The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (24 page)

For Bertillon, this case was a mere episode. He would not listen to his French colleagues, such as Lacassagne and Locard, who by now recognized the importance of fingerprinting. Indeed, Locard had been fascinated from the beginning by the new method and performed painful experiments on himself — burning his fingers with cold and hot irons — to see if his fingerprints would change, finding that they did not. But Bertillon treated the new discovery as a minor supplement to anthropometry. He never repudiated his statement “My measurements are surer than any fingerprint pattern,”
⁴⁵
and by 1910, France was the only country in Europe that was not using fingerprinting as its primary identification system.

ix

With or without fingerprints, Bertillon was still successful in solving many crimes, and his accomplishments were recognized throughout Europe and the United States. Among his commendations was a medal from Queen Victoria for helping to identify bodies from the wreck of the ship
Drummond Castle
in 1896; though there were few comparative materials for Bertillon to work with, his ability to take precise measurements allowed some relatives to claim their dead.

The American muckraking writer Ida Tarbell came to interview Bertillon in 1894. “The prisoner who passes through his hands,” an admiring Tarbell wrote, “is subjected to measurements and descriptions that leave him forever ‘spotted.’ He may efface his tattooing, compress his chest, dye his hair, extract his teeth, scar his body, dissimulate his height. It is useless. The record against him is unfailing. He cannot pass the Bertillon archives without recognition; and, if he is at large, the relentless record may be made to follow him into every corner of the globe where there is a printing press, and every man who reads may become a detective furnished with information which will establish his identity. He is never again safe.”
⁴⁶
Tarbell said that the Parisian apaches had invented a new phrase in their street argot: being arrested was referred to as
un sourire pour le studio Bertillon,
or “a smile for the Bertillon studio.”
⁴⁷

In the same interview, Tarbell asked Bertillon whether his measuring system proved or disproved the theories of Cesare Lombroso and many other criminologists, who believed that certain physical characteristics were signs of criminality. He dismissed these theories, many of which were based on sheer racism. “No, I do not feel convinced that it is the lack of symmetry in the visage, or the size of the orbit, or the shape of the jaw, which make a man an evil-doer,” he answered, continuing:

A certain characteristic may incapacitate him for fulfilling his duties, thus thrusting him down in the struggle for life, and he becomes a criminal because he is down. Lombroso, for example, might say that since there is a spot on the eye of the majority of criminals, therefore the spot on the eye indicates a tendency to crime; not at all. The spot is a sign of defective vision, and the man who does not see well is a poorer workman than he who has a strong, keen eyesight. He falls behind in his trade, loses heart, takes to bad ways, and turns up in the criminal ranks. It was not the spot on his eye which made him a criminal; it only prevented his having an equal chance with his comrades. The same thing is true of other so-called criminal signs. One needs to exercise great discretion in making anthropological deductions.
⁴⁸

Anthropometry led to a significant change in the way nations viewed their populations. A French law passed in July 1912 required “nomads and itinerants” — people such as traveling peddlers and the like — to carry “anthropometric identity cards.”
⁴⁹
These cards, which included the bearer’s name, date and place of birth, parents’ names, a photograph, and fingerprints, were the forerunners of the national identity card.

Significantly, it became a crime
not
to carry evidence of who one was. Neither criminals nor law-abiding citizens could disappear into a crowd or find anonymity by moving from place to place. As the requirements to provide proof of identity grew stronger, one would always be connected with one’s past through records.

Of course, in some places, people resisted encroachments on their privacy, mourned their right to be anonymous. This may explain the popularity of fictional criminals, particularly those — like Fantômas — who were able to change their appearance and identity easily.

In 1911, a short time after the theft of the
Mona Lisa,
the reporter Katherine Blackford interviewed Bertillon about his system. He demonstrated several kinds of measuring and photographic equipment. At the end of their talk, she wrote, “we went up to the roof of the Palais de Justice [where he worked] whence we could see the Panthéon, the towers of and spire of Notre Dame, and Sainte-Chapelle. Only a few days before, on account of the theft of ‘la Joconde’ from the Louvre, he had photographed this view.”
⁵⁰

Bertillon was now fifty-eight years old, with a worldwide reputation. Robert Heindl, commissioner of police in Dresden, said of Bertillon’s long term of service, “Paris became the Mecca of the police, and Bertillon their prophet.”
⁵¹
Solving the theft of the masterpiece would be the capstone of his career, if he could accomplish it. In a promising development, two suspects were soon brought into custody. However, they would lead Bertillon and the Sûreté on a false trail into the world of art, which was in the midst of its own identity crisis: struggling to define reality and rediscover how to portray it.

