The Crimes of Paris
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It can be argued that all detective fiction owes something to Vidocq. Certainly his outsize persona intrigued some of France’s greatest and most popular writers, among them Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Eugène Sue. Balzac used the character Vautrin, modeled after Vidocq, in several books of his massive sequence of novels, La comédie humaine. At one point, Vautrin explains crime and the world:
It is a strange mud pit.… If you get that dirt on you while you’re driving around in a carriage, you’re a very respectable fellow, but if it spatters all over you while you slog along on foot, then you’re a good-for-nothing rogue. Make the mistake of grabbing anything out of the mud, no matter how insignificant, and they’ll pillory you in the courts of law. But steal millions, and they’ll point you out as a hero, in the very best houses. That’s an ethical system you pay the cops and the judges thirty million a year to keep in good working order. It’s just great! 18 Vautrin also offers Balzac’s famous observation on wealth: “The secret of all great fortunes… is always some forgotten crime — forgotten, mind you, because it’s been properly handled.” 19
Victor Hugo, author of what has proved to be the most durable of nineteenth-century French novels, Les misérables, also knew Vidocq personally and is said to have modeled both of the main characters of his great book after Vidocq: Inspector Javert, the relentless policeman, and his quarry the ex-convict Jean Valjean represented the two sides of Vidocq’s nature and career.
The works of these authors were best sellers among a new class of reader that had developed along with the growth of literacy in nineteenth-century France. As the reading public grew, mass-circulation newspapers and journals sprang up to fulfill the demand for news, commentary, and popular literature. Newspapers printed sensational stories of crime and scandal, called faits divers; to improve their tales, authors of faits divers wrote in a style more usual for fiction than for journalism. Henry de Roure, a journalist of the Belle Époque, wrote that the reader sitting down to read a fait divers “licks his chops. Believes himself to experience one by one — and with what transports of joy! — the emotions of an unfortunate woman attacked at night and cut into pieces with successive blows of a sword; then, in trying to enter into the character of the assassin, he tastes the incomparable psychological pleasures which [the reader], as a practical man, has never experienced directly.” 20
Seeing the popularity of such lively journalism, the newspaper publisher Émile de Girardin decided to publish fiction outright and developed the feuilleton, or serial. In 1836, the first issue of his La Presse contained the premier installment of an exciting novel with the promise of additional chapters to come. The French public took to the feuilletons with such enthusiasm that they became virtually obligatory for any newspaper trying to increase its circulation. Major authors’ works often appeared first in this format and were afterward released in book form. Perhaps the most popular of the romans feuilletons, or serial novels, was Eugène Sue’s Les mystères de Paris, which tripled the circulation of Le Journal des Débats, where it appeared between 1842 and 1843. The author received an offer of 100,000 francs for his next serial even before a word was written, a fantastic figure for the day, making Sue one of the highest-paid authors in France.
Faits divers and feuilletons were new only in format, for people had written stories about crimes since ancient times. The truly innovative literary genre of the nineteenth century was the detective story, in which the crime is only a prelude. Detective stories appealed to a more sophisticated public by presenting a puzzle that the reader seeks to solve before, or at least along with, the detective-hero.
The first modern detective story, in which the central character’s importance lies in his ability to detect, was written by an American, Edgar Allan Poe. He was inspired by Vidocq’s Memoirs to create the sleuth C. Auguste Dupin, who first appeared in the story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841. 21 Poe set the tale in Paris and even included a reference to Vidocq. The character Dupin, portrayed as a man of culture and scientific learning, remarks, “Vidocq was a good guesser and a persevering man. But without educated thought, he erred continually.” 22
Poe’s detective stories were written before many American cities had any kind of organized police force and before London’s Scotland Yard had been established. Indeed, the very word detective did not appear until two years after the publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” when Sir James Graham, the British home secretary, formed a special group of officers called the Detective Police. Poe himself called his stories “tales of ratiocination.” 23
Poe had scientific interests as well as literary ones. Indeed, the very same issue of the magazine that published “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” also contained an article by Poe on photography, which had just been invented by two Frenchmen, Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre. And Poe’s detective was a particularly modern hero, one who used his mental faculties to resolve the crisis — the mystery — he faced. He might carry a weapon, but his true power came from his intellect and a rigorous scientific mind-set.
