Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (11 page)

T
HIS IS THE STORY
that was dictated to the abbé P…, recorded by Jacques Peuchet, and embellished by the Baron. Even in its novelized form, it contains several gaps and inconsistencies–which might be taken as a mark of its authenticity. The moral–vengeance destroys the avenger–scarcely matches the events described in the confession. That ‘diabolical smile’ on Picaud’s face suggests that, for a man who considered himself in some way posthumous, there was indeed such a thing as complete and happy vengeance. And there are other problems, too. How, for instance, did Allut know so much about Picaud’s life in Fenestrelle, the exact composition of his treasure, his hiding place in Paris, the orchestration of his crimes and a hundred other details? How did such a clueless man become so well informed? And why, if he knew so much, was he never able to locate the treasure?

The Baron–or perhaps it was the abbé P…–noticed the inconsistency and found a gratifying solution: Allut had been visited by the ghost of François Picaud. ‘No man’s faith can be stronger than mine’, Allut is supposed to have said, ‘for I have seen and heard a soul detached from its body.’ After the restoration of the monarchy, devout, mystical fantasies were in fashion, and few readers of the
Mémoires Tirés des Archives de la Police de Paris
would have felt cheated by the novelistic device of a garrulous ghost. Many would have been perfectly willing to accept it as the literal truth.

One day, some of the incidents described in the confession may be authenticated by the chance discovery of a letter or a police report that escaped the conflagration of the archives, but it is too much to hope that this particular detail will ever be confirmed. Information supplied by disembodied souls is of little use to historians. From a rational point of view, there was only one person who could have known the whole story, and that person had either been disembowelled or left to die twenty feet below the Rue d’Enfer.

There is every reason to believe that Picaud’s death was indeed described in the original confession and duly registered by the Paris police. It is also quite likely that the blinding and disembowelling occurred only in the Baron’s Gothic brain, and that, in reality, Allut left the half-starved remnant of François Picaud to die a miserable death. So much of the story is missing that no definite conclusions can be reached. Birth, marriage and death certificates went up in flames in 1871 on the same day as the police archives. It is a sad irony that a story that was rescued from obscurity and destruction by an archivist with a passion for the hidden truth should be so full of unconfirmable facts. It is even more ironic that the abbé P…who provided the Paris police with all this information, who taught Allut to loathe his sins, recorded his confession and sent him to the next world with the absolution that only an ordained priest can confer, is, for some reason, the only person in the story whose full name is unknown.

1. The Case of the Crayfish

New Year’s Day, 1813, Rue des Grésillons

A
T SOME POINT
in the night, while the snow was falling thickly, the pile of rubbish had crossed the street, and was now positioned a few doors down from no. 13, Rue des Grésillons. This street, which was later swept away by the Gare Saint-Lazare, ran along the edge of the grim and grimy
quartier
known as Little Poland. It was the kind of area where a pile of rubbish might expect to pass unnoticed, even if it did occasionally put forth a gnarled head that swivelled and disappeared.

The Rue des Grésillons was the haunt of mysteriously industrious people who considered themselves lucky to be tenants, because no landlord or bailiff ever dared set foot there. It was Paris, but it had nothing that anyone would have recognized as Paris. Once, it had marked the point beyond which no building was allowed. On one side–the old perimeter of the city–were half-empty scrap-iron yards, smutty laundries, windowless brothels and nameless hostels. Most of its inhabitants came from distant parts of France, and some of its teetering tenements housed the entire adult male population of an Alpine valley. On the opposite side of the street–the side further from Paris–were the desolate slopes and gullies of the city’s northern waste dump.

In any other street, the pile of rubbish would have been dismantled in a trice by a licensed rag-picker, a municipal cleaner or by one of the unregistered scavengers who darted about like shadows, poking at piles of waste and filling a leather bag with objects of unidentifiable desire; but by the time they reached the Rue des Grésillons, the sweepings of Paris had attained a state of refinement that placed them almost beyond the digestive aspirations of a rat. Every cabbage-stalk and bone, every nail, splinter, scrap and thread, every bandage and poultice from the hospitals of Paris had been gathered or eaten, leaving only a gravelly coagulation of mud, soot, hair, faeces, and whatever else ten thousand brooms had mustered in the street before nine o’clock in the evening. There was just enough compostable matter in that residue of seven hundred thousand human lives to start the process of fermentation–which was fortunate, because the night was bitterly cold, and the occupant of the pile of rubbish was dressed only in the thin felt jacket of a messenger.

