The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (22 page)

The detective chief stood and made a little speech about the evolution of criminal investigation.

Years ago, the man whose duty it is to fight the enemies of society had only his own powers to rely upon. Between him and the criminal it was skill against skill, art against art. Then came the modern inventions — -railways, steamers, the telegraph, the telephone — and matters grew worse for the detective. Alas! it was the murderers, the forgers, who had the advantage, inasmuch as they could steal a long march upon Nemesis, and get their accomplices to use the telegraph and the telephone for their benefit.

The question, therefore, was to discover a system by which society and not its foes would reap the advantages. Ladies and gentlemen, this system has been found, and the man to whom we owe it, and whose name will go down to posterity, is M. Bertillon.
²³

Goron’s nephew handed him the package, which he opened. Here, Goron explained, were the instruments used in the new science of bertillonage, “for the identification of those who, having previously fallen into the hands of the police, expect to escape detection by changing their names or altering, as they think, their appearance.”
²⁴

The name Bertillon sent a thrill of excitement through the room. When Goron asked for individuals willing to be measured, several young women were the first to volunteer. Alphonse Daudet, a well-known writer, offered his own physiognomy for the measurements. While Goron was at work, he noticed Vernet moving to the door.

“Ah, there’s M. Vernet,” he cried. “Don’t go away. Come and be measured.”

The financier shook his head with a smile. “No, thank you,” he responded. “I have seen the thing done before.”

Seemingly joking, Goron appealed to two American girls who were standing by the door. “Catch him, ladies. Don’t let him escape.”

By this time, all eyes were on Vernet, and he was unable to get away without causing a scene. “This is a bad joke,” he told Goron.

“Oh, it’s part of the fun,” returned the detective.

Vernet was compelled to put the best face on things. He shrugged and permitted Goron to take his measurements. Goron recorded them on a blank Bertillon card and handed it to his “nephew,” who had in his pocket another card with the measurements of the supposedly dead convict Simon. After a brief comparison, he nodded to Goron, who took Vernet by the arm and led him to another room.

“I advise you not to make a scene,” Goron said. “I know you to be Simon, an escaped convict, and the suspected murderer of Aymard. You will have to come with me. My ‘nephew’ over there is a detective, and I have three others within call. Say good-bye to your hostess and follow me.”

Vernet’s nerve had taken him from Cayenne to Paris, and he tried to bluff his way through this setback as well. Drawing himself up, he told Goron coolly, “This is a mistake, which I will make you regret.”
²⁵

After Bertillon himself had confirmed Goron’s measurements, however, Vernet confessed. He was sent to prison to await transport back to Cayenne. It was a fate he could not endure. He hanged himself in his cell.

vi

Harry Ashton-Wolfe, a British citizen who worked for several years with Bertillon, later wrote a number of books about his experiences. Ashton-Wolfe was a friend of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and he portrayed Bertillon as very much in the mold of the world’s most famous literary detective.
²⁶
In “The Clue of the Blind Beetles,” Ashton-Wolfe described how a package containing the body of a man was found in the Bois de Boulogne, on the western edge of Paris. Indications were that the victim had been struck on the head from behind by a club or hammer. He wore only a shirt and trousers, but other items of clothing had been enclosed in the package with him.

Even though the ground was soft from recent rains, there were no traces of footprints or wheels. The wrapped package was heavy and unwieldy, and if it had been left there by one man, he must have been enormously strong. Bertillon took a stroll toward the Seine, which loops around the Bois, and found markings of a boat on the riverbank. Leading away from it were shapeless impressions, made, Bertillon deduced, by a man who had tied a thick cloth over his boots to conceal his tracks. Since the paper of the package was dry, it had to have been left there after midnight, when the rain had stopped.

