April 24, 1933. A young married couple commits suicide for no apparent reason.
It’s a very strange story that occurred that night in the building at number 26 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, near the Pantheon, in the home of Mr. and Mme T.
Three years earlier, Monsieur Urbain T., a young engineer, top in his class, had married Mademoiselle Gisèle S., age twenty-six, one year his senior. Mme T. was a pretty blonde, tall and svelte. As for her husband, he was the typical dark and handsome young man. The previous July, the couple had set up house on the ground floor of 26 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, in a former workshop that they had converted into a studio apartment. The young newlyweds were very close. Nothing seemed to be clouding their happiness.
One Saturday evening, Urbain T. decided to take his wife out to dinner. They both left the house at around seven. They wouldn’t return home until about two in the morning, along with two couples they’d just met. The unusual din from their apartment woke the neighbors, unaccustomed to such a racket from tenants who were ordinarily so quiet. No doubt the party took a few unexpected turns.
At around four in the morning, the guests departed. During the half-hour that then passed in silence, two muffled explosions sounded. At nine o’clock, a neighbor, leaving her own apartment, passed in front of the couple’s door. She heard moaning. Suddenly remembering the shots heard in the night, she grew worried and knocked. The door opened to reveal Gisèle T. Blood was slowly leaking from a visible wound beneath her left breast. She murmured, “My husband! My husband! Dead.” A few moments later, Detective Magnan of the local police appeared on the scene. Gisèle T. was moaning, lying on the couch. In the next room, they discovered the body of her husband. The latter was still clutching a revolver in his hand. He had shot a bullet straight through his heart.
Beside him, a scribbled note: My wife killed self. We were drunk. I kill self. Don’t try …
From the police report, it appears that Urbain and Gisèle T., after their dinner out, found their way to a bar in Montparnasse. The other evening, from Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, I walked to the intersection where the Dôme and the Rotonde stand, after leaving behind the dark gardens of the Observatoire. The T.’s must have followed the same path, that night in 1933. I was surprised to find myself in a place I’d avoided since the early sixties. Like the Studio des Ursulines, the Montparnasse neighborhood always reminded me of Sleeping Beauty’s castle. I had felt the same thing at age twenty, when I spent a few nights in a hotel on Rue Delambre: Montparnasse already seemed like a quarter that had outlived itself and was slowly decaying, far from Paris. When it rained on Rue d’Odessa or Rue du Départ, I felt as if I were in a Breton port in the drizzle. The old train station, which hadn’t yet been demolished, exhaled gusts of Brest or Lorient. Here, the party had long been over. I remember that the sign for the long-vanished Jimmy’s was still clinging to the wall on Rue Huyghens, and that it was missing two or three letters which the sea breezes had blown away.
It was the first time—according to the newspapers in April 1933—that the young couple had set foot in a Montparnasse nightspot. Had they had a bit too much to drink with dinner? Or else, quite simply, had they felt like disrupting, if only for a night, the tranquil course of their lives? One witness swore he’d seen them at around ten o’clock in the Café de la Marine, a dance hall at 243 Boulevard Raspail; another, at the Cabaret des Isles on Rue Vavin, in the company of two women. The detectives showed their photos around to solicit statements, which had to be taken with a grain of salt, since one saw plenty of blonde girls with dark-haired boys, like Urbain and Gisèle T. For several days they tried to identify the two couples that the T.’s had brought home with them to Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, then the investigation was closed. Gisèle T. had been able to talk before succumbing to her injuries, but her memories were hazy. Yes, they had met two women in Montparnasse, two strangers she didn’t know much about … And those two had taken them out to Le Perreux, to a dance hall where two men had joined them. Then they’d gone to a house with a red elevator.
This evening, I’m following in their footsteps in a sullen quarter that the Tour Montparnasse veils in mourning. During the day, it hides the sun and throws its shadow onto Boulevard Edgar-Quinet and the surrounding streets. I leave behind me the Coupole, which they’re smothering under a concrete façade. It’s hard to believe that Montparnasse used to have any nightlife …
In what period, exactly, did I live in that hotel on Rue Delambre? Around 1965, when I met Jacqueline, not long before my departure for Vienna.
