The Crime of The Boulevard

By JULES CLARETIE

Member of the French Academy

Translated by MRS. CARLTON A. KINGSBURY

R. F. FENNO & COMPANY

Eighteen East Seventeenth Street:: NEW YORK

Copyright, 1897

by

R. F. FENNO & COMPANY

The Crime of the Boulevard

[Pg 3]

CHAPTER I.

"Where does Bernardet live?"

"At the passage to the right—Yes, that house which you see with the grating and the garden behind it."

The man to whom a passer-by had given this information hurried away in the direction pointed out; although gasping for breath, he tried to run, in order to more quickly reach the little house at the end of the passage of the Elysée des Beaux Arts. This passage, a sort of cul-de-sac, on either side of which were black buildings, strange old houses, and dilapidated storehouses, opened upon a boulevard filled with life and movement; with people promenading; with the noise of tramways; with gaiety and light.

The man wore the dress and had the bearing of a workman. He was very short, very fat, and his bald head was bared to the warm October rain. [Pg 4] He was a workman, in truth, who labored in his concierge lodge, making over and mending garments for his neighbors, while his wife looked after the house, swept the staircases, and complained of her lot.

Mme. Moniche found life hard and disagreeable, and regretted that it had not given her what it promised when, at eighteen, and very pretty, she had expected something better than to watch beside a tailor bent over his work in a concierge's lodge. Into her life a tragedy had suddenly precipitated itself, and Mme. Moniche found, that day, something to brighten up her afternoon. Entering a moment before, the apartment occupied by M. Rovère, she had found her lodger lying on his back, his eyes fixed, his arms flung out, with a gash across his throat!

M. Rovère had lived alone in the house for many years, receiving a few mysterious persons. Mme. Moniche looked after his apartment, entering by using her own key whenever it was necessary; and her lodger had given her permission to come there at any time to read the daily papers.

Mme. Moniche hurried down the stairs.

"M. Rovère is dead! M. Rovère has been murdered! His throat has been cut! He has been assassinated!" And, pushing her husband out of the door, she exclaimed:

"The police! Go for the police!"

[Pg 5] This word "police" awakened in the tailor's mind, not the thought of the neighboring Commissary, but the thought of the man to whom he felt that he ought to appeal, whom he ought to consult. This man was the good little M. Bernardet, who passed for a man of genius of his kind, at the Sureté, and for whom Moniche had often repaired coats and rehemmed trousers.

From the mansion in the Boulevard de Clichy, where Moniche lived, to M. Bernardet's house, was but a short distance, and the concierge knew the way very well, as he had often been there. But the poor man was so stupefied, so overwhelmed, by the sudden appearance of his wife in his room, by the brutal revelation which came to him as the blow of a fist, by the horrible manner of M. Rovère's death, that he lost his head. Horrified, breathless, he asked the first passer-by where Bernardet lived, and he ran as fast as he could in the direction pointed out.

Arrived at the grating, the worthy man, a little confused, stopped short. He was very strongly moved. It seemed to him that he had been cast into the agony of a horrible nightmare. An assassination in the house! A murder in the Boulevard de Clichy in broad daylight, just over his head, while he was quietly repairing a vest!

He stood looking at the house without ringing. M. Bernardet was, no doubt, breakfasting with his [Pg 6] family, for it was Sunday, and the police officer, meeting Moniche the evening before, had said to him: "To-morrow is my birthday."

Moniche hesitated a moment, then he rang the bell. He was not kept waiting; the sudden opening of the grating startled him; he pushed back the door and entered. He crossed a little court, at the end of which was a pavilion; he mounted the three steps and was met on the threshold by a little woman, as rosy and fresh as an apple, who, napkin in hand, gayly saluted him.

"Eh, Monsieur Moniche!"

It was Mme. Bernardet, a Burgundian woman, about thirty-five years of age, trim and coquettish, who stepped back so that the tailor could enter.

"What is the matter, M. Moniche?"

Poor Moniche rolled his frightened eyes around and gasped out: "I must speak to M. Bernardet."

"Nothing easier," said the little woman. "M. Bernardet is in the garden. Yes, he is taking advantage of the beautiful day; he is taking a group"——

"What group?"

"You know very well, photography is his passion. Come with me."

And Mme. Bernardet pointed to the end of the corridor, where an open door gave a glimpse of the garden at the rear of the house. M. Bernardet, the Inspector, had posed his three daughters with [Pg 7] their mother about a small table, on which coffee had been served.

"I had just gone in to get my napkin, when I heard you ring," Mme. Bernardet said.

Bernardet made a sign to Moniche not to advance. He was as plump and as gay as his wife. His moustache was red, his double chin smooth-shaven and rosy, his eyes had a sharp, cunning look, his head was round and closely cropped.

