The Devil in Montmartre: A Mystery in Fin de Siècle Paris

by Gary Inbinder

  Bernard turned his sad eyes toward the doctor. “I believe you do, Sir Henry. She’s the pretty little blonde we sketched at the Atelier.”

  The doctor stared blankly for a moment and then his eyes brightened. “Yes, of course, that was Mademoiselle uh—Mademoiselle Ménard. I saw Lautrec’s portrait of her at Joyant’s gallery. Well, let’s hope she turns up soon. By the way, here’s an odd coincidence. I’m treating another admirer of Mademoiselle Ménard and the portrait, an American artist, Marcia Brownlow. Do either of you know her?”

  “I do,” said Lautrec. “She and her rich companion were at the Moulin Rouge a few evenings ago. I thought they were going to make an offer for my painting, but I’ve heard nothing since.”

  “Oh, I see. I’m afraid Miss Brownlow is quite ill. Her friend, Miss Endicott, is making arrangements to return to America as soon as Miss Brownlow can travel, and I will accompany them to a sanatorium.”

  “I’m sorry, gentlemen, I don’t see what this has to do with Virginie. If you’ll excuse me.” With that curt declaration, Bernard got up and left the cabaret.

  Sir Henry watched Émile go out the door, then turned to Lautrec. “Poor fellow. I diagnose a case of Virginie on the brain. I suppose he’s sweet on her.”

  Lautrec muttered, “Perhaps.” He turned his attention to a slender man walking toward the piano. “You see the man who’s about to play?”

  Sir Henry screwed a monocle into his eye and gazed across the smoke-filled hall. “Yes; who is he?”

  “His name’s Satie; not bad, really. The crowd listens when he plays.”

  Lautrec abandoned Le Chat Noir in the early morning hours. He ventured into the rabbit’s warren of dark, narrow streets snaking up the hill. His button-hook tapping the cobblestones, the artist limped painfully up a murky, echoing brick cavern roofed over by a cloudy, moonless sky. Cats crouching in cubbyholes hissed and yowled as he passed. Gaslamps glowed, their feeble yellow flames lighting his way toward his favorite whorehouse. There the artist would drink, sketch, and joke with the girls, afterward engaging in a game of rumpy-pumpy until the sun rose, shining its light on the alabaster dome of Sacré-Cœur.

  Puffing with fatigue from the steep walk, Lautrec rested under a lamp and reached into his coat pocket for his cigarette case. Unable to locate the case, he muttered, “Damn,” then patted and rummaged round in his other pockets until he found a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches.

  Continuing up a flight of steps, the always perceptive artist failed to notice someone tailing him, a silent observer lurking in the shadows. As Lautrec approached the brothel, a powerful stench assaulted his nostrils. Staring ahead he noticed a familiar form, the oval iron tank of a sewage wagon parked beside a cesspit. The night soil collectors were pumping human waste, some of which had slopped over onto the pavement where it commingled with piles of horse dung and unswept rubbish. Lautrec cautiously skirted the work area and proceeded to the maison, where he rang for the madam.

  The proprietress, a feather-bedecked trull with flaming red hair, recognized the little gentleman and greeted him with a grin. But her smile soon turned to a comical grimace as she got a whiff of the street. Lifting a perfumed handkerchief to her nose, she urged, “Quickly, Monsieur, come in before my house fills with miasma.” Lautrec crossed the threshold, chuckling at the madam’s unscientific objection to the stench.

  The stalker watched from an unlit passageway between two houses across the street. As Lautrec entered the brothel, the stealthy observer made a mental note of the time and address.

  Nine years earlier, during the hot months of August and September, Paris experienced the Great Stink, a foul, putrid odor that pervaded the entire city. Many Parisians feared the “miasma,” which they believed was the source of typhoid and cholera. The bacteriologists, led by Pasteur, pointed to the microscopic source of the stench as the cause of epidemic diseases. There was a fuss in the press and the harried government formed a commission to study the matter, raising a debate about the sewer system and the methods of waste disposal. In the end, with cooler weather the stink disappeared, the feared epidemic never materialized, and the city’s methods of dealing with human excreta remained, for the most part, unchanged. In the early morning hours, hundreds of foul-smelling sewer wagons rumbled through the streets of Paris, cleaning out cesspools and cesspits and emptying waste receptacles in thousands of cellars.