The room next to mine was occupied by a man of about thirty-five, a blond fellow I’d sometimes meet in the hall and who I ended up getting to know. His name? Something like Devez or Duvelz.
He was always nattily dressed and wore an official decoration on his lapel. Sometimes he invited me out for a drink, at a bar right near the hotel, the Rosebud. I didn’t dare refuse. He seemed enchanted with the place.
“It’s very pleasant here …”
He spoke from the tip of his teeth, with the voice of a well-heeled scion. He confided to me that he’d spent more than three years “in the djebel” and that he’d earned his decoration over there. But the Algerian War had sickened him. He’d needed a long time to get over it. Very soon he was going to take over for his father as head of a large textile concern in the North.
It didn’t take me long to realize he wasn’t telling the whole truth: about that “large textile concern,” he remained vague. And he contradicted himself, telling me one day that he’d graduated from Saint-Maixent, just before his departure for Algeria, then the next day that he’d done all his schooling in England. Sometimes his plummy dental accent yielded to a street hawker’s patter.
It was only because I was walking in Montparnasse that Sunday evening that Duvelz—or Devez—suddenly reemerged from the void. I remembered that one day, we had run into each other on Rue de Rennes, and he had invited me for a stein of beer, as he said, at one of those dismal cafés in Place Saint-Placide.
The Cabaret des Isles on Rue Vavin, where the couple had allegedly been spotted, occupied the basement of Les Vikings. The Scandinavian ambiance and light-colored wood of Les Vikings clashed with the Negro cabaret. You just had to go downstairs: from the Norwegian cocktails and hors-d’oeuvres of the ground floor, you were plunged into the frenzy of Martinican dances. Is that where the T.’s met the two women? I suspect it was instead at the Café de la Marine on Boulevard Raspail, near Denfert-Rochereau. I remember the apartment where Duvelz had dragged Jacqueline and me, at one end of that same Boulevard Raspail. I hadn’t dared refuse his invitation that time, either. For nearly a week, he had insisted that the two of us come on Saturday evening to visit a woman friend of his that he absolutely wanted us to meet.
She opened the door and, in the half-light of the vestibule, I couldn’t quite make out her face. I was struck by the opulence of the large living room we entered, so out of character with Duvelz’s small hotel room on Rue Delambre. He was there. He introduced us. I’ve forgotten her name: a brunette with regular features. One of her cheeks bore a large scar, near the cheekbone.
Jacqueline and I were sitting on the sofa. Duvelz and the woman, on armchairs, facing us. She must have been about Duvelz’s age: thirty-five. She looked at us with curiosity.
“Don’t you find the two of them charming?” said Duvelz in his dental accent.
She stared fixedly at us. She asked:
“Would you like something to drink?”
Things felt awkward. She served some port.
Duvelz took a large sip.
“Relax,” he said. “She’s an old friend …”
She gave us a shy smile.
“We were even engaged once. But she had to marry someone else …”
She didn’t react. She sat very straight in her chair, her glass in her hand.
“Her husband is often away. We can take advantage to go out, just the four of us. What do you say?”
“Go out where?” asked Jacqueline.
“Wherever you like. Or we don’t have to go out at all.”
He shrugged.
“We’re perfectly comfortable here … No?”
She still sat very stiffly in her chair. She lit a cigarette, perhaps to hide her nervousness. Duvelz swallowed another gulp of port. He put his glass down on the coffee table. He stood up and walked over to her.
“She’s pretty, don’t you think?”
He ran his index finger over the scar on her cheek. Then he undid her blouse and began fondling her breasts. She didn’t react.
“We were in a very serious car accident together, back in the day,” he said.
She pushed his hand away gruffly. She smiled at us again.
