The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (28 page)

Géry Pieret, safely out of Paris, sent a wry note to the
Paris-Journal,
lamenting Apollinaire’s imprisonment and calling him “kindly, honest, and scrupulous.” Pieret signed himself “Baron Ignace d’Ormesan,” a reference to the main character in Apollinaire’s novel, who has the power to appear in many places at the same time. Artists and writers signed petitions to protest Apollinaire’s arrest, but the police still wanted to know who was the third man in the case. Finally, Apollinaire gave up Picasso’s name. “I did not describe his actual part in the affair, I merely said that he had been taken advantage of, and that he had never known that the antiquities he bought came from the Louvre.”
⁵⁹

Early the next day, September 12, Fernande answered the doorbell at Picasso’s apartment to find a detective there. Trembling, Picasso dressed hastily. “I had to help him,” wrote Fernande, “as he was almost out of his mind with fear.” Picasso was taken to the office of the investigating magistrate and “saw Apollinaire — pale, dishevelled and unshaven, with his collar torn, his shirt unbuttoned, no tie, and looking gaunt and insubstantial: a lamentable scarecrow.”
⁶⁰

There are differing accounts of what happened next. Fernande, writing long after she and Picasso had separated, declared:

Picasso became completely desperate: his heart failed him.… He too could only say what the magistrate asked him to say. Besides Guillaume had admitted so many things, true as well as false, that he had totally compromised Picasso.…

It has been said that Picasso denied his friend and pretended not to know him. That is quite untrue. Far from betraying him, that moment brought out the true strength of his friendship with Apollinaire.
⁶¹

Fernande, however, knew the story only as she had heard it from Picasso.

It seems significant that after the hearing, Magistrate Drioux allowed Picasso to go home and sent Apollinaire back to the Santé. Rumors spread that Picasso had denied everything, making Apollinaire out to be a liar. Nearly half a century later, Picasso told a journalist a version of the affair:

[Apollinaire] got himself arrested. Naturally, they confronted us. I can see him there now, with his handcuffs and his look of a big placid boy. He smiled at me as I came in, but I made no sign.

When the judge asked me: “Do you know this gentleman?” I was suddenly terribly frightened, and without knowing what I was saying, I answered: “I have never seen this man.”

I saw Guillaume’s expression change. The blood ebbed from his face. I am still ashamed.…
⁶²

vii

After another night in jail, during which he consoled himself by composing poetry, Apollinaire was taken to the court once again. Although this time he would have a lawyer present, he feared that Magistrate Drioux might find him guilty of complicity in the theft. He was held in the Mousetrap, a nickname for the “narrow, stinking cells” where prisoners awaited trial. Then a guard led him, handcuffed, down the corridor to the courtroom. The reporters and photographers pounced. “What a surprise to find myself suddenly stared at like a strange beast! All at once fifty cameras were aimed at me; the magnesium flashes gave a dramatic aspect to this scene in which I was playing a role. I soon recognized a few friends and acquaintances.… I think that I must have laughed and wept at the same time.”
⁶³
It was humiliating for him, nonetheless, to be led through the crowd in handcuffs — and without a tie.

The prosecutors had raised the stakes: Apollinaire was now accused of being not merely an accomplice but the chief of the international gang of criminals who had come to Paris to loot its museums. Magistrate Drioux, however, seemed skeptical and questioned Apollinaire at length about his relationship with Pieret, whom Apollinaire was now calling his “secretary.” Apollinaire admitted allowing Pieret to stay with him in 1911, even though he knew he had stolen before, in 1907, and was even now resuming his career of crime. The judge expressed surprise at this “degree of indulgence.”

“Here is part of my reason,” Apollinaire said. “Pieret is a little bit my creation. He is very queer, very strange, and after studying him I made him the hero of one of the last stories in my
L’hérésiarque et Cie.
So it would have been a kind of literary ingratitude to let him starve.”
⁶⁴

Apollinaire’s friends in the courtroom must have held their breath, for no one knew if Magistrate Drioux had a sense of humor or if Apollinaire’s sally might offend him. Opening the dossier that the Sûreté had prepared, Drioux started to read the accusations. Apparently there were some anonymous messages that he found absurd.

