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In January, the owner of Lampon’s Eating House, a small restaurant in the rue Princesse a few blocks south of the Seine, noticed a bad odor coming from his well. Customers started to complain that the water tasted foul. On investigation, the owner fished up a smelly package wrapped in cloth. When he cut it open, he was horrified to find the lower portion of a human leg.

He went to the local police to report his discovery and found a friend, Sergeant Ringué, who came to the restaurant to view the latest ghastly find. The discovery reminded Ringué of a man that he had stopped and questioned late on the evening of December 22. The man had been carrying a large hamper and a package that he said contained some hams. He told Ringué that he had just arrived from Nantes and was carrying his luggage to his room on the rue Princesse. Ringué had let the man go on his way but now regretted that he had not looked inside the package. He further recalled that the man was short and wore a tall hat.

The young policeman went to his superior, Gustave Macé, the police commissaire of the district. Then unknown, Macé was on a career path that would, ten years later, bring him to the top of the Sûreté. Now he was an eager young man, fascinated with his work and very ambitious. Macé went to the restaurant and discovered another parcel in the well, which he fished out with difficulty. Like the first, the package was wrapped in black calico, sewn shut. Within lay a second severed lower leg, encased in a drab cotton stocking on which was stitched in red thread the initial B with a small cross on each side of it. Macé noticed that the sewing was very fine, probably done by a professional.

The first pathologist to do a medical examination on the legs concluded that they were those of a woman and that the killer had not been very adept in the dismembering. He estimated that the legs had been in the well for about a month. The well was emptied, but no further body parts were found. Next, Macé, like Canler trying to trace Lacenaire, started the tedious work of going through a list of eighty-four females reported missing in the previous six months. Unfortunately, he found none who could be connected to the embroidered stocking.

Then Dr. Auguste Tardieu took a look at the evidence. A former student of Orfila’s, he was now the foremost forensic physician in France. After a thorough examination, he declared that Macé was wasting his time looking for a woman. “These remains,” he said, “are those of a man advanced in years.… The feet are larger than those of a woman. The dismemberment has been done skillfully by a cleaver or chopper. The cuts were made soon after death. There has been a considerable effusion of blood. I observe also that there is a clearly marked scar on one leg, only recently healed. But without the head it will not be easy to establish the identity, and the murderer appears to have taken good care to conceal that most important piece of evidence.” 28

This information put Macé on the right track. He was now convinced that the other human parts recently discovered in Paris were part of the same victim whose legs were in the well at Lampon’s. He believed that the murderer must live near the rue Princesse; the man questioned by Ringué must have been frightened into dumping his incriminating burden into the well instead of taking it to the Seine, and he had to have been sufficiently familiar with the area to do so. The concierge of the building where Lampon’s was located, an old woman, told Macé that an outsider could get to the well only if he knew about a small button on the outer door that worked a string latch.

Macé was still looking for someone who was skilled at sewing. When he asked if any tailor had ever lived in the building, the concierge told him about a Mlle. Dard, a seamstress who had lived there but was now singing at café concerts. She had done piecework for a tailor who visited often. When Macé located Dard, a pretty young woman, she gave him the name