The wooden palings of the garden were examined; none were broken.
The garden paths showed no trace of footsteps.
The magistrate thought it probable that the robber had walked on the grass to leave no foot-prints if he had come that way; but how could he have got into the house?
The back door to the garden had an outer guard of three iron bars, uninjured; and there, too, the key was in the lock inside, as in the front door.
All these impossibilities having been duly noted by Monsieur Popinot, by Bibi–Lupin, who stayed there a day to examine every detail, by the public prosecutor himself, and by the sergeant of the gendarmerie at Nanterre, this murder became an agitating mystery, in which the Law and the Police were nonplussed.
This drama, published in the Gazette des Tribunaux, took place in the winter of 1828–29.
God alone knows what excitement this puzzling crime occasioned in Paris! But Paris has a new drama to watch every morning, and forgets everything.
The police, on the contrary, forgets nothing.
Three months after this fruitless inquiry, a girl of the town, whose extravagance had invited the attention of Bibi–Lupin’s agents, who watched her as being the ally of several thieves, tried to persuade a woman she knew to pledge twelve silver spoons and forks and a gold watch and chain.
The friend refused.
This came to Bibi–Lupin’s ears, and he remembered the plate and the watch and chain stolen at Nanterre.
The commissioners of the Mont-de-Piete, and all the receivers of stolen goods, were warned, while Manon la Blonde was subjected to unremitting scrutiny.
It was very soon discovered that Manon la Blonde was madly in love with a young man who was never to be seen, and was supposed to be deaf to all the fair Manon’s proofs of devotion.
Mystery on mystery.
However, this youth, under the diligent attentions of police spies, was soon seen and identified as an escaped convict, the famous hero of the Corsican vendetta, the handsome Theodore Calvi, known as Madeleine.
A man was turned on to entrap Calvi, one of those double-dealing buyers of stolen goods who serve the thieves and the police both at once; he promised to purchase the silver and the watch and chain.
At the moment when the dealer of the Cour Saint–Guillaume was counting out the cash to Theodore, dressed as a woman, at half-past six in the evening, the police came in and seized Theodore and the property.
The inquiry was at once begun.
On such thin evidence it was impossible to pass a sentence of death.
Calvi never swerved, he never contradicted himself.
He said that a country woman had sold him these objects at Argenteuil; that after buying them, the excitement over the murder committed at Nanterre had shown him the danger of keeping this plate and watch and chain in his possession, since, in fact, they were proved by the inventory made after the death of the wine merchant, the widow Pigeau’s uncle, to be those that were stolen from her.
Compelled at last by poverty to sell them, he said he wished to dispose of them by the intervention of a person to whom no suspicion could attach.
And nothing else could be extracted from the convict, who, by his taciturnity and firmness, contrived to insinuate that the wine-merchant at Nanterre had committed the crime, and that the woman of whom he, Theodore, had bought them was the wine-merchant’s wife.
The unhappy man and his wife were both taken into custody; but, after a week’s imprisonment, it was amply proved that neither the husband nor the wife had been out of their house at the time.
Also, Calvi failed to recognize in the wife the woman who, as he declared, had sold him the things.
As it was shown that Calvi’s mistress, implicated in the case, had spent about a thousand francs since the date of the crime and the day when Calvi tried to pledge the plate and trinkets, the evidence seemed strong enough to commit Calvi and the girl for trial.
This murder being the eighteenth which Theodore had committed, he was condemned to death for he seemed certainly to be guilty of this skilfully contrived crime.
Though he did not recognize the wine-merchant’s wife, both she and her husband recognized him.
The inquiry had proved, by the evidence of several witnesses, that Theodore had been living at Nanterre for about a month; he had worked at a mason’s, his face whitened with plaster, and his clothes very shabby.
At Nanterre the lad was supposed to be about eighteen years old, for the whole month he must have been nursing that brat (nourri ce poupon, i.e. hatching the crime).
The lawyers thought he must have had accomplices.
The chimney-pots were measured and compared with the size of Manon la Blonde’s body to see if she could have got in that way; but a child of six could not have passed up or down those red-clay pipes, which, in modern buildings, take the place of the vast chimneys of old-fashioned houses.
But for this singular and annoying difficulty, Theodore would have been executed within a week.
The prison chaplain, it has been seen, could make nothing of him.
All this business, and the name of Calvi, must have escaped the notice of Jacques Collin, who, at the time, was absorbed in his single-handed struggle with Contenson, Corentin, and Peyrade.
It had indeed been a point with Trompe-la-Mort to forget as far as possible his chums and all that had to do with the law courts; he dreaded a meeting which should bring him face to face with a pal who might demand an account of his boss which Collin could not possibly render.
The governor of the prison went forthwith to the public prosecutor’s court, where he found the Attorney–General in conversation with Monsieur de Granville, who had spent the whole night at the Hotel de Serizy, was, in consequence of this important case, obliged to give a few hours to his duties, though overwhelmed with fatigue and grief; for the physicians could not yet promise that the Countess would recover her sanity.
After speaking a few words to the governor, Monsieur de Granville took the warrant from the attorney and placed it in Gault’s hands.
“Let the matter proceed,” said he, “unless some extraordinary circumstances should arise. Of this you must judge. I trust to your judgment.
The scaffold need not be erected till half-past ten, so you still have an hour.
On such an occasion hours are centuries, and many things may happen in a century.
Do not allow him to think he is reprieved; prepare the man for execution if necessary; and if nothing comes of that, give Sanson the warrant at half-past nine.
Let him wait!”
As the governor of the prison left the public prosecutor’s room, under the archway of the passage into the hall he met Monsieur Camusot, who was going there.
He exchanged a few hurried words with the examining judge; and after telling him what had been done at the Conciergerie with regard to Jacques Collin, he went on to witness the meeting of Trompe-la-Mort and Madeleine; and he did not allow the so-called priest to see the condemned criminal till Bibi–Lupin, admirably disguised as a gendarme, had taken the place of the prisoner left in charge of the young Corsican.
No words can describe the amazement of the three convicts when a warder came to fetch Jacques Collin and led him to the condemned cell!
With one consent they rushed up to the chair on which Jacques Collin was sitting.
“To-day, isn’t it, monsieur?” asked Fil-de-Soie of the warder.
“Yes, Jack Ketch is waiting,” said the man with perfect indifference.
Charlot is the name by which the executioner is known to the populace and the prison world in Paris.