Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (12 page)

It transpired that the yellow curtains must have gone to the cleaners, and that Fossard no longer lived along the Rue Poissonnière. However, so dense and intertwined were the threads of mutual acquaintance, daily routines and knowledge of neighbours’ doings, and so tirelessly did Vidocq wear out his shoe-leather on the cobbles, that even if the report had falsely specified green curtains and a one-armed seamstress, he would still have found his man.

He eventually caught Fossard–just in time for the New Year–by asking hundreds of questions, spending a small taxpayers’ fortune in bribes, disguising himself as a coalman and, finally, by pouncing on Fossard ‘with the speed of a lion’. Fossard went back to Bicêtre, and from there to the hulks of Brest. No doubt, like most convicts, he managed to escape, but the coal-blackened face of the colossal Vidocq had put the fear of Satan in him, and the Sûreté Brigade was never troubled by Fossard again.

T
HE ULTIMATELY
disappointing case of the yellow curtains is a good example of what might be termed the early Vidocq method of investigation. Ever since his boyhood in Arras, he had been paring down his modus operandi to a few infallible devices. His first theft had involved the use of a glue-coated feather, fed through the crack of the cash-box in his parents’ bakery–a crime as difficult to explain as it was tedious to commit. Since the feather extracted only the smallest of small change, he resorted to a false key, and when the key was confiscated by his father, he used a pair of pliers, wrecked the box, grabbed the cash and walked ‘very quickly’ to the next town.

These simple means were well suited to the urban villages that made up early-nineteenth-century Paris. But the city was growing by the day: in some
quartier
s, even a concierge or a police spy could barely keep abreast of the influx of strangers. In the sixteen years during which Vidocq ran the Sûreté Brigade (1811–27), the population of Paris increased by over one hundred thousand. The drainage system grew by ten kilometres, the hills of rubbish turned into mountains, and streets that had never wandered far from their medieval origins reached out into the countryside like the veins of a gigantic parasite. Soon, it would take something more than mere persistence to stretch the net of public safety over the whole crime-ridden metropolis.

3. The Case of the Six Thousand Missing Criminals

20 June 1827, 6 Petite Rue Sainte-Anne

O
NLY A BUREAUCRAT
with a heart of stone would have felt no pity for the fifty-two-year-old man who sat alone in his office that Wednesday in June, hunched over a large desk on which a single sheet of paper remained. That musky suite of rooms under the shadow of the Sainte-Chapelle had been his home for the last sixteen years, and the little platoon of twenty-eight men and women–scribes, spies and half-reformed convicts–had been the only family he had known since he left his parents’ bakery as a boy. He had grown to love the accommodating file cabinets, the capacious wardrobe that would have been the envy of a boulevard theatre and the little galley where, at any hour of the day or night, a convict’s mistress cooked the meals that kept them on the trail of criminals.

Commissioner Henry, who had been like a father to him, had retired to devote himself to fishing, and his departure had caused a flurry of administrative manoeuvrings. In his place, the Minister had appointed a neat and tidy young man with a heart of stone, who had begun to investigate Vidocq’s distant and not-so-distant past. Rather than await the outcome of the investigations, Vidocq had decided to tender his resignation. He signed the sheet of paper, and left the office for what seemed likely to be the last time. As he passed along the glass-covered arcade, lugging a trunk full of documents, he wondered how his successor as Head of the Sûreté–an ex-convict known as Coco Lacour–would manage to match his impressive record of arrests.

Vidocq had brought to justice enough criminals to sink a prison ship. His name was a household word, and he was somewhat inconveniently famous as a master of disguise from Cherbourg to Marseille. He had solved so many cases that to the tradesmen, cab drivers, clerks and, for that matter, criminals, who read about his exploits in the newspapers, nothing seemed quite as innocent as before. That feeble old woman might be a secret agent on a case, and that loaf of bread she was carrying might be an improvised valise containing a loaded pistol and a pair of handcuffs.

It is a tribute to Vidocq’s efficiency that when he left the Sûreté, most of the mysteries that remained unsolved concerned Vidocq himself. Why, for instance, were his hands covered with blood when his former mistress Francine was found with five stab-wounds inflicted by his knife–a knife, admittedly, that she later claimed in a signed statement to have borrowed for a suicide attempt? Why was an ex-convict, who was known to be a habitual gambler, put in charge of the Police des Jeux, which supervised casinos? And how did he manage to retire from the Sûreté in June 1827, with almost half a million francs, when his annual salary was only five thousand francs?

One case was so mysterious that it seems to have escaped attention altogether, and it is especially unfortunate that the lack of evidence makes it the shortest case of all.

The mystery is this: the number of people Vidocq arrested each year far exceeds the annual number of convictions for crimes against the person or against property in the entire Seine
département
. In one year, the Sûreté Brigade arrested seven hundred and seventy-two murderers, thieves, forgers, conmen, escaped convicts and miscellaneous miscreants. Even subtracting the forty-six unexplained arrests made ‘by special warrant’, and the two hundred and twenty-nine ‘vagabonds and thieves’ who were expelled from Paris, this leaves a very large number of criminals who do not appear in the official statistics. Even at a conservative estimate, in the sixteen years of Vidocq’s reign, the number of criminals arrested by the Sûreté, but unaccounted for in the official statistics, is approximately 6,350. At this rate, it would have taken fewer than fifteen Vidocqs to arrest every criminal in the country.

