The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection Read Online Free PDF Page B

Macé’s writing shows the clear influence of Edgar Allan Poe, indicating that the Paris police were well aware of detective fiction. Macé makes Voirbo sound particularly like one of Poe’s characters in describing what happened after he hit Bodasse with a flatiron:
Not a sound escaped him. His head sank on to the table, his arms hung down inert. I was astonished, and satisfied with my strength and skill.
Then, blowing out the light, I opened the window and pulled the shutters to. In silence and darkness I listened to discover if he stirred. But I heard nothing, except his blood which fell on the floor, drop by drop! This monotonous drop, drop, drop, made my flesh creep. Still I kept on listening, listening. All of a sudden I heard a deep sigh, and something like a creaking of the chair. Désiré was moving, he was not dead! Suppose he were to cry out. This thought restored all my presence of mind to me. Lighting a small lamp, I saw the body had moved sideways, he was then still living. He was certainly no longer in a condition to make himself heard, to call for help, but his death-agony might be spun out and I did not want to see him suffer a long while. I therefore took a razor, approached him from behind and placed my hand under the chin of my ex-friend. Yielding to my pressure, the head rose up and then fell backwards. The lamp was shining full on his blood-smeared face. His round eyes were not yet lifeless — for a moment they fastened on the blade of the razor I was holding above him, and suddenly assumed such an expression of terror, that my heart beat violently. It was necessary to put an end to it. The same way a barber does when about to shave a customer, I pressed the blade just below the Adam’s apple, where the beard commences, and with a vigorous sweep I drew the blade from left to right. It entirely disappeared in the flesh, the head fell lifeless on the back of the chair. 32
    iv
    L’Affaire Gouffé started as a missing persons case. On Saturday, July 27, 1889, a man reported that his brother-in-law, Toussaint-Augustin Gouffé, a Parisian court bailiff, had disappeared. Gouffé, a middle-aged widower with three daughters, had last been seen on the twenty-sixth. The inspector on duty did not think the matter was terribly serious. Gouffé was a known philanderer and might just have been on some amorous adventure. But when he was still missing on the thirtieth, the case was referred to Marie-François Goron, the chief of the Sûreté.
    Goron was a small, fair, asthmatic Breton with a waxed mustache and pince-nez. He could be brusque in manner, but he was passionate about hunting criminals. Like Vidocq, he commanded a troop of “beaters” who posed as ex-convicts while roaming the dens of the Paris underworld. Goron had also developed new techniques for questioning criminals. He subjected suspects to alternating light and dark cells, and rotated bread and water with sumptuous meals. (His interrogation rooms were called “Monsieur Goron’s cookshop.” 33 ) He went so far as to promise suspects women if they talked. These techniques proved successful, and Goron took full credit, for he was a genius at garnering publicity; newspapers frequently ran flattering stories about him.
    Goron would later write memoirs that he described as “social photographs that, without retouching, by their unadorned simplicity and horror, conveyed the truth.” 34 Contrary to his assertion, his accounts came close to crossing the line of voyeurism, confusing the literary and popular with the real. Perhaps that was not too surprising, given his claim that his memoirs were an attempt to “raise the roofs of the houses of the capital” in order to see the “human perversity” found there. 35
    Taking over the case of the missing bailiff, Goron visited Gouffé’s office on the rue Montmartre. He discovered burned matches in front of the safe, which had not been broken into. A sum of fourteen thousand francs was found hidden