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Confronted with this evidence, Gourbin confessed. He told Locard that he had established his alibi by changing the time on the wall clock where he had been playing cards. Thus, when the game ended at what the other players thought was midnight, it was in reality half an hour earlier.

Locard, whose career continued till his death in 1966, acknowledged the debt he owed to two maîtres. One was Lacassagne; the other was Alphonse Bertillon, who was regarded even by Sherlock Holmes’s creator as the highest expert on crime in Europe. Bertillon was the scion of a brilliant family, whose members were so devoted to intellectual pursuits that they donated their bodies to be dissected and examined after death for the advancement of science. If anyone could have used the most recent technological advances to find the Mona Lisa, it was this tortured and flawed individual.

5

THE MAN WHO MEASURED PEOPLE

Émile Forquet, the judge who received Joseph Vacher’s confession, had done a bit of detecting himself to bring the serial killer to justice. Forquet liked to collect and review the files of unsolved cases. He then arranged them according to the categories of crimes and types of injuries, along with reports of people seen in the vicinity. Noticing a pattern, he realized that witnesses’ reports seemed to point to a single person. Forquet circulated copies of a card that used a system of identification known as bertillonage to describe the ears, nose, scars, and eyes of this man. The responses he received helped him to identify Vacher, and when the man was finally in front of him, Forquet pressed him to confess.

Alphonse Bertillon’s method of identification, which he had named anthropometry, or “man measurement,” was by 1900 in general use by police departments all over Europe and the United States. So great was Bertillon’s fame that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even mentioned him as a rival to Sherlock Holmes. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, a prospective client arrived to consult Holmes. As his friend Watson recalled the scene, the client said:

“I am suddenly confronted with a most serious and extraordinary problem. Recognizing, as I do, that you are the second highest expert in Europe —”

“Indeed, sir! May I inquire who has the honor to be the first?” asked Holmes, with some asperity.

“To the man of precisely scientific mind the work of Monsieur Bertillon must always appeal strongly.”

“Then had you not better consult him?”

“I said, sir, to the precisely scientific mind. But as a practical man of affairs it is acknowledged that you stand alone. I trust, sir, that I have not inadvertently —”

“Just a little,” said Holmes. 1

i

Bertillon came from a family renowned for intellectual achievement. His maternal grandfather, Achille Guillard, was a doctor and statistician who coined the term demography in 1855 and had written one of the first books on the subject. In the early years of the Second Empire, a time of such political repression that it was illegal for citizens to assemble in groups larger than three, Guillard ran afoul of the authorities and was tossed into prison. There he shared a cell with a young doctor named Louis-Adolphe Bertillon, who had been arrested for tending the wounded on both sides of the street fighting. They were not in jail long, and on their release, Guillard introduced Dr. Bertillon to his daughter, Zoe. The two were soon married. Zoe Bertillon was a brilliant woman who argued the merits of the philosophical systems of Comte and Spinoza with Jules Michelet, a family friend and France’s foremost historian of the time. Lean and graceful, taller than her husband, she kept her home in simple republican good taste. In 1862, Zoe and a friend started a school called the Free Society for the Professional Instruction of Young Women, which emphasized intellectual subjects.

Her husband, Louis-Adolphe, was one of the first members of the Anthropology Society of Paris, founded by his brilliant friend