The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (36 page)

The police took the Lancelottis and Séguenot in for questioning. When Vincent heard that Perugia had accused him of hiding the
Mona Lisa,
he vehemently denied it. He admitted knowing Perugia and also acknowledged that he and his brother had gone to the railway station when Perugia left for Italy, but that had been no more than a friendly gesture toward their fellow Italian.

Séguenot was emphatic as well. “I work at home as a washerwoman,” she said. “Nothing, however small, could have been brought into our miserable little room without my noticing it immediately.… If I had seen [the painting] in Perugia’s possession, I would have torn it fom his grasp and rushed it back to the Louvre.”
²¹
In fact, she added under further questioning, “It was only when Perugia was arrested that I even learned that the painting
existed!
” The police official who questioned her expressed some surprise at this, as well he might have, for it seemed unlikely that anyone living in Paris in 1911 could have been oblivious to the theft.

Despite their denials, Magistrate Drioux ordered all three suspects charged with receiving and concealing an art object stolen from a state museum. He released Séguenot and Michael, ordering only Vincent to be held at La Santé Prison.

Those who believed that Perugia could not possibly have acted alone felt that the Lancelotti brothers did more than merely conceal the painting. It was suggested that they could have been his accomplices in physically removing the painting and its heavy frame from the wall of the museum. The argument against this scenario, of course, is that the only two people known to have seen the thief — the plumber who opened the stairway door for him and the passerby who saw him throw away a doorknob outside the museum — both told police that there had been only one man.

In any case, Drioux eventually dropped all charges against the trio when it became clear that Perugia would not be returning to France to testify against them. His testimony was the only evidence of their involvement, though many accounts of the case since then have mentioned them as co-conspirators.

vi

In January 1914, Perugia’s hopes of receiving a reward for returning the painting were finally dashed. Alfredo Geri collected the twenty-five thousand francs that had been offered by Les Amis du Louvre, a society of wealthy art lovers, for information leading to the return of the painting. The grateful French government also bestowed upon him its most prestigious decoration, the Légion d’honneur, as well as the title
officier de l’instruction publique.
Geri showed what were perhaps his true colors when he promptly turned around and sued the French government for 10 percent of the value of the
Mona Lisa.
His contention was that a Gallic tradition gave the finder of lost property a reward of one-tenth the value of the object. In the end, a court decided that the
Mona Lisa
was beyond price and that Geri had only acted as an honest citizen should. He received no further reward.

Perugia, meanwhile, was growing depressed in jail. Perhaps it bothered him that Geri collected the reward he had hoped to get, or merely that the authorities insisted on keeping him locked up, not willing to accept him as a hero. Guards reported that he occasionally wept. A psychologist came to see him, but Perugia at first refused treatment, insisting that he wasn’t crazy. After a little coaxing, however, he began to discuss his feelings. By the time his trial began on June 4, he was again calm and self-possessed, insisting that he had acted as a patriot.

Since there was no question of guilt, the legal proceedings were more like an inquest intended to establish the truth, if such a thing were possible. Three judges presided in a large room that had been remodeled to provide space for journalists from around the world. The designer of the room had placed on a cushion, in the middle of a semicircle, a massive silver hemisphere that symbolized justice. A cynical journalist remarked that it would not be prudent to allow the defendant to sit too closely to this artistic treasure.

Perugia was handcuffed when he entered the courtroom at 9:00
A.M.
, but he smiled graciously at the photographers. Cavaliere Barilli, president of the court and head of the three-judge panel, called the proceedings to order. He asked a few questions of Perugia to establish his parentage, the town where he was born, and his occupation. Again, asked if he was a housepainter by trade, Perugia insisted that he was a
pittore,
an artist. The judge asked if he had ever been arrested before, and Perugia’s memory failed him. The judge reminded him of the two occasions when he had been arrested in France, once for theft.