“You must be hungry …”
She had a husky voice and, I thought, a slight accent.
“Will you help me bring dinner in?” she asked him curtly.
“Of course.”
The two of them got up.
“It’s a cold supper,” she said. “Will that be all right?”
“That’s perfect,” said Jacqueline.
He had taken the woman by the shoulder and steered her out of the living room. He stuck his head through the doorway.
“You like champagne?”
He had lost his dental accent.
“Very much,” said Jacqueline.
“Be right back.”
We sat alone in the living room for a few minutes, and I’m racking my brains to remember as many details as I can. The French windows looking out on the boulevard were half-open because of the heat. It was at 19 Boulevard Raspail. In 1965. A grand piano at the very back of the room. The sofa and the two armchairs were made of the same black leather. The coffee table of chrome-plated metal. A name like Devez or Duvelz. The scar on the cheek. The unbuttoned blouse. A very bright light, as if from a projector, or rather a flashlight. It lights only a portion of the scene, an isolated instant, leaving the rest in shadow. We will never know what happened next or who those two people really were.
We slipped out of the living room and, without shutting the door behind us, crept down the stairs. Earlier, we had taken the elevator, but it wasn’t red like the one mentioned by Gisèle T.
A statement by a waiter who worked in a restaurant-nightclub in Le Perreux figures on the front page of an evening paper in that month of April 1933. The headline is as follows:
POLICE SEARCHING FOR TWO COUPLES
WHO SPENT EVENING IN APARTMENT
OF YOUNG CHEMIST AND HIS WIFE
At police headquarters in the Val-de-Grâce precinct, though the investigation has been called off because it was ruled a double suicide, they tell us that the young couple had gone not only to Montparnasse but also to the banks of the Marne, to Le Perreux; and that they went not just with two women but with two women and two men… . Attempts to locate these four individuals have so far been in vain.
We went to Le Perreux in hopes of gleaning a few important details on the moments preceding the tragedy.
In a “restaurant-nightclub” on the Quai de l’Artois, they clearly remember the presence of the two young persons.
“They arrived at around ten,” states the waiter who served them. “They were alone. She was very pretty, blonde, very slim … They were sitting over there, under the balcony. Is that where they met the people they invited home? I didn’t notice. We get a lot of traffic on Saturday nights at that time of year. They didn’t seem to be having an especially good time. In any case, I remember they settled their check at eleven-thirty.”
It is hard to take this testimony at face value, as it presupposes that the T.’s had gone to Le Perreux alone, and of their own accord. But everything we know about their life in the quiet neighborhood around Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques suggests that they were not the type to frequent dance halls on the banks of the Marne on Saturday nights. No, it was certainly the two unknown women, met in Montparnasse, who took them to Le Perreux that night, as Gisèle T. had herself indicated. And one has to wonder why the waiter made such a statement. Did he confuse them with other customers? More likely, he was trying to steer the investigators away from the people in whose company he had seen the T.’s, two women and two men, no doubt regulars of the establishment. The two women from Montparnasse knew the two men. But where—asked the newspaper article—was the house with the red elevator that Gisèle T. had spoken of?
Leaving the Café de la Marine, the T.’s and the two unknown women might have taken a taxi. But no cab driver, the day after the tragedy, told investigators that he’d driven four fares to Le Perreux-sur-Marne. Nor had a single one come forward to say that he’d brought back several couples from Le Perreux to number 26 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques at around two in the morning.
In those days, one went from Paris to Nogent-sur-Marne and Le Perreux via the train station at Bastille or the Gare de l’Est. The trains leaving from Bastille followed the so-called Vincennes line, up to Verneuil-L’Etang. I knew that line even in the early sixties, before the RER replaced it and the Bastille train station was demolished to make way for the new Opera.
