Excerpt from Chapter 7 of

Luncheon at the Dead Rat

by Byron Grush

Vidocq Visits the Morgue

He wasn’t theVidocq, merely his son…or at least, that was what he claimed. Emile-Adolphe Vidocq was the son of the first wife of François Eugène Vidocq, the world’s first private detective. When François Vidocq died Emile-Adolphe sought to be recognized as his alleged father’s legitimate offspring but it turned out that the elder Vidocq had been in prison when the conception would have taken place. No inheritance for Emile-Adolphe.

Perhaps an obsession with the establishment of this paternity contributed to Emile-Adolphe’s following in his famous father’s footsteps. At any rate, Emile-Adolphe Vidocq now promoted himself as a detective for hire; the fame and popularity of the first Vidocq guaranteed clients and an adequate source of income. He had just been hired by François Gardinier to locate his missing son, Geoffroy. Where better to start than at the morgue?

The father, François Eugène Vidocq, had since the age of 13 been in and out of prison for various acts of thievery, battery, dueling to the death, forgery, escape, and other criminal acts. He escaped from prison several times, one time disguised as a sailor and another time as a nun. In 1809 when he was in La Force Prison in Paris he offered to act as an informant for the police, reporting on the other inmates. He was transferred to jail in Bicêtre and there began his career as a spy.

Once released in 1811 he continued his work as secret agent for the Paris police, making use of his knowledge of the criminal underground. He then organized the Brigade de la Sûreté. He hired ex-criminals like himself and encouraged his agents to “explore the various rendezvous in every part; to go to the theatres, the boulevards, the barriers, and all other public places, the haunts of thieves and pickpockets” including the local bars and brothels.

He resigned from the Sûreté twice, the final time in 1832 when he began to work full time as a private investigator. In 1833, Vidocq founded Le Bureau des Renseignements, a detective agency and private police force, again staffed by former criminal elements. It has been called the first detective agency in history.

Vidocq was responsible for a number of innovations in crime fighting, notably a criminal data base of index cards with personal descriptions, aliases, and modus operandi of known offenders. This had a great influence on a clerk working for the Sûreté named Alphonse Bertillon who extended the system by including actual measurements of the suspects. This anthropometric system called “bertillonage” predated fingerprint identification and was used around the world.

Vidocq refined crime scene investigation making the first plaster casts of footprints, measuring the ballistic properties of bullets, and using other techniques that would become part of modern forensics. He was a master of disguise and often took part in felonies in order to arrest criminals. It was said that he had a photographic memory and never forgot a criminal face. It was also said that Vidocq set up robberies himself to increase his arrest count.

Honoré de Balzac in his novel, Le Père Goriot, and in later works modeled the character of Vautrin (first an arch-criminal, then a police minister) after Vidocq. Victor Hugo, in Les Misérables, modeled both the main characters, Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert after Vidocq. Alexandre Dumas used attributes of the famous detective for his policeman character of Monsieur Jackal in Les Mohicans de Paris. Edgar Allan Poe referred to him in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and his own detective, C. Auguste Dupin, used deductive techniques such as Vidocq might have used to solve the murders. Eugène Sue wrote Les Mystéries de Pariswith a Vidocq-like character named Rodolphe de Gerolstein. This work prompted Vidocq himself to write Les Vrais Mystéries de Paris, albeit using a ghost writer.

Like father, like son—Emile-Adolphe Vidocq had embarked upon a career as a private detective. While he lacked the first-hand knowledge of his father’s criminal background and the experience of working as chief of police of the Sûreté, he had studied François Eugène Vidocq’s memoires and other written works and had acquired an appreciation for the ratiocinative approach to solving crime He had few acquaintances among the criminal underground, but he knew which haunts to explore and which questions to ask. And he had a close associate who accompanied him on his cases: Henri Barbou.

Barbou and Vidocq had met at the Université de Rouen. Henri Barbou had studied mathematics and was finishing up an advanced degree when the younger Vidocq appeared on the scene. The two men shared rooms for the duration of Barbou’s tenure as a student and became fast friends. They often strolled through the ancient town, exploring the botanical gardens at the Jardin des Plantes de Rouen or the Place du Vieux Marché, where Joan of Arc met her fiery death. Vidocq never finished his higher education. He moved to Paris when Barbou established a private tutoring service there, and again the two men shared an apartment.

Vidocq’s detective business at first was slow and dull. His typical case was to follow a wife or husband suspected of infidelity. A big breakthrough came when he was hired to recover some rare jewels stolen from the estate of a prominent banker; the police had been stymied. Vidocq applied the principles of his father’s investigative techniques, mainly, examining not only the obvious, but also the trivial. He observed that the window through which the thief or thieves had supposedly gained access had been broken from the inside. By following the wife he learned of her lover and the plans they had laid to leave Paris together, sustained by the sale of the jewelry. Vidocq proved that the wife was the guilty party. The notoriety of the banker and the degree of the scandal thus revealed was of great interest to the press and so the story stayed in newsprint for several days. Soon Vidocq, whose detecting prowess was glorified by the papers, was in demand.

Vidocq would routinely discuss his cases with his friend and soon found Barbou’s insights beneficial. He began to invite Barbou to accompany him in matters of investigative difficulty. Barbou’s fine mind for mathematical reasoning coupled with Vidocq’s methodical approach and the ease with which the pair of sleuths could use each other as sounding boards proved to be a successful combination.

Today, they had hastened to the Île de la Cité to walk along the River Seine on the Quai de l’Archevêché, past men with wheeled hand carts pushing draped cargo shaped ominously like corpses, to the soiled stone façade of a low building over whose door appeared the familiar words, “Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!”—the musée de la mort, the Paris Mortuary.