Using a cable attached to the battery in his automobile, Bertillon activated a new device he had recently assembled. “A short arc, enormously magnified by complex lenses and reflectors, produced a concentrated beam of dazzling brilliancy, which could be focused to any angle,” Ashton-Wolfe wrote. While he held the lamp, Bertillon attached a mask containing magnifying lenses to his face and examined the body. Spotting something on the victim’s shirt, he called for a collodion slide, which was a sticky glass plate used to pick up tiny bits of evidence — in this case, what appeared to be insects. The body was then sent for an autopsy while the clothes went to Bertillon’s laboratory.

Ashton-Wolfe described the results: “In the hair, which, although still dark at the roots, was grey at the points, were fragments of coal, sand, and sawdust. The microscope proved the coal to be anthracite; the sand, silicate, ferruginous silicate, and quartz; and the sawdust, when split with a microtome, turned out to be composed of pine and oak. The stains on the shirt were also coal, intermingled with traces of mildew. When I carried my report to my chief, I found him at work on the collodion slide.”
²⁷
Bertillon reported that “the two tiny insects we found on the shirt are
Anophthalmi,
a species of blind beetle. Moreover, they are quite colorless — absolutely devoid of pigment. They’ve bred for generations in the dark. Taken together with the coal and sand, I should say that it proves the body was hidden for a time in a cellar or a vault. It only remains to find it.”
²⁸

Ashton-Wolfe commented that if they had to search all the cellars in Paris, it would be a long process. Bertillon frowned and told him, “I see you forget the formulae that apply to every premeditated murder:
Who profits by the crime?
and
Seek the woman.
One or the other will lead us to that cellar.”
²⁹

Chemical analysis of the dead man’s clothing provided another clue. The coat and vest were covered with
Saccharomyces cerevisiae,
which were the bacteria used in fermenting alcohol. Bertillon surmised that the cellar they were looking for might well be in a café. Because a boat was used to transport the body, the café must be near the Seine. The oak and pine sawdust indicated that the same cellar must be used for sawing firewood.

Bertillon’s darkroom technicians produced a reconstructed photograph of the victim’s face, and detectives began to show it around the city’s cafés. Bertillon instructed Ashton-Wolfe how to proceed. “Say that you are searching for a relative.… Take care not to let it appear that you fear something has happened to him.”
³⁰
Bertillon believed the man was an accountant or a clerk. His boots and hands showed no signs of manual labor, and his right sleeve was fresher-looking than the left. This indicated that, like many people in clerical jobs, the victim wore a protective lustrine sleeve on the end of the arm he used to write with. A typist, on the other hand, wore lustrine sleeves on both arms.
³¹

Bertillon’s assumptions were soon proved correct, as someone recognized the man in the photograph: he was a forty-year-old bookkeeper named Charles Tellier. Tellier had disappeared ten days earlier but had told his landlady he was going on vacation, so she had not reported him missing. Neighbors said Tellier was quite a ladies’ man and sometimes got into trouble when the ladies were married to someone else. He was also known to patronize illegal bookmakers. A search of his room turned up numerous betting slips, and some love letters that were signed “Marcelle.”

The landlady reported that Tellier ate his meals at a tavern in the Latin Quarter called La Cloche de Bois. Dressed as an art student (“peg-topped trousers and velveteen jacket, with the wide-brimmed hat and flowing tie”
³²
), Ashton-Wolfe went to investigate the place. He found that the proprietor, “red-faced, jovial, and generous,” was a burly man named Jacques Cabassou. Less congenial was Cabassou’s wife, who served as bartender and cashier and kept Cabassou from buying too many drinks and meals for the needy students who frequented the place. Ashton-Wolfe became more interested when he learned that her name was Marcelle, and he filched one of the meal bills she had written. He compared it with the handwriting on the love letters from Tellier’s room. They matched.

Before Ashton-Wolfe could look further into La Cloche de Bois, another detective, named Rousseau, came up with a new lead. One of Tellier’s co-workers, a man named Guillaume, had taken a leave from work at the same time that Tellier disappeared. Guillaume was known to have owed Cabassou a sizable debt from gambling losses. Rousseau followed Guillaume’s trail to Antwerp, where he had sold some diamonds. Tellier’s landlady had said that her tenant often wore rings and tiepins set with diamonds. The conclusion Rousseau had drawn was that Guillaume killed Tellier for his diamonds to pay for his gambling losses.