  This night, the two night soil collectors finished pumping, closed the pipe, mounted their wagon and moved on. Dressed in their typical workers’ blouse and cap, incessantly puffing on clay pipes to mask the stench of their trade, the collectors bantered and cracked jokes to break the monotony. The older man managed the reins and the brake; their powerful gray horse strained against its leather traces, pulling the heavy load uphill. The young man connected the hose and worked the pneumatic pump at each stop.

  They were nearing the end of their run on the Rue Tourlaque. Soon, they would journey through the city to a central collection point on the Seine embankment, where the waste would be emptied into tanker barges for transport to a suburban sewage farm. The senior man, Papa Lebæuf, a burly fellow of fifty with a grizzled beard flowing halfway down his chest, halted the wagon. “All right Jacques, last call for this morning.”

  “Thank God,” the younger man said as he sprang from his perch onto the pavement. A wiry fellow with thick, brawny arms and powerful hands, Jacques un-reeled the rubber hose, connected the nozzle to a pipe, and returned to the wagon to work the pump. After a moment he growled, “Damn! It’s stuck; something must be clogging the pipe.”

  “Bloody hell!” cried Lebæuf. “That’s just our luck; trouble on the last damned job on our route. Well, I guess you better pull up the manhole cover and we’ll take a look.” He grabbed a long pole with a hook and held a lantern while Jacques tied a handkerchief over his face and opened the cesspool.

  As Lebæuf approached the open hole with his lantern, Jacques warned:

  “Hey, Papa, stand back with that lantern. There might be a gas leak.”

  “I know, dammit. I’ve been cleaning out shit-holes since before you were born.” He handed the pole to Jacques and stood back, shining the light into the cesspool.

  Jacques grabbed the implement and poked round the masonry-lined receptacle. “God, what a stink,” he muttered. Then: “Hey, Papa, I’ve got something. It looks like some bastard dumped a hunk of meat wrapped in a cloth.”

  Lebæuf snorted in disgust. “I’d like to make the damned fool clean out every shit-hole on this hill. Well, no use bitching about it. Go ahead and fish it out.”

  Jacques hauled up the smelly object and flung it onto the pavement where it landed with a thud. Papa turned the light on it. When they saw what it was their eyes widened. The younger man looked away, gagged, and retched.

  Papa Lebæuf was proud of his strong stomach, but the bloody thing they fished out of a Montmartre cesspool that morning would haunt his dreams for the remainder of his life.

  5

  OCTOBER 15

  THE INVESTIGATION

  Dawn crept over Paris. The Île de la Cité emerged from the shadows; the sun, an orange disc in a slate sky, shone its pale rays through a cloud bar onto the grimy gothic towers of Notre Dame. Nearby, on the south bank of the Seine, in an office building on the Quai des Orfèvres, Paul Féraud, Chief Inspector of the Sûreté, began his day with coffee, bread, and a mysterious police report.

  Mote-sprinkled light streamed through half-opened blinds; an oil lamp burned feebly on Féraud’s cluttered mahogany desk. The streets below were quiet; a good time for the chief to work and to think through a problem. He took advantage of this early hour to review new reports of unusual suspected homicides, his specialty. A thirty-year veteran, Féraud had risen through the ranks, learning his profession in the hard school of experience.

  The office was a study in organized confusion: files, dossiers, reference books, photographs, strewn about in an order known only to the chief. Among the paper
s littering his desktop stood a gleaming brass telephone, the aforementioned green-shaded lamp, a photograph of Féraud’s late wife in a black-crepe-decorated silver frame, and photographs of the Chief’s four adult children: three married daughters and a son in the military. In addition, there was a cigar box, a copper ashtray with an engraving of the Eiffel Tower, and a curiosity, a guillotine cigar cutter, a gift from the “old boys” on the force in recognition of their chief’s thirty years of public service.

  The drab gray-green painted walls were lined with dusty bookshelves and cabinets overflowing with paperwork, curios, and memorabilia. On the wall opposite the chief’s desk hung the Rogue’s Gallery, a grouping of photographic portraits of criminals brought to justice by Féraud, many mounted side by side with photographs of their guillotined heads posed on slabs in the Morgue.

