Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection by Dorothy Hoobler, Thomas Hoobler Read Free Book Online

honor of the army; unfortunately, they saw honor only in clinging to what
     had clearly been discredited. Most onlookers were astonished by the verdict: once again, Dreyfus was found guilty, but this
     time with “extenuating circumstances,” as if there could be extenuating circumstances for treason. The president of France
     offered him a full pardon, which Dreyfus accepted, while continuing the legal efforts to prove his innocence. A civilian court
     cleared Dreyfus of all charges in 1906, and by an act of the French Parliament, he was reinstated to the army and decorated
     with the Légion d’honneur.
    The wounds of the Dreyfus affair were far from healed, however, and Bertillon in particular felt anguish, with good reason,
     that his own reputation had been damaged. He saw the theft of the
Mona Lisa
as a chance to show that he was still, as many believed, France’s premier criminal investigator.
viii
    Parisians were both fascinated and terrified by crime and criminals,
le prestige du mal.
Sensational accounts of the most lurid crimes thrilled readers of the mass-circulation newspapers. Supposedly true crime
     stories, called
faits divers,
and serialized novels, the
feuilletons,
were popular features of any newspaper wanting to attract readers. The historian Ann-Louise Shapiro has commented, “The culture
     seemed saturated with accounts of sensational crimes and infamous criminals. Mass-circulation newspapers entertained a wide
     popular audience with criminal stories, even as crime became the focus of scientific inquiry and the subject of articles that
     moved… out of professional journals into more popular formats and general social criticism. Medical and legal experts as well
     as professionalizing social scientists began to think of crime as a mirror held up to society, exposing the tendencies of
     the day writ large.” 43 During the years 1906–8, the death penalty had been suspended for the first time in more than a hundred years, but the ban
     created such anxiety among the populace that it had to be reversed. Guillotinings, traditionally held in public, were so popular
     that even when officials held them at inconvenient times and without publicity, mobs of spectators still showed up.
    The courtrooms were packed with spectators when the juicy trials of famous criminals were on the docket. People went to the
     morgue to look at corpses, sometimes to guess the identity of unknown victims. An underground railway carried groups of tourists
     through the city sewer system, which had been made famous by Victor Hugo in
Les misérables
and was in real life often used as a hiding place for criminals. Wealthy residents of Paris’s fashionable Right Bank headed
     up the slope of Montmartre for a
frisson,
or thrill, as they rubbed shoulders with the dangerous criminal and lower classes. Cabaret singers sang of characters such
     as pimps, streetwalkers, and tramps. Sprinkled among the audience were real crooks, prostitutes, and pimps.
    The French loved gossip and scandal, and Paris’s numerous daily newspapers catered to their needs, though some tales were
     too hot even for the scandal sheets to repeat. Meg Japy, a twenty-one-year-old from the provinces, had married Adolphe Steinheil,
     an artist who was twenty years older. Steinheil was not an avant-garde artist like Picasso; each year he managed to have one
     of his canvases accepted for display in the Salon, the government-sponsored exhibition of art that had acquired a stamp of
     approval marking it as culturally stifling. Nor was Adolphe exciting in bed, but Meg, beautiful and vivacious, found it easy
     to attract other lovers. Her husband consoled himself with the fact that his wife’s paramours were generally men of wealth
     and power, who graciously purchased some of Adolphe’s works, enabling the Steinheils to maintain a well-to-do lifestyle in
     Paris.
    Meg eventually reached the pinnacle of her particular form of art: she became the mistress of Félix