glance reveals that the man is carrying a dagger in one hand and seems to be seeking a victim.

  Apollinaire, Picasso’s literary friend, author of experimental poetry and elegant pornography, embraced the Fantômas works as enthusiastically as if they had been high art. He called the first book an “extraordinary novel, full of life and imagination, lamely written but extremely vivid.… From the imaginative standpoint Fantômas is one of the richest works that exist.” 49 Apollinaire founded a group of like-minded connoisseurs known as La Société des Amis de Fantômas; they included Max Jacob, the homosexual artist who at one time shared his apartment with Picasso. Other enthusiastic readers included Picasso himself, the writers Colette and Jean Cocteau, and the painter Blaise Cendrars, who called the series “the modern Aeneid.” Apollinaire believed that though all social classes enjoyed the series, there were “only a few bon esprits who appreciated the series with the same good taste as himself.” 50

  Fantômas’s popularity may have been galling to the real-life members of the Sûreté. The truth was that in Paris, the forces of law were regarded with distrust. Since the time of Napoleon, one of the chief duties of the police had been to spy on the populace. Through all of the changes in government that had taken place since then, the laws of the Napoleonic Code had not been repealed, and indeed a host of new criminal regulations had been passed. This left such a patchwork of a legal system that the police could find almost any reason to investigate or detain a person. Moreover, because the police files had been destroyed during the Commune, the authorities had rushed to build up new dossiers, compiling information on as many people as they could. Often the accusations in these hastily assembled files, gleaned from sources as diverse as professional informers or disgruntled neighbors, were utterly untrue.

  Bertillon, despite his faults, was one of a number of people who were trying to bring a new spirit of scientific investigation to crime solving, a process that had been going on in France ever since the Sûreté had been founded nearly a century before. Joining him were social scientists and psychologists who investigated the roots and causes of crime, arguing whether people were innately criminal or not — and if not, what drove them to crime.

  Bertillon’s search for the Mona Lisa would bring him into the world of avant-garde artists in Montmartre, where Picasso was engaged in his own investigation of what was real and what was illusory. From the day he first arrived in Paris, the young artist knew the city, with its glitter and grit, its gaiety and gloom, was to be his inspiration. His canvases often portrayed people who existed in the demimonde between respectability and illegality, just as he experienced in the city around him. His most famous painting of this period shows five prostitutes whose expressions are as challenging in their way as the Mona Lisa’s famous smile. To create it, Picasso had to break the boundaries of his art, something only a genius could do. To solve the theft of the Mona Lisa, Bertillon would have to do that in his own field, and ultimately he would fail.

  2

  SEARCHING FOR A WOMAN

  The disappearance of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre stunned Parisians, who had long dismissed any impossible task with the remark that doing so “would be like trying to steal the Mona Lisa.” 1 The theft was, however, a blessing for the city’s newspapers and magazines, which had prospered during the Third Republic. As the government ended its censorship policies, the circulation of Paris’s newspapers had nearly tripled what it had been in 1880. Nothing sold papers as well as crime stories, and this one was unparalleled for its sensational qualities. For days, headline writers competed for the mot juste to describe the Mona Lisa theft, struggling for a word to adequately express the shock: “INIMAGINABLE!” “INEXPLICABLE!” “INCROYABLE!” “EFFARANT!”2 A newspaper printed a doctored photo of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame with one tower missing. The caption read, “Couldn’t this happen too?” 3 For Parisians, who loved both crime and art, it was an all-consuming event.

  It was personal too. Le Figaro’s editor wrote, “Since it has disappeared, perhaps forever, one must speak of this familiar face, whose memory will pursue us, filling us with regret in the same way that we speak of a person who died in a stupid accident and for whom one must write an obituary.” 4 Less seriously, the Revue des Deux Mondes wrote that the meaning of the famous smile was now clear: Mona Lisa had been thinking of the fuss her disappearance would create. Outside the Louvre, vendors sold postcards on this theme, with cartoon images of the woman in the painting “escaping” from the museum, often with a taunt at her “captors,” the guards.

  Someone who signed himself or herself as “Mona Lisa” expanded on this idea, writing a letter to L’Autorité that explained she had “divorced” the museum because she didn’t like the way she was talked about: “They’ve bored me stiff with this ‘famous smile!’… You do not know women or you do not know them well. If I smiled with an ‘enigmatic’ air it was certainly not for the ridiculous reasons attributed to me by the gentlemen of the literature.… This smile marked my lassitude, my scorn for all the skunks who paraded endlessly before me, and my infinite desire to carry out my abduction.