6

THE SUSPECTS

T
he fifty-thousand-franc reward that the
Paris-Journal
had offered for information leading to the return of the
Mona Lisa
naturally brought numerous replies that proved to be hoaxes or false alarms. One response, however, led to the arrest of two suspects whose names were well known to the avant-garde art community of Paris: Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire.

The letter that set off this train of events appeared in the
Paris-Journal
on August 29, 1911, addressed to the editor, who reprinted it on his paper’s front page with the precise sum and time omitted:

Monsieur,
On the 7th of May, 1911, I stole a Phoenician statuette from one of the galleries of the Louvre. I am holding this at your disposition, in return for the sum of _________ francs. Trusting that you will respect my confidence, I shall be glad to meet you at [such and such a place] between____ and _____ o’clock.
¹

As the editor commented, although the newspaper had offered a reward for the
Mona Lisa,
it “has never undertaken to ransom
all
the works of art stolen from the Louvre.” Nonetheless, this “was an opportunity to check a detail that would be interesting if proven genuine,” so one of the paper’s reporters went to meet “a young man, aged somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, very well-mannered… whose face and look and behavior bespoke at once a kind heart and a certain lack of scruple.”
²

This was indeed the thief, and he showed the reporter what he had taken from the Louvre. The reporter described it as “a rather crude bust, an example of the somewhat rudimentary art of the Phoenicians.”
³
When a curator of the museum examined it, he confirmed from markings that it was from the Louvre’s collection (no one had even noticed it was missing) but said it was not a Phoenician but an Iberian sculpture, recently excavated from diggings at Cerro de los Santos near Osuna, Spain. Such details didn’t interest the
Paris-Journal,
which gleefully exhibited the object in its window and paid the young thief, who happened to be a writer, to tell its readers how he had obtained it:

It was in March, 1907 that I entered the Louvre for the first time — a young man with time to kill and no money to spend.… [Other newspapers had insisted that the
Mona Lisa
’s theft was the result of allowing the public into the museum free of charge. This letter seemed to confirm that, and the practice was soon stopped.]

It was about one o’clock. I found myself in the gallery of Asian antiquities. A single guard was sitting motionless. I was about to climb the stairs leading to the floor above when I noticed a half-open door on my left. I had only to push it, and found myself in a room filled with hieroglyphs and Egyptian statues… in any case the place impressed me profoundly because of the deep silence and the absence of any human being. I walked through several adjoining rooms, stopping now and again in a dim corner to caress an ample neck or a well-turned cheek.

It was at that moment that I suddenly realized how easy it would be to pick up and take away almost any object of moderate size.… I was just then in a small room, about two meters by two in the “Gallery of Phoenician Antiquities.”

Being absolutely alone, and hearing no sounds whatever, I took the time to examine about fifty heads that were there, and I chose one of a woman, with, as I recall, twisted, conical forms on each side. I put the statue under my arm, pulled up the collar of my overcoat with my left hand, and calmly walked out, asking my way of the guard, who was still completely motionless.

I sold the statue to a Parisian painter friend of mine. He gave me a little money — fifty francs, I think, which I lost the same night in a billiard parlor.

“What of it?” I said to myself. “All Phoenicia is there for the taking.”
⁴

The thief went on to describe how he stole and sold several other pieces before leaving the city. He had returned in May 1911 and resumed his career of looting objects from the Louvre. He noticed that the collection in the Phoenician room, his favorite hunting ground, was much diminished, and blamed that on “imitators of mine.”
⁵

Unfortunately, the thief wrote, what promised to be a steady source of income was now ruined because of “this hullabaloo in the paintings department [the
Mona Lisa
theft]. I regret this exceedingly, for there is a strange, an almost voluptuous charm about stealing works of art, and I shall probably have to wait several years before resuming my activities.”
⁶

i

Naturally enough, the article caused a sensation. The
Paris-Journal
encouraged its readers to think that the unnamed thief might well be the culprit in the
Mona Lisa
case as well. France’s undersecretary of state of beaux-arts, Étienne Dujardin-Beaumetz, under pressure because he was ultimately the person responsible for the Louvre, filed a complaint with the public prosecutor against a “person or persons unknown,” in an attempt to get the newspaper to reveal the name of the person who stole the “Phoenician” heads.

