Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [115]
Answering the criticism from some anarchist circles that the gang had killed ordinary employees, potential comrades in the struggle, Garnier wrote, “Why kill workers? — They are vile slaves, without whom there wouldn’t be the bourgeois and the rich.
-“It’s in killing such contemptible slaves that slavery will be destroyed.” 21
Bonnot, whose photograph as the mastermind of the gang appeared almost daily in the newspapers, had holed up in the back of a secondhand-clothes shop. Like Garnier, he avidly read l’anarchie, which was still printing provocative sentiments. On April 4, one of its writers lectured the bourgeoisie: “If you apply your wicked laws, then too bad for you; social violence legitimates the most bloody reprisals, and following on from the muffled voice of Brownings, you will hear another, more powerful voice: that of dynamite!” 22
Bonnot composed a letter in response to sentiments like these, reflecting on what life had brought him: “I am a famous man. My name has been trumpeted to the four corners of the globe. All those people who go through so much trouble to get others to talk about them, yet don’t succeed, must be very jealous about the publicity that the press has given my humble self.
“I am not appreciated in this society. I have the right to live, and while your imbecilic criminal society tries to stop me, well too bad for it, too bad for you!”
He recalled some of his life’s few happy moments, the times when he made love to Judith in the cemetery at Lyons: “I didn’t ask for much. I walked with her by the light of the moon.… It was there that I found the happiness I’d dreamed about all my life, the happiness I’d always run after and which was stolen from me each time.”
Unlike Garnier, his partner in crime, Bonnot expressed some regrets: “At Montgeron I didn’t intend to kill the driver, Mathillet, but merely to take his car. Unfortunately when we signaled him to stop, Mathillet pointed a gun at us and that finished him. I regretted Mathillet’s death because he was a prole like us, a slave of bourgeois society. It was his gesture that was fatal.
“Should I regret what I’ve done? Yes, perhaps, but I will carry on.…” 23
vi
The police were slowly tightening the net around the fugitives. Élie Monier, who had been identified by bank clerks as one of those who had taken part in the Chantilly robbery, was unwise enough to meet one of the editors of l’anarchie for dinner. Since the staff members of the radical paper were under continual surveillance, Monier’s cover was blown. Instead of making an immediate arrest, the tail on the newspaper editor followed Monier to his hideout — the Hôtel de Lozère on the boulevard de Menilmontant, near the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Jouin, the agency’s second-in-command, had now been appointed to head the “flying brigade” created to use the motor bandits’ own tactics to bring them down. He lost no time in apprehending Monier. In a predawn raid, he led his squad to the hotel, where they burst into Monier’s room, catching him asleep. There were two more loaded Brownings on the night table, but Monier was unable to reach them. Jouin triumphantly released the news that yet another member of the gang had been apprehended.
Among Monier’s effects were some letters with addresses of other possible hiding places, including the secondhand shop in Ivry where Bonnot had gone to ground. It was, recalled Belin, “a desolate region of the city… dotted with hundreds of tumble-down shacks where criminals, and down and outs, and every kind of undesirable used to live. In this melancholy region of huts and ruined houses… was a miserable second-hand clothes store.” 24
Antoine Gauzy, the owner of the shop, was an unlikely anarchist: middle-aged, with a wife and three children to feed. His political inclinations were indicated only by the fact that he had named his youngest child Germinal, after Zola’s novel about a coal miners’ strike. Unluckily for him,