  “I said to myself: what a face those officials will make when tomorrow the news will spread through all of Paris: La Joconde5 has spent the night elsewhere!” 6

  i

  Since there were few real developments in the case, reporters were free to print rumors and sheer speculation about who had perpetrated the crime. All that restrained them were the limits of their imaginations. Among the more creative guesses was that of the Paris-Journal, which reported that a professional clairvoyant, Mme. Albane de Siva, after “ascertaining at the Central Astronomical Office the position of the planets at the time of the theft,” deduced that
the picture was still hidden somewhere in the Louvre, and that the thief was “a young man with thick hair, a long neck and a hoarse voice, who had a passion for rejuvenating old things.” 7

  Meanwhile, right-wing and monarchist publications alleged that the theft was only the latest manifestation of a crime wave that revealed “the extraordinary state of anarchy” 8 that characterized the government of the Third Republic, which, not by coincidence, was at that time led by Premier Joseph Caillaux, a member of the Radical-Socialist Party. The fact that Caillaux was currently negotiating with Germany over the two countries’ rival claims in Morocco led to a darker accusation: that the Germans had taken the painting and were holding it hostage to secure favorable terms in the final settlement. On the other hand, there were also some who saw the theft as “a political plot to injure the prestige of the Republic and murmur that the [supporters of the monarchy] could say if they would, where the Joconde is.” 9

  In the days immediately following the theft, anyone carrying a package received attention. Two German artists, suspicious apparently because they were German and possessed paints and brushes, were reported to the police and questioned. A man running for a train — the 7:47 express for Bordeaux — while carrying a package covered by a horse blanket caused police to telephone the stationmaster at Bordeaux, asking him to search the train. When a shabbily dressed man approached an antiques dealer offering to sell a portrait of a “noblewoman,” the dealer informed the police.

  The investigation soon spread its net over a wider area. Checkpoints on roads leading out of the capital examined the contents of every wagon, automobile, and truck. Fearing that the thief must be trying to leave the country, customs inspectors opened and examined the baggage of everyone departing on ships or trains. Then, ships that had left during the day that had passed between the theft and its discovery were identified and searched when they reached overseas ports. In New York City, detectives swarmed aboard the German liner Kaiser Wilhelm II after it docked, and combed every stateroom and piece of luggage for the masterpiece.

  Some thought the whole thing was a hoax, recalling that the satirical journal Le Cri de Paris had thrown the city into a panic the previous year by reporting that the Mona Lisa on view in the Louvre was a copy, hung there to hide the fact that the original had been stolen. That had proved to be the editor’s idea of a joke, but now people wondered if there had been some truth to the report, and whether this latest, actual disappearance would be covered up by the return of a “real” Mona Lisa. Not to be outdone, the editors of Le Cri de Paris now declared that the painting that had been stolen on August 21 was itself only a copy and that the genuine work was in the New York mansion of a millionaire identified as “J.K.W.W.” 10

  “What audacious criminal, what mystifier, what maniac collector, what insane lover, has committed this abduction?” asked L’Illustration, which offered a reward of 40,000 francs 11 to anyone who would deliver the painting to its office, presumably so that it could gain the publicity of solving the case. 12 Soon the rival newspaper Paris-Journal offered 50,000 francs, and a bidding war was on, certain to attract dozens of people who wished only to collect the reward — or to attract attention to themselves. A waiter named Armand Gueneschan stepped forward, claiming to know where the painting was hidden. Supposedly it was in the hands of a rich nobleman who had financed the theft because he was obsessed with the image (not the last time this was suggested as a motive for the crime). Gueneschan offered to reveal the man’s name for 200,000 francs. However, after the police questioned the waiter, they concluded that he was either a liar or deranged.

  ii

  Premier Caillaux, recognizing the importance of the theft to the nation, appointed a well-known jurist, Henri Drioux, as juge d’instruction (examining magistrate) to conduct an official inquiry. Louis Lépine, prefect of the Paris police, Octave Hamard, head of the Sûreté, and Alphonse Bertillon had already inspected the scene of the theft and turned up a few clues, finding the discarded case and frame in the stairwell. Le Petit Parisien sarcastically reported “Mona Lisa Stolen.… We still have the frame,” 13 but on the glass of the protective case, Bertillon found a fingerprint. A few years earlier, he had been credited with being the first criminologist to solve a case by using fingerprint evidence, and some thought this latest discovery signaled the imminent arrest of the culprit. Unfortunately, Bertillon’s files, comprising three-quarters of a million individual cards, were indexed under his own physical identification system and not according to fingerprint type. The only way to determine the owner of this incriminating fingerprint was to find the person who had left it there. Bertillon and his staff painstakingly began to collect the prints of every employee of the museum, 257 in all.