But nowhere was the consternation greater than at 11, boulevard de Clichy, in Montmartre, the artists’ quarter on the Right Bank of the Seine. This was the residence and studio of Pablo Picasso and his mistress Fernande Olivier — and Picasso was the artist who had bought the “Phoenician” statuettes from the Louvre thief. The apartment was a comfortable one, very different from the “starving artist” garret of myth. Picasso had finished with that phase of his career two years earlier when he moved out of his previous apartment, where the only heat had come from a rusty iron stove and there was no gas or electricity. There, Picasso had to hold a candle next to the canvas when he worked at night, his favorite time for painting. Now, he was selling paintings regularly to admirers like Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo, wealthy Americans who had settled in Paris. Picasso also had a dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who relieved the young Spanish artist of the need to struggle to find gallery space or, even worse, submit his paintings to a jury for the annual Salon des Indépendants. The Picassos (as Fernande liked to call the couple, mistaking Pablo’s affection for a permanent attachment) even had a maid now, the hallmark of the Parisian bourgeoisie. The maid liked her job, for the couple often slept late, relieving her from early morning duties.

On his first visit to Paris in 1900, just before his nineteenth birthday, Picasso and his friend the poet Carles Casagemas found rooms in Montmartre, where the atmosphere was startlingly free compared to that in Barcelona, their hometown. Pablo discovered that young, beautiful women were willing to pose nude for him (and sleep with him), and he and Carles often stayed out all night at cafés where art and literature and sex and politics were discussed far into the night. They took girlfriends dancing at the Moulin de la Galette, a gaslit dance hall next to one of the few working windmills left on Montmartre. Picasso was inspired to paint the scene, brilliantly capturing its garish, underworldly quality. He and Carles visited the Louvre, no doubt standing like any other tourists in front of the
Mona Lisa,
and the Museé du Luxembourg, where the works of then-modern artists like the impressionists were on display. When he left Paris, keeping a promise to his parents to be home by Christmas, Pablo told himself that he would return.

Early in 1901, Picasso started an avant-garde art magazine in Madrid while Carles returned to Paris, trying to rekindle his relationship with a woman he had fallen in love with. When she spurned him, Carles shot himself (after trying to kill her first and missing). The news shocked Picasso, and he threw himself into the creation of art. This was the beginning of his Blue Period, named not only for the predominant color in his canvases, but for the melancholy quality he gave his human subjects. Later that year he moved into the apartment Carles had occupied in Paris and found backers for a well-received exhibition of his own work. He also met a neighbor named Max Jacob, a homosexual poet and would-be painter who would become one of Picasso’s closest friends. (Picasso, seeing Jacob’s paintings, advised him to stick to poetry.
⁷
)

After a return to Barcelona, Picasso settled in Paris for good in April 1904, renting a run-down apartment in an oddly shaped building on the hill of Montmartre at 13, rue Ravignan. Max Jacob called it the Bateau-Lavoir because it resembled one of the laundry barges moored in the Seine. The place was a haven for artists and other bohemians, and arguments, singing, weeping, and cries of passion could be heard through the thin walls at all hours. Picasso, who loved animals, kept two dogs and, in a drawer, a small white mouse. In August, during a thunderstorm, he found a sodden kitten on the street and picked it up. After he reached the Bateau-Lavoir, he encountered a young woman who had gone inside to seek shelter from the storm. He offered her the kitten, and when she laughed, he invited her to see his studio.

Her name was Fernande Olivier (the last name was her own invention) and although she was only a few months older than Picasso, she had already been married and given birth to a son. To him, she was a woman of the world, the first he had ever known other than prostitutes. Asking her to move into his apartment, as he did a few months later, was a rite of passage for him.

As for his appeal to her, “There was nothing especially attractive about him at first sight,” she was to recall. After all, he was five feet three inches tall, with stiff, unkempt hair and a gnome-like face. “But his radiance, an inner fire one sensed in him, gave him a sort of magnetism which I was unable to resist.”
⁸
That volcanic energy made itself felt through his penetrating dark eyes, which shine out from every photograph made of Picasso, regarding the camera with defiance.

Picasso was possessive of Fernande, preventing her even from going shopping alone, lest some man see her and carry her off. He forbade her to do housework, for he liked chaos where he worked (even later, when they had a housekeeper, the woman was instructed not to touch his studio), and Fernande was perfectly content to serve as his sexual companion. She showed up increasingly in his paintings, which now took on a rosy hue. It must have increased Fernande’s sense of security that he sometimes painted her with a husband and child.

Now with her on his arm, he circulated through the cabarets and bars of Montmartre, meeting others who aspired, as he did, to become artists of one kind or another. The most important of these to his career would be Guillaume Apollinaire, two years older than Picasso but very much a man of the world who had learned the invaluable skill of appearing to know far more than he did.

The story of how Apollinaire and Picasso met has many versions. Not even the year is certain, and the two principals themselves recalled it differently. Nevertheless, it was a signal moment in the history of art. Apollinaire would serve as Picasso’s herald and publicist; doing so would enhance Apollinaire’s reputation as well. Picasso was inarticulate on the subject of his art, and Apollinaire was articulate on everything. They were like two elements that, when combined, created an explosion.