Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [47]
The detective was sure he had identified his man, but he still had to find him. He got a break when Avril, Lacenaire’s accomplice in the double murder, was arrested on another charge. Hoping for leniency, he offered to help Canler. He told him that the man known as Gaillard had a rich aunt who lived in the rue Bar-du-Bec. When Canler went to see her, she admitted she had a disreputable nephew whom she feared. Indeed, she had put a grille on her door because she feared that he would murder her someday. The aunt gave Canler his quarry’s current name: Lacenaire.
Canler issued a general alert throughout France with Lacenaire’s description. On February 2, 1836, the police arrested a man at Beaune. It was Lacenaire, trying a new scam: selling forged bonds. He was brought back to the Paris Prefecture, where he greeted Canler politely. He admitted that he had robbed the bank messenger but at first refused to give the name of his accomplice. When told that his cohort in the double murder had cooperated in his capture, he confessed to that as well, revenging himself on Avril and Red Whiskers for good measure with further incriminating testimony. When Canler pointed out, “You realize, of course, that it will finish you,” Lacenaire replied, “I know that. It doesn’t matter so long as it finishes them too.” 9 His sense of grievance had overcome self-preservation.
The trial of the three criminals — Lacenaire, Avril, and Red Whiskers — began in the Cour d’Assises 10 of the Seine on November 12, 1836. The highlight of the trial was Lacenaire’s speech to the court. Dressed in a stylish blue coat, he reached heights of self-dramatization, portraying himself as an alienated genius at war with society. He mesmerized those present in the courtroom, and reporters wrote everything down for the next day’s newspapers. Since Lacenaire had already declared that he was eager to meet his fiancée, the guillotine, the death sentence for him and Avril was almost anticlimactic.
Lacenaire became a celebrity, and while he awaited execution, visitors flocked to his prison cell, where he presided over a virtual salon for writers, doctors, scientists, and journalists. He gave visitors calling cards bearing the inscription “Pierre-François Lacenaire, fiancé of the guillotine.” 11 Gifts of fine food and wine as well as messages of goodwill flooded into the prison from ladies of the highest society. One man offered Lacenaire an expensive coat, which he refused on the grounds that he would not be able to give it much wear. The literary world fawned on him; both Victor Hugo and Théophile Gautier came to visit and listen to him recite his poetry.
Lacenaire also found time to write his memoirs, certainly the most notorious such document up to that time. With them, he finally achieved his longed-for literary success, interspersing his poetry with the account of his life. While he claimed that he had modeled the memoirs on those of Vidocq, Lacenaire’s are marked by self-pity, with few descriptions of crimes and many more romantic explanations of why he became a criminal. His rationalizations further reveal him as a highly intelligent man who used the injustices — real and perceived — of society to excuse his behavior. This view led him to see himself as a victim and any crime as defensible. 12
Scientists came to his cell to examine and measure him, trying to find the essence of what made him a criminal. Adherents of the pseudoscience of phrenology claimed to be able to determine a person’s personality from examination of his skull, and right before the execution, a phrenologist came to make a model of Lacenaire’s head.
Lacenaire was concerned that his execution be handled just right. He wrote, “I make no secret of it — it would have been very disagreeable to me to have been dispatched by a provincial executioner.” 13 Thus he was displeased to learn that he would meet his fate at seven in the morning, when he would have preferred