That was not the only precedent set by Poe. As the critic Julian Symons notes about him: “He… established the convention by which the brilliant intelligence of the detective is made to shine more brightly through the comparative obtuseness of his friend who tells the stories.” 24 This obtuse friend — not an outright bumbler, but someone unable to come close to the detective in terms of deductive brilliance — became another standard of the genre, most notably, of course, with Dr. John Watson, the foil to Sherlock Holmes. Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, acknowledged his debt to Poe, slyly having Watson remark to Holmes, “You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin.” And Conan Doyle would write frankly in Through the Magic Door: “Poe is to my mind, the supreme, the original short-story writer of all time.” 25
Though Poe’s stories were set in a Paris that didn’t exist, they were soon translated into French. In November 1845, the Revue Britannique published a translation of “The Gold Bug,” but it was not until the following year, when the Parisian newspaper La Quotidienne published a loose three-part translation of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” that the French public discovered Poe. The translator changed the name of the street to the rue de l’Ouest (because there is no rue Morgue) and ramped up the gory details for audiences that were accustomed to feuilletons. The story — in which two women are brutally murdered by an escaped orangutan — caused a stir, and essays on Poe began to appear in respected publications such as the Revue des Deux Mondes. More translated stories of his followed.
The great French poet Charles Baudelaire was amazed by Poe, saying that he “experienced a strange commotion” on first reading him. 26 Searching through American magazines for more, and finding stories that he himself had “thought vaguely and confusedly” of writing, 27 Baudelaire became a devotee of the American author. In 1852, he published translations of Poe’s tales along with commentaries that increased Poe’s literary reputation in France, where he became better known than in his native land. The French particularly responded to Poe’s Gothic elements, the dark side of the psyche that Poe would write of as “the blackness of darkness.” 28 Baudelaire, learning of Poe’s mysterious death in Baltimore in 1849, investigated the circumstances and declared, “This death was almost a suicide — a suicide prepared for a long time.” 29
France’s fascination with Poe did not stop in the 1850s. Pioneers of modernism — among them the symbolist poets Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud — found inspiration in Poe’s works. So did the composer Claude Debussy, who was working on an opera based on Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” when he died. Debussy wrote to a friend, “I have recently been living in the House of Usher which is not exactly the place where one can look after one’s nerves — just the opposite. One develops the curious habit of listening to the stones as if they were in conversation with each other and expecting houses to crumble to pieces a
s if this were not only natural but inevitable.… I have no confidence in the normal, well-balanced type of persons.” 30
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It was not long before Poe inspired French imitators. The first great French fictional detective (not counting Vidocq’s inventions) was Monsieur Lecoq, who initially appeared in 1865, the creation of Émile Gaboriau. In his name, personal vanity, and frightening reputation, Lecoq echoed Vidocq. Moreover, Lecoq had also been a crook before becoming a detective. His methods, however, came from Dupin: the young Gaboriau had read Baudelaire’s translation of Poe.
Gaboriau was the son of a public official in the provinces who wished for his son to become a lawyer. Rebellious, the young man joined the army and then came to Paris to be a writer. He began as a ghost writer for Paul Féval, a newspaper editor, dramatist, and author of criminal romances for feuilletons. To do research, Gaboriau attended trials, visited prisons, and even roamed the morgues. He was fascinated by the details of police work, the operations of the Sûreté, and the duties of juges d’instruction (investigating magistrates) — ironically finding a certain fulfillment in the profession his father had urged him to follow.
Gaboriau had a large collection of police memoirs and literature on police work. As a result, his detectives, including Lecoq, are very realistically portrayed; for this reason, Gaboriau is regarded as the father of the modern police procedural and, for some, as the inventor of the modern detective novel (for Poe wrote no novels, only short stories). Like Poe, Gaboriau used the science of his time — the chemistry of poisons, photography, and the telegraph. Equally influential was his stress on the importance of logic, the “calculus of possibilities,” 31 in solving the crime.