The tracks ran along the viaduct on Avenue Daumesnil, whose arches were populated with cafés, warehouses, and businesses. Why do I so often walk along this viaduct in my dreams? This is what one discovered under its arches, in the shade of the plane trees along the avenue:
L’Armanite Laboratory
Garage des Voûtes
Peyremorte
Corrado Casadei
Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes Dispensary
Dell’Aversano
La Régence, furniture maker
Les Marbres Français
Café Bosc
Alligator, Ghesquière and Co.
Sava Autos
Daumesnil Wireworks
Café Labatie
La Radieuse heating
Testas, nonferrous metals
Café-Tabac Valadier
One summer evening, at Café Bosc, just before my departure for Vienna, the tables were set out on the sidewalk. I couldn’t take my eyes off the lights of the Gare de Lyon, nearby …
The train stopped at Reuilly, then at Bel-Air. It exited Paris via the Porte Montempoivre. It passed by the Braille school and made a stop at Saint-Mandé station, near the lake. Then it was Vincennes, and the station at Nogent-sur-Marne, at the edge of the forest.
From Nogent station, they would have had to walk all the way up Grande Rue to the town of Le Perreux. Unless the two men came to pick them up in a car.
It seems more likely that when leaving the Café de la Marine with the two women, they headed down into the Raspail metro stop, a few yards away from the café.
The metro runs directly to the Gare de l’Est. There, they took the train on the Mulhouse line. When it left Paris, crossing the Canal Saint-Denis, one could see, from above, the slaughterhouses of La Villette. The train stopped in Pantin. Then it ran along the Canal de l’Ourcq. Noisy-le-Sec, Rosny-sous-Bois. They arrived at Le Perreux station. They stepped onto the platform and the train continued on its way, over the viaduct that crosses the Marne River. The two women took them to a restaurant-nightclub right nearby, on the Quai de l’Artois. They were now a group of six, including the two unknown men.
I remember the Quai de l’Artois, which began at the foot of the viaduct. Just opposite was the Ile des Loups. During the years 1964 and 1965, I went to that island: a certain Claude Bernard, to whom I’d sold a music box and several old books, had invited my girlfriend, Jacqueline, and me there several times. He lived in a kind of chalet, with bow windows and verandas. One afternoon, he photographed us on one of the verandas, to try out his new camera, and a few moments later he handed us the color image: it was the first time I’d ever seen a Polaroid.
This Claude Bernard was about forty years old and made his living as a dealer in secondhand goods: he owned warehouses, a stall at the Saint-Ouen flea market, and even a used bookstore on Avenue de Clichy, which is wher
e I’d first met him. After dinner, he drove Jacqueline and me back to Paris in a gray Jaguar. A few years later, I lost touch with him for good. His stall at the flea market and his bookstore on Avenue de Clichy had vanished into thin air. The phone number to his house on the Ile des Loups was “no longer in service.”
I’m thinking of him because of the Ile des Loups. In one of the articles about what the newspapers labeled “the tragic orgy,” they hinted that the police might have identified one of the unknown men that the T.’s and the two women had met in the restaurant-nightclub on the Quai de l’Artois: a resident of Le Perreux. As far as I’m concerned, he could only have lived on the Ile des Loups. And given the waiter’s dubious testimony, I wonder whether the T.’s and the two other couples even went to the restaurant-nightclub on the Quai de l’Artois that evening. It seems more likely that one of the men took them to the Ile des Loups, for that was where the house with the red elevator stood.
Today I’m trying to reconstruct the layout, but at the time when I went to visit Claude Bernard, I would never have imagined such a thing. Claude Bernard had not lived long in that large chalet decorated with verandas and bow windows. A wooden kiosk rose in the back of the garden.
Who had the previous owner been? A certain Jacques Henley? Henley’s photo figures in old film directories, with the caption “Speaks English and German without an accent.” A very British face: blond mustache, very pale eyes. His address is given as: Jacques Henley, “Les Raquettes,” Ile des Loups, Nogent-sur-Marne (Seine), Tremblay 12-00. But in the phone book, at the same telephone number, he is listed under the name E. J. Dothée. Among the other former inhabitants of the island that I was able to inventory:
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