“You bought, very recently, it has been alleged,” Drioux said, “a castle in the
départment
of the Drôme?”

Apollinaire could not resist another humorous reply. “You must be referring to a castle in Spain,” he told the magistrate. “I have seen many of those evaporate.”

“I have a letter here,” Drioux continued, apparently falling into the spirit of Apollinaire’s testimony, “from someone who says you borrowed two books from him, and that one of them… you never returned.”

“I imagine his reason for lending them to me was that I might read them,” said Apollinaire. “I haven’t read them yet. I will return them to him as soon as I can.”
⁶⁵

Magistrate Drioux finally announced that he was granting the petition of Apollinaire’s lawyer for the release of his client.

Ironically, the incident gave Apollinaire the fame that his writings had never brought him. Because the story of his arrest was so entangled with the theft of the
Mona Lisa,
it was reported worldwide. The
New York Times
called him “a well-known Russian
⁶⁶
literary man living in Paris [who] underwent a searching examination on the charge of having shielded Pieret from the law.”
⁶⁷
Publicity of whatever kind proved beneficial to his career: afterward, Apollinaire’s writings reached a wider audience.

Moreover, imprisonment provided inspiration for what may be his most enduring work, a book of poetry titled
Alcools
(
Spirits
), published two years later. One of the poems is “À la Santé”:

I

Before I enter my cell

I am required to strip naked

And then a sinister voice cries

Guillaume what have you become

I am a Lazarus entering the tomb

Not leaving it as he did

Farewell farewell the rounds are singing

To my years To the young girls

……………………

V

How slowly the hours pass

Like a funeral procession

You will mourn the hour that you wept

Which will pass too quickly

As every hour passes

VI

I listen to the clamor of the city

A prisoner without a view

I see nothing but a hostile sky

And the naked walls of my prison

The daylight draws within itself

Yet here a lamp still burns

We are alone in my cell

Beautiful clarity Beloved reason

While Apollinaire looked for solace from clarity and reason in his cell, elsewhere in the city were many who sought to create chaos and disorder. Very soon, a few of those avowed anarchists — and not ones who merely fired pistols into the air, like Picasso — would tear the city’s attention away from the missing
Mona Lisa.
Real criminals were plotting a modernist crime.

7

THE MOTOR BANDITS

O
n the night of the thirteenth of December, 1911, three men traveled by train to the fashionable Paris suburb of Boulogne-sur-Seine. They had purchased one-way tickets, for they planned to return by automobile. Not just any automobile either. They had scouted the area in daylight, looking at the shiny new cars parked outside the grand houses, before selecting one that belonged to a family named Normand. It was a Delaunay-Belleville, which many people regarded as the finest automobile in the world. The company, through its showroom on the Champs-Élysées, sold only the chassis, complete with six-cylinder engine and tires. Each purchaser then had to arrange for the construction of his own distinctive body, or coach, with companies that catered to this trade. However, every Delaunay-Belleville was still easily recognized by its distinctive circular radiator, which reflected the company’s origins as a boiler manufacturer.

A Delaunay-Belleville was not a casual purchase. The chassis alone cost fifteen thousand francs, the equivalent of five years’ wages for the skilled workmen who built it. It was a favorite of Nicholas II, the czar of Russia (he is said to have owned twenty), and — to make a point about the superiority of the French auto industry — virtually the required form of transportation for the president of France.

The three men waited until all the lights inside the house were extinguished, and allowed time for everyone inside to fall asleep. Then they forced a side door to the garage, not a difficult task, for all of them were familiar with burglars’ tools. Once inside, they used flashlights to examine the car. One of the men, Jules Bonnot, was an experienced mechanic and professional driver.

The men opened the large door of the garage and pushed the car outside. Starting it would be a noisy process, but one of the men stood in front of the radiator and turned the crank that rotated the driveshaft while Bonnot sat in the driver’s seat and worked the ignition lever.

