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

Faure, the president of
     France. At fifty-eight, Faure was twice her age, but as a connoisseur of feminine beauty, he remained a devotee of the
cinq à sept
— the traditional late afternoon tryst. And Meg, according to Maurice Paléologue, an official in the foreign office, “was
     expert at shaking men’s loins.” 44
    Late in the afternoon of February 16, 1899, Meg slipped through a side door of the Élysée Palace for a rendezvous with Faure
     in a room known as the Blue Salon. Sometime later, the president’s male secretary heard cries that sounded more like signals
     of distress than of passion. He investigated to find Meg naked and Faure dead, with his fingers gripping her hair so tightly
     that she could not get free. Paris gossips later supplied the detail that she had been administering oral sex when the strain
     proved too much for Faure’s heart. Servants were able to release Meg by cutting her hair and quickly spirited her away as
     a priest was brought in to belatedly administer the last rites.
    Because Faure had been a determined anti-Dreyfusard, resolutely refusing all demands for a retrial of the imprisoned officer,
     his death was rumored to have been part of a conspiracy. By one account, he had been killed in a far more sinister and deliberate
     fashion; by another, his mistress had stolen some papers relating to the Dreyfus case from the president’s office.
    To those who knew the truth, none of this did anything to hurt Meg’s reputation. She continued hosting her weekly salon at
     the four-story house on a cul-de-sac called the impasse Ronsin, where she and her husband lived. She might thus have continued
     for the rest of her life, taking occasional lovers and living off her reputation. But Meg was destined to burst into the headlines
     soon in her own right, as the defendant in a double murder trial that fully satisfied the public’s appetite for scandal and
     intrigue.
    A similar fate awaited the new bride of the man who was premier of France at the time the
Mona Lisa
was stolen. Henriette Rainouard Claretie had obtained a divorce from her first husband three years earlier, in 1908, after
     a fourteen-year marriage. After a decent interval, she expected to marry her lover, the rising politician Joseph Caillaux.
     Caillaux, however, found it difficult to obtain an amicable parting from the woman he was already married to (and who had
     also divorced a husband to marry him), and he did not press the issue until after he had attained the ultimate political prize,
     the post of premier of France, in June 1911. Four months later he made Henriette an honest woman — but unfortunately, not
     quite a respectable one.
    It was unusual for French politicians to divorce and remarry. It was socially acceptable for them to take lovers, even long-term
     ones, but they were not supposed to elevate their mistresses’ status to wife. Moreover, Caillaux’s first wife, though agreeing
     to a divorce, had found and kept some incriminating letters that her husband and Henriette had exchanged during their illicit
     affair. When hints of these started to appear in a prominent newspaper, Henriette feared the correspondence itself would appear
     in print. She took drastic action and in so doing became the star of the era’s most spectacular murder trial, in which politics
     played a major role and the murder victim was even accused of causing his own death.
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    Parisians had a particular love-hate obsession with the apaches, or young gangsters, who made their headquarters in Belleville,
     on the Right Bank. 45 From that neighborhood, the apaches emerged to terrorize citizens on the central boulevards of the city. They specialized
     in violent tactics, using sudden kicks, sucker punches, and head butts as a prelude to robbing victims. (A crime reporter,
     Arthur Dupin of
Le Journal,
had coined the term
apache
in 1902 because the gangs’ fierce tactics and violence resembled the French image of the Apache Indians in