  One particular file had just arrived and it occupied the chief that morning. It had, pursuant to his instructions, been marked “Urgent” and rushed to him by special courier. The file contained a police report concerning a female torso discovered in a Montmartre cesspit by a pair of night soil collectors. The sergeant on duty had immediately notified Féraud; that was at five A.M. (the time the chief arrived at his office each morning) and this too was according to instructions. Moreover, the police had erected a rope-line barricade and assigned a gendarme to guard the area, preventing the curious from contaminating the scene with their footprints, cigar and cigarette butts, and so forth.

  Paris was full of tourists, the closing ceremony of the Universal Exposition was only two weeks away, and the Whitechapel Murders of 1888 were fresh on everyone’s mind. Scotland Yard’s widely publicized failure in that case had placed all detectives and their methods under a dark cloud of popular mistrust. Any hint in the press that Jack the Ripper had crossed the channel could cause panic, not to mention embarrassment to the police and the government. Therefore, as a precautionary measure, a preliminary report of any suspected homicide resembling the Ripper’s modus operandi went directly to the Chief Inspector as a matter of the highest priority.

  The detailed description of the body disgusted Féraud and, as always, filled him with a sense of outrage. Though he had seen many horrific things in his years on the force, he always wondered what drove people to commit such crimes. Gruesome photographs would be taken at the scene and at the Morgue later that morning, before and after the autopsy. He scratched his short, graying beard. It could be a prank. He hoped that was the case, that some medical students or drunken riffraff had gotten hold of a cadaver and dumped it into the cesspit as a hoax. Paris was a world-renowned medical center, after all, and cadavers quite easy to come by. Stupid bastards, he muttered. But then, what if it wasn’t a hoax? He could not afford to take chances, to make a mistake that might cost other women their lives. A knock on the door interrupted the chief’s train of thought. It must be Achille. “Enter,” he growled.

  A tall, slender man of thirty entered the office and stood at attention before his chief. Inspector Achille Lefebvre was a new breed of detective, a graduate of the prestigious École Polytechnique, a fervent advocate for scientific methods of detection. Achille’s pale, clean-shaven face, near-sighted blue eyes aided by a gold-rimmed pince-nez, and stiff, soft-spoken manner made him seem an “odd fish” to the veterans. The old boys had nicknamed him the professor, but after five years on the force Achille had gained their grudging respect, not to mention what mattered most—the confidence of their chief.

  The chief smiled at the young man’s soldierly stiffness. “Relax, Achille; take a load off your feet. You’ve got plenty of legwork ahead of you, my boy.” Achille sat in a small armchair on the other side of the desk; Féraud handed over the file. After giving him a minute to scan the report, the chief continued: “You’re going up to Montmartre on the Morgue meat wagon. Take Rousseau and a good photographer. Do you know the neighborhood?”

  “Yes, sir, it’s a quiet area near the summit of the hill.”

  Féraud nodded. “Yes, it was quiet and I want to keep it that way. I’ve already given a release to the newspapers: Body of unknown female discovered in Montmartre. And that’s all they’ll get until we make a positive identification. Give them any more and the reporters and morbid curiosity-seekers will be swarming Montmartre hill like flies on a turd. Anyway, let’s hope this is all a stupid prank, but for now we’ll proceed as though it’s a homicide. To begin, we know from the report that the night soil collectors had last pumped the cesspool the morning of the 13th. So the body must have been dumped between then and this morning’s collection.

  “Start gathering evidence and question the residents at that address. We’re a long way from going to the juge d’instruction for a warrant. There’s a gendarme guarding the scene and they’ve set up a barricade. You’ve worked with Rousseau before; he’s a good man and you both know the drill. When you’ve got what you want, you and the photographer can take the body to the Morgue on the meat wagon. Rousseau will stay in Montmartre to interview the neighbors.

  “I’ll contact Bertillon. He owes me a favor or two, and I’m going to ask him to supervise the autopsy and work directly with you. Telephone the Morgue from the Montmartre station to confirm the appointment. When you’ve finished at the Morgue you may go home, but I want you and Rousseau in my office with a written report first thing tomorrow morning. Any questions?”

