The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime - Michael Sims [37]
For a period of seven years I was chief detective to the Government of France; and if I am unable to prove myself a great crime-hunter, it is because the record of my career is in the secret archives of Paris.
I may say at the outset that I have no grievances to air. The French Government considered itself justified in dismissing me, and it did so. In this action it was quite within its right, and I should be the last to dispute that right; but, on the other hand, I consider myself justified in publishing the following account of what actually occurred, especially as so many false rumours have been put abroad concerning the case. However, as I said at the beginning, I have no grievance, because my worldly affairs are now much more prosperous than they were in Paris, my intimate knowledge of that city and the country of which it is the capital having brought to me many cases with which I have dealt more or less successfully since I established myself in London.
Without further preliminary I shall at once plunge into an account of the case which a few years ago riveted the attention of the whole world.
The year 1893 was a prosperous twelve months for France. The weather was good, the harvest excellent, and the wine of that vintage is celebrated to this day. Everyone was well-off and reasonably happy, a marked contrast to the state of things a few years later, when dissension rent the country in twain.
Newspaper readers may remember that in ’93 the Government of France fell heir to an unexpected treasure which set the whole civilized world agog, especially those inhabitants of it who are interested in historical relics. This was the finding of the diamond necklace in the Château de Chaumont, where it had lain for a century in a rubbish heap of an attic. I believe it has not been questioned that this was the veritable necklace which the Court jeweller, Boehmer, hoped to sell to Marie Antoinette, although how it came to be in the Château de Chaumont, no one has been able to form even a conjecture. For a century it was supposed that the necklace had been broken up in London, and its five hundred stones, great and small, sold separately. It has always seemed strange to me that the Countess de Lamotte-Valois, who was thought to have profited by the sale of these jewels, should not have abandoned France if she possessed money to leave that country, for exposure was inevitable if she remained. Indeed, the unfortunate woman was branded and imprisoned, and afterwards was dashed to death from the third storey of a London house, when, in the direst poverty, she sought escape from the consequences of debt.
I am not superstitious in the least, yet this celebrated piece of treasure-trove seems actually to have exerted a malign influence over everyone who had the misfortune to be connected with it. Indeed, in a small way, I who write these words suffered dismissal and disgrace, though I caught but one glimpse of this dazzling scintillation of jewels. The jeweller who made it met financial ruin; the Queen for whom it was constructed was beheaded; that high-born Prince Louis René Édouard, Cardinal de Rohan, who purchased it, was flung into prison; the unfortunate Countess, who said she acted as go-between, clung for five awful minutes to a London window-sill before dropping to her death to the flags below; and now, a hundred and eight years later, up comes this devil’s display of fireworks to the light again.
Droulliard, the working man who found the ancient box, seems to have prised it open and, ignorant though he was—he had probably never seen a diamond in his life before—realised that a fortune was in his grasp. The baleful light from the combination must have sent madness into his brain, working havoc therein as though they were those mysterious rays which