  There was good reason to think that the theft was an inside job. That was certainly the personal view of France’s undersecretary of state of beaux-arts, Étienne Dujardin-Beaumetz. He had just finished a months-long struggle with museum employees who wanted to unionize — a battle that the employees had lost. The undersecretary thought a malcontented employee had taken the picture as an act of “personal vengeance” and predicted that “one day they’ll find the Mona Lisa hidden in some attic of the Louvre.” 14

  Dujardin-Beaumetz was involved in another controversy that would for a time promise to throw light on the theft. The Department of Beaux-Arts had announced earlier in 1911 that it would allow a road to be built through the Saint-Cloud Park on the western outskirts of Paris, a move that people who lived around the park charged would destroy the natural beauty of the area. Protesters had demonstrated against the roadway throughout the summer of 1911. After the theft of the Mona Lisa, a handwritten note fell into the hands of the police. It declared that the painting was being held hostage to protect the park. It read, in part, “The Mona Lisa is well hidden in the house of the head stableman at the Parc de Saint-Cloud, where she was placed the very evening of her removal by the head gardener, who got it from one of the attendants of the museum. No use in looking elsewhere; she will be given back only if the park is left in its current state.” 15

  The police searched the stableman’s house, as well as other locations in the park. They even explored the possibility that the spokesperson for a preservationist group had written the phony ransom note to give publicity to the efforts to preserve the park. If so, he succeeded, for an investigation revealed that Dujardin-Beaumetz had lied about the amount of damage the road would cause to the trees in the park. Months later, the pressure became too much for Dujardin-Beaumetz to endure, and he resigned his post.

  Besides losing a masterpiece, the Louvre itself had suffered a great loss of pride. Paris-Journal ran the text of a sign that its editors suggested should be posted in the museum:

  * * *

  In the Interest of Art

  And for the Safeguarding of the Precious Objects

  THE PUBLIC

  Is Requested to be Good Enough to

  WAKE THE GUARDS

  If they are found to be asleep.16

  * * *

  The day after the theft was announced, an article by Guillaume Apollinaire appeared in the evening newspaper L’Intransigeant. The poet and critic, after assessing the painting’s importance as art, criticized the museum’s security:

  There is not even one guard per gallery; the small pictures in the Dutch rooms running along the Rubens gallery are literally abandoned to thieves.

  The pictures, even the smallest, are not padlocked to the wall, as they are in most museums abroad. Furthermore, it is a fact that the guards have never been drilled in how to rescue pictures in case of a fire.

  The situation is one of carelessness, negligence, indifference.

  The Louvre is less well protected than a Spanish museum. 17

  That last statement was a low blow indeed, although it would soon become clear to the authorities that Apollinaire knew far more about the Louvre’s security arrangements than he let on.

  There were numerous false trails and hoaxes in con
nection with the case. A fourteen-year-old prostitute, Germaine Terclavers, already in custody, startled the police by claiming that her pimp and his gang had stolen the painting and that it was stored in Belleville, the apaches’ home base. She claimed that she had seen the painting herself and that the gang planned to ship it to the United States on an ocean liner.

  Germaine had recently been arrested and sentenced by a judge to four years in a reform school, and she hoped to get a pardon by revealing what she knew. The police were able to find her nineteen-year-old boyfriend and pimp, named Georges. They placed him under arrest for carrying an illegal weapon — an all-purpose charge that the police routinely used to take into custody almost anyone they suspected of larger crimes. Georges turned out to be a feared gang leader, but whether he was skillful enough to carry off the Mona Lisa theft remained in doubt.

  When questioned, Germaine provided more details, naming other gang members who she said had planned the crime for weeks. She had overheard them talking about a gardien (museum attendant), the Louvre, and La Joconde. According to her, she was even asked to serve as a lookout but turned the offer down. As she expanded her story, the police became more interested. She claimed that Georges had not come home the night before the Monday morning of the heist; when he returned late on Monday, he refused to say where he had been. Later, he bragged that he and his gang had committed a crime that had turned the city upside down.

  “I remember,” Germaine said of her boyfriend, “that each day he read Le Journal, anxiously following developments in the investigation and constantly telling me that the gang ‘were going to get pinched.’ ” 18 Her denunciations were never corroborated, and the police could not tell whether Georges was simply trying to impress her or if there was some truth in the tale. In any event, Georges enlisted in the army to escape the charge of illegal gun possession, and Germaine was sent off to reform school, never again to receive as much attention as she had gained from her accusation.