With that completed, the court allowed one of Perugia’s lawyers to make a motion to dismiss the case because the crime did not occur in Italy and there had been no formal complaint by the French government. Barilli reserved judgment on that matter and resumed his questioning of Perugia. Like everyone else, the judge was curious to learn how this apparently humble man could have carried out the audacious crime. Could Perugia describe what happened on August 21, 1911, when he stole the
Mona Lisa
?

Somewhat eagerly, Perugia asked if he could also tell why he had committed the crime, but the judge told him that he must do that later. For now, he wanted a description of the act itself.

Perugia offered an abbreviated version: He had entered the Louvre through the front door early that Monday, wandered through various rooms, took the
Mona Lisa
from its place on the wall, and left the same way. The judge pointed out that during the pretrial interrogations, Perugia had admitted trying to force the door at the bottom of the little stairwell that led to the Cour du Sphinx. Perugia had no answer for this, and the judge did not press him for one.

It is difficult to understand why Perugia changed his story or even why he did not tell the full truth about how he entered and left the museum, given the fact that he freely confessed to the crime itself. Perhaps he was afraid of implicating others, such as the Lancelotti brothers, or even people who might have helped him in other ways, both before and after the theft. The alibi that he had concocted for himself — that he was a patriot reclaiming one of Italy’s treasures — sounded better if he had been the sole actor in the drama.

Now, Perugia was asked why he had stolen the
Mona Lisa.
He responded that all the Italian paintings in the Louvre were stolen works, taken from their rightful home, Italy. When asked how he knew this, he said that when he worked at the Louvre, he had found documents that proved it. He remembered in particular a book with prints that showed “a cart, pulled by two oxen; it was loaded with paintings, statues, other works of art. Things that were leaving Italy and going to France.”
²²

Was that when he decided to steal the
Mona Lisa
? Not exactly, Perugia replied. First he considered the paintings of Raphael, Correggio, Giorgione… all great masters. “But I decided on the
Mona Lisa,
which was the smallest painting and the easiest to transport.”

“So there was no chance,” asked the court, “that you decided on it because it was the most valuable painting?”

“No, sir, I never acted with that in mind. I only desired that this masterpiece would be put in its place of honor here in Florence.”
²³

Allowed to continue recounting his experiences in Paris, Perugia described how the French workers looked down on him. They hid his tools. They mocked him. They put salt and pepper into the wine he drank with his lunch. Finally, they called him “macaroni” and “dirty Italian.” The reporters wrote the slurs down, their pencils moving furiously. When that part of Perugia’s testimony appeared in print, his popularity at home was secure.

Perhaps thinking that it would be wise not to allow Perugia to turn the proceedings into his personal forum, Barilli played one of the prosecution’s trump cards: “Is it true,” he asked, “that you tried to sell ‘La Gioconda’ in England?”

Accounts of the trial say that this was one of the few moments when Perugia lost his composure. He glared around the courtroom, clenching his fists as if to do battle with his accusers.

“Me? I offered to sell La Gioconda to the English? Who says so? It’s false! Who says so? Who wrote that?”

Barilli pointed out that “it is you yourself who said so, during one of your examinations which I have right here in front of me.”

Unable to deny that, Perugia recalled going to England on a pleasure trip with some friends. He saw some postcards of the
Mona Lisa,
and that made him decide to get advice on how he could take the painting to Italy. “I was certainly not going to get this kind of advice in France! Therefore from this same postcard vendor, I got the name of an antiques dealer. That’s how I found out about Duveen. At the antiques dealer, I asked how I could take the
Mona Lisa
to Italy, but Duveen didn’t take me seriously. I protest against this lie that I would have wanted to sell the painting to London. If such a thing had ever been my intention… I would have knocked on the door of all the antique dealers and asked for money.… But I wanted to take it back to Italy, and to return it to Italy, and that is what I did.”
²⁴

“Nevertheless,” said Barilli, “your unselfishness wasn’t total — you did expect
some
benefit from restoration.”