If Commissioner Henry had devoted his well-earned retirement to writing his memoirs instead of fishing in the Seine, he might have explained that Vidocq was more dangerous as a detective than he ever was as a crook, and that, by casting the eerie light of crime over the whole city, he created a demand for people like himself: legalized avengers who would give the taxpayers their money’s worth by cleaning up the streets. He might have granted Vidocq his proper place in history, and hailed him as the man who reinvented crime-fighting as a means of controlling the innocent population…But, as Vidocq may have reflected that June morning, as he set down his trunk on the Quai des Orfèvres to take a swig from his brandy-flask, a true genius is never recognized by his contemporaries.

4. The Case of the Mysterious Unpleasantness

17 October 1840, 13 Galerie Vivienne

S
OME TIME AFTER
Vidocq’s departure from the Sûreté, that characteristically Parisian breed known as
badauds
(‘gawkers’), who had nothing better to do than stand and stare, as though any object, whether living or lifeless, might become interesting if stared at long enough, began to notice Xs–sometimes accompanied by Os–marked in white chalk on the walls of certain houses. If a particularly patient
badaud
had lingered within sight of one of the single Xs, he might eventually have seen a man or a woman take a piece of white chalk and inscribe an O beside the X before disappearing down the street or behind the brick column of a public urinal; and, if he followed the mysterious defacer of public property, he might in due course have found himself in one of the plusher parts of Paris, under a glassy arcade thronged with people who, like himself, had nothing better to do than stand and stare.

The Galerie Vivienne had been built in 1823 as a speculative venture. It quickly became one of the busiest arcades on the Right Bank. On a summer evening, Parisians out for a stroll would leave the dazzling sun on the boulevard and plunge into its gleaming shadows to feast their eyes on chocolates and pralines and miniature armies of petits-fours, or to gaze at the frills and ornaments that were displayed like holy relics under the nymphs and goddesses of the rotunda. A man could smoke a cigarette there on a rainy day while examining the curves and unexpected vistas of the marble galleries and the pretty women who came to shop for lingerie and the latest fashions. Like an elegant marquise, the Galerie Vivienne had a sort of indestructible frivolity, and its fame as the centre of Paris fashions spread far beyond the city. The words ‘Galerie Vivienne’ appeared like a sacred motif on beautifully wrapped bandboxes that were delivered to ladies in provincial towns when their husbands were away. It was, in short, the sort of place a woman could safely visit on her own without arousing suspicion.

That Saturday afternoon, a young woman, who will have to remain nameless, entered the Galerie Vivienne and passed through the monumentally respectable entrance of no. 13. She climbed the magnificent, swirling staircase where windows set high in the marbled wall made it possible to look onto the stairs without being seen. She knocked at a door and was ushered into the comfortable office of the man who was described on the metal plaque, the headed notepaper and in countless advertisements as ‘Ex-chief of the special Sûreté police, which he directed for 20 years with undisputed success’.

The Bureau of Universal Intelligence at 13 Galerie Vivienne was the world’s first private detective agency, founded two decades before Allan Pinkerton, ‘the Vidocq of the West’, launched his National Detective Agency in Chicago. It offered a range of discreet services: ‘Prosecutions and debt-collection, intelligence of every sort, surveillance, and investigations in the interests of business and families.’ Other agencies had sprung up in imitation, but none of them had prospered, as the Bureau’s prospectus cheerfully explained:

To some minds, there was a touch of menace in the Bureau’s advertising. It was almost as if a blackmailer had extended his operation to the entire commercial world of Paris…

But since the Bureau performed such useful services, and since a more liberal government was preventing the police from interfering in family affairs, it enjoyed some powerful protection. It had a huge database of file-cards on every known criminal–and several thousand law-abiding citizens too–and a team of specialized sleuths: ‘the Cyclops’, ‘the Faun’, ‘the Man-about-Town’, and a very tall detective who could peer through first-floor windows without using a ladder. Even when the Bureau was raided, and more than two thousand old Sûreté files relating to the years 1811–27 were confiscated, its filing-system was feared by politicians as much as Vidocq’s fists were feared by criminals.

The Bureau’s ‘undisputed success’ had not come easily. The house rules, which were prominently displayed in the director’s office, gave some idea of how difficult it was to work with agents who had acquired their skills and manners in prison-cells and slums:

The final rule would have been of particular interest to a
badaud
. It pertained to ‘external operations’. When a house was under surveillance, the agent was to mark the nearest street corner with an X. ‘To this effect, white chalk will always be at his disposal.’ When he left the house to follow a subject or to ‘satisfy a need’, he was to mark the wall with an O. In this way, the director could monitor his agents’ activities and take punitive action where necessary.

It is fortunate, in a sense, that the Bureau was closed down in 1843 and its files dispersed. Some of the paperwork found its way to government offices and, from there, eventually, to second-hand bookshops and archival collections. One of the salvaged records appears to be the office copy of a letter that the young woman in the Galerie Vivienne had received that Saturday. (In 1840, there were six deliveries a day, so that a letter posted in Paris to an address in the city before 9 a.m. would arrive before noon.)