As he crouched in the steaming filth, the bogus messenger felt the warm glow of satisfaction that always seemed to presage a successful operation. The others had succumbed, hours before, to the lure of an all-night wine shop, but he knew that, however long it took, the wait would be worth his while. To the man known as ‘Sans-Gêne’ (‘Have-A-Go’)–the man who had tricked, chiselled, sawn and bludgeoned his way out of every prison in France–a night of cramp, frostbite and stench was nothing. As everyone knew, Eugène-François Vidocq was impervious to pain. He also possessed the curious faculty of lessening his height by four or five inches, and in this contracted form could walk about and jump. He could carry on a normal conversation with a metal file in his mouth. He had thought nothing of staining his face with walnut juice and clogging up his nostrils with coffee and gum arabic in order to imitate the skin colour and chronic nasal discharge of a criminal known as Tête-de-Melon. At last, his hard work and persistence were about to pay off. The case that had brought him that New Year’s Night to the Rue des Grésillons would, he was certain, be the last nail in the coffin of his enemies at police headquarters.

Twenty-two members of the gang had already fallen into his net–including the Pissard twins, and the fiendish criminal who, until he was tortured, was known only as ‘The Apothecary’. They had carried out their thefts with such elaborate cunning and such minute knowledge of the premises (including the apartment above the
commissariat
of the eighth district), that it was obvious they must have been employees of the victims. In bringing these men to justice, Vidocq had, almost single-handedly, destroyed the centuries-old reputation of Savoyard immigrants for honesty and reliability. No one would ever trust a chimney-sweep, floor-polisher or errand-boy again, which, in a city where people habitually left their key in the door and invited strangers into their home, could only be construed as an act of public philanthropy.

The one remaining member of the gang was the notorious ‘Crayfish’, whose whereabouts had remained as mysterious as his nickname. (Perhaps he owed it to his grasping claws or a bright-red complexion, or perhaps he had achieved proficiency in the potentially useful art of walking backwards.) Though the Crayfish had eluded capture, his girlfriend, a laundress, had been traced to the Rue des Grésillons, and it was reasonable to suppose that the Crayfish would attempt to deliver her New Year’s gift in person.

Dawn’s chill fingers were already stretching over the eastern suburbs when a shadow passed along the house-fronts. The door of no. 13 opened, and the figure scuttled in, looking up and down the street as it backed into the courtyard. A minute later, the frozen heap of filth was standing in the hallway, beneath the stairs, whistling in the manner of a Savoyard coachman. On hearing the signal, the Crayfish emerged on the landing two floors up, and the following conversation took place:

‘Is that you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll be down in a minute.’

‘It’s too cold to wait here. Meet me at the bar on the corner–and look sharp.’

It was not until he was holding up his trousers with one hand and, with the other, presenting his braces to a smelly man with a pistol in his hand, that the Crayfish realized what had happened. An hour or so later, his ankles tied with napkins to the legs of his chair, he was helping Vidocq to celebrate his capture in a private room at the Cadran Bleu restaurant, divulging all sorts of information about his criminal colleagues, in the mistaken belief that this would ensure his release.

T
HAT MORNING
, Commissioner Henry arrived for work as usual, turning off the Quai des Orfèvres, and passing along a glass-covered arcade that led from the river to the courtyard of the Sainte-Chapelle. It was there, under the shadow of the medieval basilica, in a frequently fumigated office at no. 6 Petite Rue Sainte-Anne, that M. Henry conducted his never-ending war on crime.

As a man who had passed many a delightful Sunday fishing in the Seine, M. Henry knew the pleasure of outwitting a slippery creature. It was a pleasure that was denied to him as head of the Second Division of the Préfecture. Criminals, who were supposed to live by their wits, were desperately stupid. Their slang was a secret code that gave them away as surely as a bag marked ‘swag’. Recently, a thief called Mme Bailly, having learned that there was money to be made as an informer, had provided the police with details of all the burglaries she had committed herself, and was surprised when they came knocking at her door.

The Commissioner’s own modest powers had earned him a reputation for supernatural percipience. He was known to the criminal underworld of Paris as ‘the Bad Angel’, and it was said that no one ever left his office without accidentally confessing his crime or giving some vital clue that led to his conviction. Unfortunately, M. Henry was forced to work with a team of skivers and incompetents. His constables had been known to lie in wait in a burglar’s cupboard for seventy-two hours, only to be locked in by the burglar and almost starved to death. And so, when Vidocq had offered his services as a thief-catcher, and proposed the creation of a special Brigade de la Sûreté staffed by ex-convicts, Commissioner Henry–to the envious indignation of his regular officers–had promptly organized Vidocq’s ‘escape’ from La Force prison, and given him his own office, with a monthly salary of one hundred francs and the promise of a bonus for each arrest.

Vidocq returned the compliment by following M. Henry’s orders with almost sheepish devotion. There was something in Vidocq’s ability to grind a man’s face to an unidentifiable pulp that filled him with devoted tenderness towards anyone who earned his respect.