The morgue was conveniently located along the banks of the river (as a large number of the dead who found their way to its chambers were suicides fished from the Seine). These and others found in alleys or along the narrow streets of the city were often unidentified. The policy of the institution was to display the deceased to the public in the hopes of identification; the morgue was open to the curious, the thrill-seekers, the morbid and morose, and attracted artists and writers like Émile Zola and Charles Dickens who wrote in detail about the profundity of decay and the spectacle of mortality that elicited cheap emotions from the population: “…they express horror, they joke, they applaud or whistle, as at the theatre…” Zola wrote, describing the throngs of visitors who ogled at the “nudities, brutally exposed, bloodstained, and in places bored with holes.”

In a long hallway the crowd gathered—pretty working girls from shops and rough-looking laborers and fashionably dressed women with their unruly children and old men carrying their lunches with them and the unemployed and those of independent means and even, now and then, the bereaved hoping to find a missing loved one, hoping against hope this battered body or that naked, purple-blotched and dripping semblance of a human being wasn’ttheir missing loved one. The crowd, like the residents of the musée de morte, exemplified the Egalité of France in a bizarre and morbid way.

Along the hallway were large windows through which the corpses could be seen arrayed on slanted black marble slabs, not unlike the display of fruits and vegetables at the nearby market. They were stripped of clothing which hung on the wall behind them…the clothing sometimes gave a better indication of identity than did the decomposed state of the bodies. There was no refrigeration. If the putrefaction of the corpse had advanced too far, the body was replaced by a photograph or a wax sculpture of the face placed artistically on a manikin.

The crowd was centered at the far end of the hall where the most recent arrival had been deposited on its marble slab: the headless torso of a woman freshly fished from the Seine. Vidocq and Barbou skirted around the leering mob and shuttled through a doorway clearly marked “défense d’enter”—no admittance. Showing his special permit card to the guard, Vidocq led his friend into the musty, damp, and putrid smelling morgue proper, into the room where the theatrics of corpse preparation…the stripping, the cleaning, the arranging…were not part of the public circus.

“Look here, Barbou,” said Vidocq, “these are the newest. The artifacts of their departure from this mortal coil are more apparent in this room. Observe the crust of dried mud on this one…it clearly indicates the body was pulled from the river, but sat somewhere for a time before its discovery. See, the bloating has given way to decomposition. Now why do you suppose someone retrieved the unfortunate from its watery grave only to abandon…or hide the body?”

“Perhaps the rescuer was also the instrument of destruction. See around the neck? There are indications of strangulation. A jilted lover kills in a fit of rage, pushes the evidence into the Seine in an effort to hide his crime, then, in a sudden pang of conscience, pulls her back out and conceals her in some alley.”

“In that case there would not be time for the water to work its terrible effect. No, she had been in the river long enough to swell up…the body gases bringing her to the surface. She was spotted floating by some good Samaritan who fished her out, then panicked and left her high and dry where she lay undiscovered for at least a day.”

“As you say, Vidocq. But we are looking for a young boy, are we not?”

“We are hoping to eliminate that possibility. Let us query the help. I say, good fellow,” Vidocq called to the morgue attendant, “have you any young boys? About eight years old?”

The morgue attendant was a weary- and bedraggled-looking man in his late 50s carrying a mop and pail. More of a janitorial employee it seemed, as he appeared reluctant even to talk to the detectives. He simply pointed to a door, his arm, hand, extended finger, wavering slightly as if the weight of it was too much to sustain for long. Vidocq and Barbou made for the door.

Friends and admirers of Emile-Adolphe Vidocq kindly characterized him as “stout.” Others, not so charitable in their estimate of the detective’s physical attributes called him “obese.” The truth was somewhere in between. He affected the thinnest of mustaches which he teased and twirled into an absurd curlicue. His appearance was accented by a severe and heartless stare, unblinking and inscrutable, which he had cultivated as a tool for the interrogation of suspects. Barbou, on the other hand, was as lanky as Vidocq was portly. His most notable feature was a hawk-like nose upon which balanced a pince-nez, often askew and never clean.

In this new chamber were the young: infants, children of various ages, adolescents. Victims of disease, exposure, starvation, or abuse. There was no particular order to the arrangement of the bodies; presumably it was first come, first to be laid out. As in the outer chamber, clothing was hung on the wall behind each victim. There was no window into this room. Parents searching for a lost child had to petition for entry.

“What a dreadful display, Vidocq! Tragic loss of the innocents, the helpless, the unloved and unwanted as well as the cherished.”

“Ah, but how instructive, Barbou! See how the ravishes of disease have blackened the skin? Notice the effects of insects and vermin? This aids the determination of the time of death. And this one…a murder. You can see the marks of ligatures on the wrists and ankles.”

“Where do we start? Sadly, there are so many.”

“Eliminate the obvious. This one too young…that one too old…those putrefied beyond recognition. How many remain for our analysis? Not so many.”

It was a ghastly chore, cataloging the dead. Barbou concentrated his mind upon statistics to quell his emotions; what percentage was of what age, what were the probabilities of misadventure; how long before each unknown person was carted away to an anonymous grave? He had pad and pencil at the ready as Vidocq examined each slab and related his findings; hash marks accumulated by each category as Barbou marked accordingly. He noted the identifying numbers of each corpse Vidocq included in the “not so many” that might be the object of their quest. When they were done, the number of possible victims that might be Geoffory Gardinier was four.

“More than I would have thought,” commented Barbou.

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