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“I advise you not to make a scene,” Goron said. “I know you to be Simon, an escaped convict, and the suspected murderer of Aymard. You will have to come with me. My ‘nephew’ over there is a detective, and I have three others within call. Say good-bye to your hostess and follow me.”

Vernet’s nerve had taken him from Cayenne to Paris, and he tried to bluff his way through this setback as well. Drawing himself up, he told Goron coolly, “This is a mistake, which I will make you regret.” 25

After Bertillon himself had confirmed Goron’s measurements, however, Vernet confessed. He was sent to prison to await transport back to Cayenne. It was a fate he could not endure. He hanged himself in his cell.

vi

Harry Ashton-Wolfe, a British citizen who worked for several years with Bertillon, later wrote a number of books about his experiences. Ashton-Wolfe was a friend of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and he portrayed Bertillon as very much in the mold of the world’s most famous literary detective. 26 In “The Clue of the Blind Beetles,” Ashton-Wolfe described how a package containing the body of a man was found in the Bois de Boulogne, on the western edge of Paris. Indications were that the victim had been struck on the head from behind by a club or hammer. He wore only a shirt and trousers, but other items of clothing had been enclosed in the package with him.

Even though the ground was soft from recent rains, there were no traces of footprints or wheels. The wrapped package was heavy and unwieldy, and if it had been left there by one man, he must have been enormously strong. Bertillon took a stroll toward the Seine, which loops around the Bois, and found markings of a boat on the riverbank. Leading away from it were shapeless impressions, made, Bertillon deduced, by a man who had tied a thick cloth over his boots to conceal his tracks. Since the paper of the package was dry, it had to have been left there after midnight, when the rain had stopped.

Using a cable attached to the battery in his automobile, Bertillon activated a new device he had recently assembled. “A short arc, enormously magnified by complex lenses and reflectors, produced a concentrated beam of dazzling brilliancy, which could be focused to any angle,” Ashton-Wolfe wrote. While he held the lamp, Bertillon attached a mask containing magnifying lenses to his face and examined the body. Spotting something on the victim’s shirt, he called for a collodion slide, which was a sticky glass plate used to pick up tiny bits of evidence — in this case, what appeared to be insects. The body was then sent for an autopsy while the clothes went to Bertillon’s laboratory.

Ashton-Wolfe described the results: “In the hair, which, although still dark at the roots, was grey at the points, were fragments of coal, sand, and sawdust. The microscope proved the coal to be anthracite; the sand, silicate, ferruginous silicate, and quartz; and the sawdust, when split with a microtome, turned out to be composed of pine and oak. The stains on the shirt were also coal, intermingled with traces of mildew. When I carried my report to my chief, I found him at work on the collodion slide.” 27 Bertillon reported that “the two tiny insects we found on the shirt are Anophthalmi, a species of blind beetle. Moreover, they are quite colorless — absolutely devoid of pigment. They’ve bred for generations in the dark. Taken together with the coal and sand, I should say that it proves the body was hidden for a time in a cellar or a vault. It only remains to find it.” 28

Ashton-Wolfe commented that if they had to search all the cellars in Paris, it would be a long process. Bertillon frowned and told him, “I see you forget the formulae that apply to every premeditated murder: Who profits by the crime? and Seek the woman. One or the other will lead us to that cellar.” 29

Chemical analysis of the dead man’s clothing provided another clue. The coat and vest were covered with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which were the bacteria used in fermenting alcohol. Bertillon surmised that the cellar they were looking for might