“Ah benefit, benefit —,” Perugia responded, “certainly something better than what happened to me here.”
²⁵

That drew a laugh from the spectators.

The hearing took only two days — quite speedy, reporters noted, for an Italian legal proceeding. It was clear that the judges didn’t want the publicity generated by the trial to go on for long. Nor did they tarry over their decision: the next day, Barilli called the court to order and announced a sentence for Perugia of one year and fifteen days. As Perugia was led away, he was heard to say, “It could have been worse.”
²⁶

It actually got better. The following month, Perugia’s attorneys presented arguments for an appeal. This time, the court was more lenient, reducing the sentence to seven months. Perugia had already been incarcerated nine days longer than that since his arrest, so he was released. A crowd had gathered to greet him as he left the courthouse. Someone asked him where he would go now, and he said he would return to the hotel where he had left his belongings. When he did, he found that the establishment’s name had changed. No longer was it the Tripoli-Italia; now it was the Hotel La Gioconda — and it was too fancy to allow a convicted criminal to stay there. Perugia’s lawyers had to vouch for him before the concierge would give him a room.

Was that the full story? Had the truth of the
Mona Lisa
’s disappearance been revealed? Many people did not think so. Though the romantic tale of the humble Italian workman falling in love with the painting and liberating it for his native country was charming, some felt that such a great theft required a larger explanation, a more elaborate plot — a mastermind, not an ordinary workman. Certainly the Sûreté would have preferred to have been outwitted by a criminal genius instead of having to explain why they had miserably bungled the investigation.

But Paris had many more crimes to offer — including two spectacular murder cases — and though few knew it, the
Mona Lisa
case was not quite closed, either.

9

CHERCHEZ LA FEMME

I
t was Alexandre Dumas
père,
in a book called
Les Mohicans de Paris,
who first coined the phrase
cherchez la femme
(“look for the woman”) to suggest that at the heart of every crime there was a woman. His dictum made its way into the consciousness of French criminologists, and even Bertillon, who strove for the objectivity of a scientist, when faced with a mystery nevertheless could not resist asking, “Where is the woman?”
¹

The female criminal was the subject of considerable theorizing among social scientists during the Belle Époque. Cesare Lombroso, who argued that criminals were atavistic types — that is, degenerates who had regressed on the scale of evolution — believed that
all
women were biologically inferior to men and hence inherently atavistic.
²
This did not mean that all women would eventually become criminals, but that they were more susceptible than men to influences that could produce aberrant behavior. These influences were as varied as the menstrual cycle, the pressures of urban life, and even the
faits divers
crime stories found in the daily newspapers. Any of these might produce a passionate response that could drive women to criminal acts. So could feminism. In the words of Théodore Joran, a rabid antifeminist, emancipated women acquired “a taste for carnage” because they could no longer contain “the instincts of brutality and savagery that, in [women’s] proper state of subordination,” were kept under control.
³

Of course, one result of the belief that women could not control themselves was that courts and juries were frequently more tolerant, not to say forgiving, of women accused of crimes. Ann-Louise Shapiro, a modern feminist author, found that the acquittal rate for women in France was over 50 percent in the 1890s, while only about 30 percent for men. Women criminals sometimes became “celebrities as well as pariahs.”
⁴
The Cours d’Assises were popular places to go for entertainment, and society women were often spectators at the trials of other women. They were known to bring picnic baskets containing canapés, sandwiches, and champagne to consume during recesses. Furthering the trend, many theater companies found that audiences flocked to plays that imitated courtroom dramas.

Shapiro cites a famous case of the 1880s in which Marie Bière, a young actress, shot Robert Gentien, a young man-about-town who had fathered her child. Gentien refused to acknowledge the infant as his own and even when the child died did not attend its funeral. Bière shot him twice in the back as he was out walking with a new mistress. Though she failed to kill him, she was tried for attempted murder. Bière’s attorneys showed that Gentien was her first lover, that she resisted his suggestion to have an abortion because she wanted to be the mother of his child, and that she had even attempted suicide in his presence in a vain attempt to win his sympathy. Bière was acquitted by twelve male jurors who wept openly as their verdict was announced.

