Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [85]
Anthropometry led to a significant change in the way nations viewed their populations. A French law passed in July 1912 required “nomads and itinerants” — people such as traveling peddlers and the like — to carry “anthropometric identity cards.” 49 These cards, which included the bearer’s name, date and place of birth, parents’ names, a photograph, and fingerprints, were the forerunners of the national identity card.
Significantly, it became a crime not to carry evidence of who one was. Neither criminals nor law-abiding citizens could disappear into a crowd or find anonymity by moving from place to place. As the requirements to provide proof of identity grew stronger, one would always be connected with one’s past through records.
Of course, in some places, people resisted encroachments on their privacy, mourned their right to be anonymous. This may explain the popularity of fictional criminals, particularly those — like Fantômas — who were able to change their appearance and identity easily.
In 1911, a short time after the theft of the Mona Lisa, the reporter Katherine Blackford interviewed Bertillon about his system. He demonstrated several kinds of measuring and photographic equipment. At the end of their talk, she wrote, “we went up to the roof of the Palais de Justice [where he worked] whence we could see the Panthéon, the towers of and spire of Notre Dame, and Sainte-Chapelle. Only a few days before, on account of the theft of ‘la Joconde’ from the Louvre, he had photographed this view.” 50
Bertillon was now fifty-eight years old, with a worldwide reputation. Robert Heindl, commissioner of police in Dresden, said of Bertillon’s long term of service, “Paris became the Mecca of the police, and Bertillon their prophet.” 51 Solving the theft of the masterpiece would be the capstone of his career, if he could accomplish it. In a promising development, two suspects were soon brought into custody. However, they would lead Bertillon and the Sûreté on a false trail into the world of art, which was in the midst of its own identity crisis: struggling to define reality and rediscover how to portray it.
6
THE SUSPECTS
The fifty-thousand-franc reward that the Paris-Journal had offered for information leading to the return of the Mona Lisa naturally brought numerous replies that proved to be hoaxes or false alarms. One response, however, led to the arrest of two suspects whose names were well known to the avant-garde art community of Paris: Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire.
The letter that set off this train of events appeared in the Paris-Journal on August 29, 1911, addressed to the editor, who reprinted it on his paper’s front page with the precise sum and time omitted:
Monsieur,
On the 7th of May, 1911, I stole a Phoenician statuette from one of the galleries of the Louvre. I am holding this at your disposition, in return for the sum of _________ francs. Trusting that you will respect my confidence, I shall be glad to meet you at [such and such a place] between____ and _____ o’clock.1
As the editor commented, although the newspaper had offered a reward for the Mona Lisa, it “has never undertaken to ransom all the works of art stolen from the Louvre.” Nonetheless, this “was an opportunity to check a detail that would be interesting if proven genuine,” so one of the paper’s reporters went to meet “a young man, aged somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, very well-mannered… whose face and look and behavior bespoke at once a kind heart and a certain lack of scruple.” 2
This was indeed the thief, and