Lecoq first appeared in 1865 in a feuilleton, which was published the following year in book form under the title L’affaire Lerouge. Lecoq is initially described as a former criminal, now a young member of the Sûreté, whose mentor, a bedridden old man nicknamed Tirauclair (“bringer of light”) helps him solve a case. In this first book, Lecoq has already become a master of disguise. Though handsome, with thick black hair and “bold piercing eyes,” 32 he passes himself off as an official by donning a stiff cravat, gold spectacles, and a wig. Like Dupin, Lecoq is an educated man, who earlier in life had been employed by Baron Moser, an astronomer. (In his spare time he solved complicated astronomical problems.) The baron warned the young Lecoq: “When one has your disposition, and is poor, one will either become a famous thief or a great detective. Choose.” 33
L’affaire Lerouge sold well, and Gaboriau produced three more novels in 1867, all with Lecoq as the central character. (In the later works, the author no longer referred to him as a former criminal.) Before Sherlock Holmes appeared, Lecoq was already a master of deduction. In Le crime d’Orcival he states, “The inquest of a crime is nothing more nor less than the solution of a problem. Given the crime… you commence by seeking out all the circumstances, whether serious or superficial; the details and the particulars. When these have been carefully gathered, you classify them, and put them in their order and date. You thus know the victim, the crime and the circumstances; it remains to find the third term of the problem, that is X, the unknown quantity — the guilty party. The task is a difficult one, but not so difficult as is first imagined.” 34 This effort to classify and hypothesize revealed the scientific mind-set that characterized the new detective. Gaboriau’s description of Lecoq’s quarters made this intellectual bent unmistakable: “On the other side of the room was a bookcase full of scientific works, especially of medicines and chemistry.” 35
Unlike Dupin, Lecoq is not just an armchair detective. He actively pursues clues and personally confronts suspects and villains. Gaboriau’s novels include interesting descriptions of Parisian life, as his detective tracks criminals to their locales, revealing their social and family life, sexuality, and politics. Many of his villains are aristocrats gone wrong, frequently big-time financial swindlers, who are particularly frightening because their self-confidence, knowledge, and connections make them more difficult to catch. The police, on the other hand, are sometimes unscrupulous in their methods — as they were in real life. Reflecting Gaboriau’s (and Parisians’) cynicism about the police, he portrays plainclothes detectives provoking fights with criminals whom they cannot arrest on legal grounds in order to charge them with assault and hold them in jail while they look for evidence of more serious charges.
Gaboriau’s fiction looked toward the later achievements of Bertillon. He described the difficulty of identifying criminals, a problem that the real-life criminologist was later to solve. In Monsieur Lecoq (1869), Gaboriau wrote:
Railroads, photography, and telegraphic communication have multiplied the means of identification in vain. Every day it happens that malefactors succeed in deceiving the judge in regard to their true personality, and thus escape the consequences of their former crimes.
This is so frequently the case that a witty attorney-general once laughingly remarked — and, perhaps, he was only half in jest: “This uncertainty in regard to identity will cease only on the day when the law prescribes that a number shall be branded upon the shoulder of every child whose birth is reported to the mayor.” 36
This sort of interplay between fiction and reality was characteristic of much of detective fiction. The fiction writers were inspired by the latest in crime techniques, while real criminologists got ideas from fiction, as one of Bertillon’s contemporaries, Edmond Locard, was to admit.
It was also common for one fictional detective to compare or contrast himself with another. In A Study in Scarlet (1887), Dr. Watson asks Sherlock Holmes, “Have you read Gaboriau’s works? Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?”
Holmes “sniffed sardonically” at the idea. “Lecoq was a miserable bungler,” he says angrily. “He had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be made a text-book for detectives to teach them what to avoid.” 37
That was rather uncharitable of Holmes, for many commentators feel that the progression of Vidocq to Lecoq to Sherlock indicated the literary debt incurred by Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle, like Poe, wanted to portray his fictional sleuth as a scientific detective. An ophthalmologist, Conan Doyle had criticized Edgar Allan Poe for using what Conan Doyle termed the “illusion” of the scientific method, and he believed that he could succeed where Poe had failed. By the 1880s and 1890s, when Conan Doyle wrote his classic Holmes stories, real-life detectives were beginning to use technologies and practices borrowed from their peers in the fields of chemistry, biology, and physics. As Sherlock Holmes tells Watson: “Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. To tinge it with romanticism produces much of the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.” 38
Watson, the narrator of Conan Doyle’s stories, provides a convenient foil to whom Holmes can explain his reasoning, since the reader, unassisted, can no longer be expected to follow the detective in solving the case. That was true of science as well. By the end of the nineteenth century, science was sufficiently complex to be well beyond the knowledge of the ordinary educated person. The inner workings of the world, it turned out, were their own encoded mystery. The critic J. K. Van Dover observed, “The detective, who claims to speak the language of the thinking scientist yet who acts morally in the sphere of the common man, offers an imaginative bridge between the two worlds of the scientist and the layman.” 39
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“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.