Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [19]
Apollinaire, Picasso’s literary friend, author of experimental poetry and elegant pornography, embraced the Fantômas works as enthusiastically as if they had been high art. He called the first book an “extraordinary novel, full of life and imagination, lamely written but extremely vivid.… From the imaginative standpoint Fantômas is one of the richest works that exist.” 49 Apollinaire founded a group of like-minded connoisseurs known as La Société des Amis de Fantômas; they included Max Jacob, the homosexual artist who at one time shared his apartment with Picasso. Other enthusiastic readers included Picasso himself, the writers Colette and Jean Cocteau, and the painter Blaise Cendrars, who called the series “the modern Aeneid.” Apollinaire believed that though all social classes enjoyed the series, there were “only a few bon esprits who appreciated the series with the same good taste as himself.” 50
Fantômas’s popularity may have been galling to the real-life members of the Sûreté. The truth was that in Paris, the forces of law were regarded with distrust. Since the time of Napoleon, one of the chief duties of the police had been to spy on the populace. Through all of the changes in government that had taken place since then, the laws of the Napoleonic Code had not been repealed, and indeed a host of new criminal regulations had been passed. This left such a patchwork of a legal system that the police could find almost any reason to investigate or detain a person. Moreover, because the police files had been destroyed during the Commune, the authorities had rushed to build up new dossiers, compiling information on as many people as they could. Often the accusations in these hastily assembled files, gleaned from sources as diverse as professional informers or disgruntled neighbors, were utterly untrue.
Bertillon, despite his faults, was one of a number of people who were trying to bring a new spirit of scientific investigation to crime solving, a process that had been going on in France ever since the Sûreté had been founded nearly a century before. Joining him were social scientists and psychologists who investigated the roots and causes of crime, arguing whether people were innately criminal or not — and if not, what drove them to crime.
Bertillon’s search for the Mona Lisa would bring him into the world of avant-garde artists in Montmartre, where Picasso was engaged in his own investigation of what was real and what was illusory. From the day he first arrived in Paris, the young artist knew the city, with its glitter and grit, its gaiety and gloom, was to be his inspiration. His canvases often portrayed people who existed in the demimonde between respectability and illegality, just as he experienced in the city around him. His most famous painting of this period shows five prostitutes whose expressions are as challenging in their way as the Mona Lisa’s famous smile. To create it, Picasso had to break the boundaries of his art, something only a genius could do. To solve the theft of the Mona Lisa, Bertillon would have to do that in his own field, and ultimately he would fail.
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SEARCHING FOR A WOMAN
The disappearance of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre stunned Parisians, who had long dismissed any impossible task with the remark that doing so “would be like trying to steal the Mona Lisa.” 1 The theft was, however,