La Lanterne
editorialized that “the jury, in acquitting Mlle. Bière, had performed a useful service.”
⁵
A wittier commentator, in
Le Figaro,
wrote that the defendant “be canonized as Sainte Marie, patron saint of gunsmiths, to whom abandoned women might make pilgrimages to have their revolvers blessed.”
⁶
Gentien himself was obliged to flee Paris to avoid public opprobrium.

i

The popularity of crime stories, not only the supposedly factual
faits divers
but also the fictional
feuilletons,
was often cited as a cause of female criminality. One social critic, Jules Langevin, stated that “the
roman feuilleton
performs the same ravages in women’s brains, perhaps does even graver damage, than does alcohol in the brains of men.”
⁷
Writing in 1902, a Dr. Séverin Icard cited the case of a young woman who regularly came to his office with a bewildering variety of symptoms. Finally, Dr. Icard noticed that the diseases these symptoms indicated were occurring in alphabetical order. Further investigation revealed that the patient had been receiving copies of a medical dictionary, issued in installments, and so developed hysterical symptoms of the disease described in that month’s reading.

The sexism went both ways. Two murder cases in the Belle Époque created enormous scandals, not only because the accused in both cases were women of good breeding, but also because they used their femininity to evade responsibility for what seemed like utterly ruthless crimes. Certainly what happened to these two murderers stood in stark contrast to the members of the Bande à Bonnot. And their trials showed that the search for truth — or the attempts to conceal it — could extend even into the courtroom.

ii

The first defendant was Marguerite Steinheil (“Meg” to the newspaper writers), who was already notorious for her role in the sudden death of President Faure in 1899. Long after the event, the story still circulated that Faure had died while in the throes of a passion so intense that his dead fingers were impossible to prize from the hair of the naked young woman whose head was in his lap.

The legend only added a certain piquancy to Meg’s reputation. Looking at her husband, who had been forty when he married her in 1890 (she was then twenty-one), one could understand why a woman as beautiful and vibrant as Meg might want to take a lover. Steinheil was timid, balding, and dull. The only reason Meg had married him in the first place was that her recently widowed mother feared that her headstrong young daughter would marry a handsome but penniless young officer she had fallen in love with.

Steinheil, a mediocre academic painter, had no fortune. All he had to offer Meg was a large house in a fashionable cul-de-sac called the impasse Ronsin, in the fifteenth arrondissement, where they settled down after honeymooning in Italy. In June 1891, Meg gave birth to a daughter, Marthe, and soon became bored. All around her she saw people living in luxury, but Steinheil could not afford to give her fine clothes and jewelry. Meg looked for excitement and luxuries outside marriage, using her youth and charm to attract wealthy lovers. Her first was a government prosecutor, Manuel Baudouin. She was with him for four years; during that time she explained the lavish gifts she received by telling Steinheil they were from an Aunt Lily. Meg went to visit her aunt frequently, and it seems likely that if Steinheil was unaware of what was really going on, it was a willful ignorance on his part. At some point, Meg had also made it clear to him that the sexual part of their marriage was over. From then on they slept in separate bedrooms.

Steinheil received fringe benefits from Meg’s liaisons when her lovers asked him to paint portraits or other works of art. When Meg became the mistress of President Faure in 1897, Steinheil received a government commission for a large historical painting. His rising income enabled Meg to hold the weekly salons where she presided over three or four hundred guests, including some of the leading social, artistic, and political figures of the time. Among them were Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty; Émile Zola; Hippolyte-François-Alfred Chauchard, the founder of the Louvre
grand magasin
(department store); and Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal. It was said that even the Prince of Wales graced her drawing room while on a visit to France.