Nothing happened. A light went on in an upstairs room of the house, and the three men huddled. Deciding that they could not abandon their plan now, they pushed the automobile into the street and managed to roll it around a corner. Bonnot examined the controls with his flashlight and discovered what he had been doing wrong. On a second attempt, the engine roared into life. Bonnot, who would become notorious as “the Demon Chauffeur,” felt a thrill of pleasure as he opened the throttle and felt the power at his fingertips. He had grand plans for this car. He would use it for something that had never been done with an automobile before.

i

What the newspapers came to call the Bonnot Gang began well before Bonnot himself arrived on the scene. In August 1909, nineteen-year-old Victor-Napoleon Lvovich Kibalchich, who later became known as Victor Serge, arrived in Paris. His father had fled Russia some years earlier, wanted for revolutionary activities there, and settled in Belgium. The family was poor, and one of Victor’s brothers is said to have died of starvation because his father could not afford to buy enough food. The home was decorated with portraits of executed revolutionaries, and on many nights, as young Victor listened, would-be revolutionaries met there to discuss ideas and plans. While still in his teens, he began to write articles for an anarchist newspaper named
Le Révolté,
signing them with the pseudonym Le Rétif (“the Restless One”).

Anarchists were by no means united on the course of action they should pursue to attain their goals. One of the points of dispute centered around the practice of
reprise individuelle
(“taking back by individuals,” which a bourgeois might call stealing). In theory,
reprise individuelle
was intended to adjust the inequality between rich and poor. A more radical idea was
illégalisme,
which, although it might appear at first glance to be the same thing, justified
any
action that anarchists might use to support themselves or the cause of anarchism.

Victor was among the extremists. When two anarchist Latvian sailors stole the payroll from a factory in North London, they shot twenty-two people, killing three, including a ten-year-old boy, in their attempt to escape. Finally the two sailors, cornered, committed suicide. The event was widely commented on. In
Le Révolté,
Victor praised the bandits for having shown that “anarchists don’t surrender.” What about the innocent people they shot? “Enemies!” Victor declared. “For us the enemy is whoever impedes us from living. We are the ones under attack, and we defend ourselves.”
¹

Though Serge was never to take part in any of the robberies carried out by the Bonnot Gang, his ideas provided the intellectual underpinnings and motivation for its members. When he reached Paris, he began to write for a newspaper named
l’anarchie.
Despite its name, the newspaper espoused a variety of views, not all political; it crusaded against smoking, drinking, and the consumption of meat. Its writers stood firmly in opposition to work, marriage, religion, military service, and voting. The editor, twenty-five-year-old André Roulot, who wrote under the name Lorulot, welcomed Serge as a colleague. Victor also reacquainted himself with Henriette “Rirette” Maîtrejean, a young woman anarchist he had met in Belgium. Two or three years older than Victor, she still looked like a teenager even though she had two children, by a husband she had married because he was an anarchist. Soon Rirette and her children moved in with Victor, and she too became a member of the staff of
l’anarchie.

Victor’s inflammatory articles were popular and caused the circulation of
l’anarchie
to rise, but they also created problems for Lorulot, who wasn’t willing to embrace illegalism. Anarchist activity in Paris had stepped up lately, inspiring a police crackdown. A young worker had been sent to jail on the charge of being a pimp, even though the woman in the case was his lover and he had hoped to rescue her from prostitution. After serving his term, the worker obtained a revolver and shot four policemen. At the demand of the prefect of police, Lépine, he was sentenced to death. On the date of his scheduled execution, a mob gathered at La Santé Prison, determined to halt it. Rioting broke out and lasted through the night, and cavalry had to be assembled as the guillotine was set up. Victor and Rirette were among the protesters. “At dawn,” Victor later recalled, “exhaustion quietened the crowd, and at the instant when the blade fell… a baffled frenzy gripped the twenty or thirty thousand demonstrators, and found its outlet in a long-drawn cry: ‘
Murderers!
’”
²

Publications like
l’anarchie
had to be careful not to be seen as inciting such violence, for they could be closed or raided by the police. The newspaper also faced attacks by others within the anarchist movement. Its windows were smashed by members of a rival paper, which felt that Victor’s illegalism discredited the movement. Quarrels even broke out among
l’anarchie
’s staff: one night, Lorulot caught a former editor trying to steal the printing equipment from the building in Montmartre where the newspaper had its offices. Someone actually summoned the police, who arrived only to find that both sides in the dispute insisted the others be arrested. Afterward, Lorulot received a bomb threat, which caused the landlord to demand that the newspaper’s staff vacate the premises.