The Commissioner was briefing his officers when a powerful smell filled the room, followed by a visibly intoxicated Vidocq, holding his latest catch by the collar. Seeing the line of policemen, the Crayfish squirmed with loathing and spat out a stream of abuse. Vidocq bowed to his colleagues, and said,

‘Allow me and my illustrious companion to wish you a Happy New Year!’

The Commissioner looked at his man with pride. Then, turning to his officers, he said, frostily,

‘Now that’s what I call a New Year’s gift! Would that each of you, Messieurs, had come bearing a similar gift.’

The Crayfish was led away to the cells, and, from that day on, Vidocq’s position as Head of the Sûreté appeared to be unassailable.

2. The Case of the Yellow Curtains

New Year’s Day, 1814, Rue Poissonnière

T
HANKS TO
Vidocq, Paris now had a centralized criminal bureau, instead of forty-eight competing
commissaires
who gave up the chase as soon as a felon turned a street corner and left the
quartier
. The ex-convict not only made police work more professional, he also conferred a rough sort of glamour on what had previously been seen as a rather squalid branch of government administration.

To M. Henry, Vidocq was simply the most effectual of all the two-faced opportunists who went back and forth between police headquarters and the underworld. To criminals, he was something weird and unnerving, a will-o’-the-wisp with fists of steel. His prestige and power were rooted in superstition: the edges of Paris were still half-dissolved in their rural hinterland, where werewolves and witches were as much a part of daily life as rabid dogs and concierges. Once, Vidocq was told by an unsuspecting policeman’s daughter that the great Vidocq could turn himself into ‘a truss of hay’.

‘A truss of hay! How?’

‘Yes, Monsieur. One day my father followed him, and just as he was going to put his hand on his collar, he grasped only a wisp of hay. That’s not all talk, the whole brigade saw the hay, which was burned.’

There was, however, nothing magical about Vidocq’s methods, and they deserve a purely rational investigation. It would be hard in any case to imagine a better guide to the devious streets of Paris than the human bloodhound who sniffed out their secrets with such ruthless delight.

O
F ALL THE MYSTERIES
that Vidocq solved–or rendered irrelevant by brute force–few were as revealing as the Case of the Yellow Curtains.

It was almost a year since the Crayfish had been netted, and M. Henry was hoping to present the Minister with another New Year’s gift. Unfortunately, the case that lay in front of him that Christmas Eve seemed too risky for Vidocq. A convict called Fossard, who specialized in making keys from wax impressions and in jumping out of upper-storey windows without hurting himself, had escaped from Bicêtre prison. (Bicêtre, two miles south of Paris, was a clearing-house for convicts: from there, they left in chains for the hulks of Brest, Rochefort and Toulon.) Apparently, Fossard was ‘armed to the teeth’, and had vowed to kill any policeman who tried to arrest him.

The problem was that Fossard had known Vidocq in prison and would certainly recognize his former cell-mate. M. Henry therefore entrusted the job to his regular officers, who, giving due consideration to the words ‘armed to the teeth’, busied themselves with paperwork and harmless enquiries which showed that Fossard was indeed still forging keys and jumping out of upper-storey windows. Faced with craven incompetence, the Commissioner reluctantly gave the job to Vidocq and presented him with the latest piece of intelligence. It took the form of a detailed but inconclusive report:

With this shred of information, Vidocq set off in search of the escaped convict.

The four streets in question formed a single, serpentine stretch of road that twisted and turned so often that it seemed to be heading nowhere in particular. In fact, it ran north from the central markets, bisecting the boulevard and the ‘Great Drain’ that girdled Paris. The main segment was the Rue Poissonnière–so called because this was the route by which fresh fish reached the capital from the ports of the Pas-de-Calais. In the festive season, the road was even busier than usual, and no one paid much attention to the elderly man with a three-cornered hat, a pigtail, and wrinkles painted on his face; nor did anyone stop to ask him why he was gazing up at windows and scribbling in a little book.

The task was daunting. Yellow was a popular colour for curtains–and many others had yellowed with age–and there were enough seamstresses in northern Paris to populate a small town. Assuming young men to be representative of the whole population, medical reports on army conscripts would suggest that there were something in the region of 6,135 hunchbacks in Paris. The streets of Paris had a total length of 425 kilometres, and the fish-route along which Fossard lurked behind yellow curtains was 900 metres long. Allowing for variations in population density in the different
quartier
s, this would give the streets in question a total hunchback population of thirteen.

A fictional sleuth might have interviewed the local haberdasher, interrogated the informant as a possible source of red herrings or examined the muddy street for the tell-tale prints of a female hunchback. But since this was real life, where the tediously simple and the impossibly confused left little room for tidy puzzles, Vidocq recorded over one hundred and fifty pairs of yellow curtains in his notebook, then trudged up and down the same number of staircases, knocking at doors. The result was a handy address list of ‘ravishing’ seamstresses, but no hunchback and no Fossard.