Steinheil, however, was becoming more of a burden to her. He had begun to need opium to sleep at night, and now in his mid-fifties, he was less and less able to turn out canvases that Meg could “sell” to her lovers. Thus, in 1905, she took up with Émile Chouanard, a wealthy widower not much older than she. A man used to having his own way, he quickly tired of the game of meeting her furtively in hotel rooms. Instead, he offered to pay the rent for a villa where they could spend days (and nights) in privacy and comfort. Meg took him up on this and rented a place called the Vert-Logis, forty-five minutes by train from Paris, in the town of Bellevue. Meg signed the lease with the name of a friend but had to share her secret with her longtime maid, Mariette Wolff, who took on the duties of housekeeper at Vert-Logis.

Unfortunately, Chouanard broke off the liaison in November 1907, apparently because Meg had presumptuously tried to influence his choice of a fiancé for his daughter. Not long after, as if to console herself that she was still attractive, Meg fainted while riding the Métro — seemingly to entice a well-dressed young man standing nearby. She had a good eye for men, for he turned out to be the Count Emmanuel de Balincourt. He walked her home and was invited to dinner. Before long, he found himself in her bed at Vert-Logis, which she had kept after the breakup with Chouanard. However, while de Balincourt was posing for Steinheil to paint his portrait, he was overcome by guilt at cuckolding the man and broke off the relationship.

Meg was at an age when women who live off their beauty are fearful when they look into the mirror. She also had her daughter, now in her teens, to consider. A husband would one day have to be found for Marthe, and Meg wanted to be able to give her, not only a good dowry, but a respectable family background. Her next lover seemed chosen with those goals in mind. He was Maurice Borderel, a widower with three adolescent children of his own. Borderel, from the Ardennes region, was not a sophisticated Parisian like her other lovers, and soon fell in love with her, assuming the responsibility for paying the rent at Vert-Logis. (Meg was now using the villa as a country home for her family, including her husband, daughter, and mother.)

However, Borderel told Meg frankly that he could not marry her. He did not wish his children to have a stepmother, not even if Meg divorced her husband. He felt that it would dishonor his first wife’s memory to put a divorcée in her place. Things might be different when his children were older and on their own, another ten years, say. Or perhaps if Meg’s husband were to die… but Borderel promised nothing.

iii

On Sunday, May 31, 1908, precisely at 6:00
A.M.
, Rémy Couillard, the Steinheil family’s valet, started down from his bedroom on the top floor of the house in the impasse Ronsin. He heard muffled cries coming from the second-floor bedroom that belonged to the Steinheils’ daughter, Marthe. That seemed strange, for he knew Marthe was at Vert-Logis, where the rest of the family had planned to go that afternoon. Meg’s mother, Mme. Japy, had arrived two days earlier and was sleeping in one of the other bedrooms on the second floor. When Couillard investigated, he found Meg bound hand and foot to Marthe’s bed, with her nightgown pulled up around her face. Only twenty, Couillard was somewhat transfixed by the sight, until Meg screamed that there were burglars in the house and told him to go for help.

Afraid to leave the room, Couillard threw open the shutters and began to shout. Three people heard him — a neighbor, a night watchman, and a policeman. They rushed into the house and gingerly searched the ground floor for intruders. Finding none, they went upstairs, where Couillard was struggling to free Meg from her bonds. In the two bedrooms next to hers, they discovered more shocking sights: the bodies of Meg’s husband and mother, with cords tied around their necks indicating that they had been strangled.

Within hours, an impressive array of law enforcement figures had arrived at the Steinheil residence to investigate, among them Alphonse Bertillon, who personally took photographs of the crime scenes and dusted the house for fingerprints. Also present was Octave Hamard, head of the Sûreté, who arrived with seven assistants in tow to announce that he was taking personal charge of the case. Finally, Magistrate Joseph Leydet, a close friend of the family who was rumored to be one of Meg’s lovers, had requested assignment as
juge d’instruction
to assemble evidence and determine what charges should be brought. Clearly, the case was already regarded as more than an ordinary one.