Lorulot decided to move the entire operation away from Paris, to a northeastern suburb called Romainville. Here he rented a house with a large garden where fruit trees and lilacs grew. A train station put Paris within easy reach, and the bucolic atmosphere soon attracted others to what became a commune. It was also the seedbed for the Bonnot Gang.

One of the first to move into the house at Romainville was Raymond Callemin, an old friend of Victor Serge’s. The two had known each other since boyhood (as teens, they had lived in a commune south of Brussels) and followed the path to anarchism together. Raymond’s father was a disillusioned socialist who repaired shoes to eke out a meager living. Both Raymond and Victor avoided school, teaching themselves by reading radical books such as Émile Zola’s
Paris
and Louis Blanc’s
History of the French Revolution.
They began as socialists, but as Victor later recalled, “Anarchism swept us away completely because it both demanded everything of us and offered everything to us.”
³

Raymond would not have fit Lombroso’s physical description of a criminal type. He was nearsighted, handsome, and a strict vegetarian, and he liked to sprinkle his conversation with the phrase “La science dit…” (“Science tells us…”), which earned him the nickname “Raymond-la-Science.” After leaving Belgium, he had drifted through France and Switzerland. Like Victor, he contributed articles to socialist and anarchist newspapers and was often in trouble with the police, both for his writings (publishing antimilitarist articles was a crime in France) and for taking part in demonstrations, where he tended to get into fights with policemen.

Raymond-la-Science seems to have set the tone for the commune at Romainville, at least in its early days. Those who stayed there were served a “scientific” diet — brown rice, raw vegetables, porridge, and pasta with cheese. Salt, pepper, and vinegar were banned as being “unscientific,” although herbs were acceptable. Tobacco, alcohol, and coffee were banned. The members were encouraged to keep fit by taking part in Swedish exercises. Many would bicycle to the nearby Marne River and rent a boat for an afternoon of rowing.

The outwardly idyllic lifestyle, however, concealed darker activities, for there were characters in the group more sinister than Raymond-la-Science. Octave Garnier, also in his early twenties, admitted that he had been a rebel against authority from his earliest years, without even knowing why. At thirteen, he began to make his own way in the world, and his ideas crystallized: “I began to understand what life and social injustice was all about; I saw bad individuals and said to myself: ‘I must search for a way of getting out of this filthy mess of bosses, workers, bourgeois, judges, police and others.’ I loathed all these people, some because they put up with and took part in all this crap.”
⁴

He began to shoplift, was caught, and spent three months in jail. Subsequently it was difficult for him to find a job because he needed certificates of good behavior. Garnier learned to forge those, but the work he did in a bakery for sixteen to eighteen hours a day paid barely enough to live on. Garnier knew he needed an education, “to know more about things, and develop my mind and body.”
⁵
He attended labor meetings and added his body to demonstrations and strikes, but felt that the union leaders were too prone to give in to employers.

Then, at the age of eighteen, he discovered anarchism. “Within this milieu,” he later wrote, “I met individuals of integrity who were trying as much as possible to rid themselves of the prejudices that have made this world ignorant and barbaric. They were men with whom I found discussion a pleasure, for they showed me not utopias but things which one could see and touch.”
⁶
One of those things was
reprise individuelle,
and Garnier set out to put it into practice. Caught during one of his attempts at theft, he went back to jail. That was the pattern he followed for nearly two years. As he approached his twentieth birthday, when (despite his criminal record) he would face required military service, Garnier kept a job long enough to save travel money and left France for Belgium. There he took up with Marie Vuillemin, a young woman who had been married for only a month and already wanted to escape her husband.