Bertillon expressed doubts but sent Ashton-Wolfe and Rousseau to arrest Guillaume, now back at work. The detectives took Guillaume back to his apartment and searched it. They found two rings and a tiepin from which the stones had been taken. Guillaume paled when they showed him the evidence, and said that someone must have planted it there. The detectives had heard that excuse before and took him before the
juge d’instruction.

Guillaume’s story was that he had lost all his money gambling, and Cabassou gave him a chance to make it back. He gave him a letter of introduction to a man who needed a courier to take some diamonds to the market in Antwerp and sell them there. In return, Cabassou asked a favor: proof that Tellier and his wife were lovers. “As Cabassou said this,” Guillaume recalled, “he changed from the smiling, jovial fellow I had always known, until his face was that of a fiend.”
³³
Now it was clear that Cabassou had a motive for killing Tellier, though Guillaume insisted that he had not found the evidence of infidelity Cabassou had demanded.

Ashton-Wolfe and Rousseau went back to La Cloche de Bois, still disguised as mildly drunken students. They were reluctant to arrest Cabassou without further proof. So, pretending to be interested in better wine than they were served, they persuaded the tavern keeper to take them to his cellar. There, Ashton-Wolfe found what appeared to be bloodstains. The two men arrested Cabassou and called in Bertillon to examine the scene.

Bertillon pointed out all the signs he had expected except for the blind insects. “See, there is the sand, the sawdust, the coal; and in a place filled with barrels and bottles of wine, you will have an abundance of the bacilli of alcohol fermentation.” Bertillon insisted that there must be another cellar, and a further search revealed “a tiny, pitch-dark recess, gained by a door under the stairs. Bertillon’s theory was vindicated: at last we stood in the place where the murder had been committed. Blood had splashed on the floor and walls, and the roof was alive with the
Anophthalmi
[the blind beetles].”
³⁴
After killing Tellier, Cabassou had removed his diamonds and sent Guillaume to sell them, hoping to throw suspicion onto him. If it had not been for Bertillon’s scientific methods and acute observation, Guillaume might well have been convicted. With a note of triumph, Bertillon pointed out to Ashton-Wolfe that jealousy had been at the heart of the case.
Cherchez la femme,
as he had predicted, had been the key to solving it.

vii

Accounts like this one, and some whose details are as fantastic as any in fiction, made Bertillon a legend in Paris — even throughout Europe and the Americas. Though he ostensibly shunned publicity, this kind of adulation would turn almost anyone’s head, and at the height of his career, Bertillon made a blunder in the most controversial investigation of his lifetime. It would stain his reputation ever after.

Bertillon was unwise, or unfortunate, enough to enter the Dreyfus case at the very beginning. Once he had given his opinion about the handwriting on the incriminating
bordereau
— that Captain Dreyfus was the author — he found it impossible to retract it.

Some writers have called Bertillon a “notorious anti-Semite” and suggested that it was bigotry that led him to that rash — and ultimately false — judgment. But there are no other instances in Bertillon’s life where he seems to have demonstrated anti-Semitism, and his brother, Jacques, was married to a Jewish woman.
³⁵
Moreover, at the time Bertillon pronounced his judgment on the handwriting, he may not even have known the name of the person who was alleged to have written the
bordereau,
or that the suspect was Jewish. All he did know was that high-ranking military officers strongly believed that the writer was guilty. But though Bertillon probably did not act in the beginning out of anti-Semitism, he refused to change his mind as facts emerged to challenge his findings, and he came to speak of “the Jews” as being part of an attempt to undermine French military and governmental authority.
³⁶
As a result, the Dreyfus affair divided the Bertillons, an egalitarian, anticlerical family, with Jacques becoming a passionate Dreyfusard who did not speak to his brother for several years.