  Achille had no questions; as his chief had said, he knew the drill. And he was well aware of the urgency of the situation with the Universal Exposition ongoing and the fear whipped up by lurid newspaper accounts of Jack the Ripper. His wife and mother-in-law would ask, “Will Féraud permit you to eat and sleep?” But of course, the question was rhetorical. As the old boys said, your hours at the Sûreté were from midnight to midnight.

  When he arrived at the police barricade Achille was relieved to find things quiet and orderly. He was greeted by Sergeant Rodin, a beefy man with a long, drooping red moustache, a gruff voice, and a gimlet eye. “There it is, Inspector.” Rodin pointed to a large lump on the pavement, covered by a white cloth splotched with ochre-colored stains, next to the cesspit. According to the report, the torso was found wrapped in the cloth. “No fuss, so far, but the landlady is upset.”

  Achille made a quick mental note of the stains on the cloth: Could be paint—or blood. Then: “Does she know the cause of the stoppage?”

  Rodin grinned and shook his head. “No, she doesn’t. The only ones who know about the stiff are me, my men, the night soil collectors, and the person, or persons, who dumped it.”

  “That gives us a little time, I suppose, but sooner or later the press will get nosy, especially after we start questioning people. And there’s a damned dirty job ahead. Where are the sewer cleaners? We need them to pump and rake out the sludge. Then the muck must be searched for evidence.”

  Rodin grimaced and checked his watch. “They should be here soon, Inspector.”

  Achille glanced up. The gray clouds looked threatening; he and his crew would need to work fast. Rain could wash away clues. It had rained intermittently the past few days. God only knew what had already been lost. He continued with urgency. “Who lives here besides the landlady?”

  “She’s the only one on the premises. The upper story is rented by a painter, Monsieur de Toulouse-Lautrec. He uses it as his studio.”

  Achille raised his eyebrows. “Toulouse-Lautrec. Is he related to the Count?”

  Rodin chuckled. “He’s the son and heir, Inspector. An odd fellow; if you saw him once you’d never forget him. He’s a sawed-off cripple, no more than 150 centimeters in his shoes, and he hobbles along with the aid of a tiny cane. Monsieur’s legs are stunted, but he has the body, arms, and hands of a normal man with better than average strength. He looks like a circus ape dressed in swell’s clothing. Black hair, thick black beard, dark brown eyes, and he peers through a pince-nez sort of like yours, Monsieur. Speaks like a toff, which is to say like the son of a count. Oh, and he’s got big ears, a bulbous nose, a
nd thick, purplish lips. No mistaking him in a crowd.”

  Achille commended the Sergeant for his portrait parlé. Then: “Does the gentleman live hereabouts?”

  The Sergeant rubbed his chin. “Not too far, Monsieur. He rents an apartment on the Rue Pierre-Fontaine in the 9th arrondissement, near one of his hangouts, the Moulin Rouge. He goes there to drink and draw pictures, and you can find him doing the same in the cabarets, bal musettes, maisons close, and boîtes. He’s a well-known figure in Montmartre and Pigalle. And there’s more. Like most of these fellows, he likes to have a little sport with his models. No doubt, he pays well. And there’re rumors about shouting matches and violence between Monsieur and his lorettes.”

  “Thank you, sergeant.” Achille asked Rodin to give Lautrec’s name and address to Rousseau for his list; he was definitely a person of interest.

  “I hope we don’t have the Ripper on our hands. It would be awful if the butchering bastard turned out to be a stunted French aristocrat,” Rodin quipped with a sly wink.

  Achille winced in response to his friend’s gallows humor. Then he left the sergeant and walked toward the cesspit and the corpse, where Gilles, the photographer, had set up his camera. Gilles was a dapper young man, blue-eyed and fair-haired with a neat little waxed moustache. Dressed unseasonably in a white suit with a straw boater set at a jaunty angle on his handsome head, he looked more like a flâneur at Le Touquet than a crime scene photographer, but that appearance was deceiving. Gilles was one of the best in his profession.

  “Hey Inspector, I’ve already got several photographs of the scene. Is there anything else you want before I pack up my equipment?”

  “Yes, there is.” Achille pulled a magnifying glass out of his jacket pocket and crouched beside the stained cloth covering the torso. He focused on the ochre stains; as he suspected, they were handprints. What’s more, the fingerprints were distinguishable, especially the thumb and forefinger of a right hand.