The three daughters, clothed alike in Scotch plaid, were posing in front of a photographic apparatus which stood on a tripod. The eldest was about twelve years of age; the youngest a child of five. They were all three strangely alike.

M. Bernardet, in honor of his birthday, was taking a picture of his daughters. The ferret who, from morning till night, tracked robbers and malefactors into their hiding places, was taking his recreation in his damp garden. The sweet idyl of this hidden life repaid him for his unceasing investigations, for his trouble and fatiguing man-hunts through Paris.

"There!" he said, clapping the cap over the lens. "That is all! Go and play now, my dears. I am at your service, Moniche."

He shut up his photographic apparatus, pulling out the tripod from the deep soil in which it was imbedded, while his daughters joyously ran to their mother. The young girls stood gazing at Moniche [Pg 8] with their great blue eyes, piercing and clear. Bernardet turned to look at him, and at once divined that something had happened.

"You are as white as your handkerchief, Moniche," he said.

"Ah! Monsieur Bernardet! It is enough to terrify one! There has been a murder in the house."

"A murder?"

His face, which had been so gay and careless, suddenly took on a strange expression, at once tense and serious; the large blue eyes shone as with an inward fire.

"A murder, yes, Monsieur Bernardet. M. Rovère—you did not know him?"

"No."

"He was an original—a recluse. And now he has been assassinated. My wife went to his room to read the papers"——

Bernardet interrupted him brusquely:

"When did it happen?"

"Ah! Dame! Monsieur, I do not know. All I know is my wife found the body still warm. She was not afraid; she touched it."

"Still warm!"

These words struck Bernardet. He reflected a moment, then he said:

"Come; let us go to your house."

Then, struck with a sudden idea, he added: "Yes, I will take it."

[Pg 9] He unfastened his camera from the tripod. "I have three plates left which I can use," he said.

Mme. Bernardet, who was standing at a little distance, with the children clinging to her skirts, perceived that the concierge had brought important news. Bernardet's smiling face had suddenly changed; the expression became serious, his glance fixed and keen.

"Art thou going with him?" Mme. Bernardet asked, as she saw her husband buckle on a leather bandolier.

"Yes!" he answered.

"Ah! Mon Dieu! my poor Sunday, and this evening—can we not go to the little theatre at Montmartre this evening?"

"I do not know," he replied.

"You promised! The poor children! You promised to take them to see Closerie des Genets!"

"I cannot tell; I do not know—I will see," the little man said. "My dear Moniche, to-day is my fortieth birthday. I promised to take them to the theatre—but I must go with you." Turning to his wife, he added: "But I will come back as soon as I can. Come, Moniche, let us hasten to your M. Rovère."

He kissed his wife on the forehead, and each little girl on both cheeks, and, strapping the camera in the bandolier, he went out, followed by the tailor. As they walked quickly along Moniche kept repeating: "Still warm; yes, Monsieur Bernardet, still warm!"

[Pg 10]

CHAPTER II.

Bernardet was quite an original character. Among the agents, some of whom were very odd, and among the devoted subalterns, this little man, with his singular mind, with his insatiable curiosity, reading anything he could lay his hands on, passed for a literary person. His chief sometimes laughingly said to him:

"Bernardet, take care! You have literary ambitions. You will begin to dream of writing for the papers."

"Oh, no, Monsieur Morel—but what would you?—I am simply amusing myself."

This was true. Bernardet was a born hunter. With a superior education, he might have become a savant, a frequenter of libraries, passing his life in working on documents and in deciphering manuscripts. The son of a dairyman; brought up in a Lancastrian school; reading with avidity all the daily papers; attracted by everything mysterious which happened in Paris; having accomplished his military duty, he applied for admission to the Police Bureau, as he would have embarked for the New World, for Mexico, or for Tonquin, in order [Pg 11] to travel in a new country. Then he married, so that he might have, in his checkered existence, which was dangerous and wearying,—a haven of rest, a fireside of peaceful joy.

So he lived a double life—tracking malefactors like a bloodhound, and cultivating his little garden. There he devoured old books, for which he had paid a few sous at some book stall; he read and pasted in old, odd leaves, re-bound them himself, and cut clippings from papers. He filled his round, bald head with a mass of facts which he investigated, classified, put into their proper place, to be brought forth as occasion demanded.

He was an inquisitive person, a very inquisitive person, indeed. Curiosity filled his life. He performed with pleasure the most fatiguing and repulsive tasks that fall to a police officer's lot. They satisfied the original need of his nature, and permitted him to see everything, to hear everything, to penetrate into the most curious mysteries. To-day, in a dress suit with white tie, carelessly glancing over the crowds at the opera, to discover the thieves who took opera glasses, which they sent to accomplices in Germany to be sold; to-morrow, going in ragged clothes to arrest a murderer in some cutthroat den in the Glacière.

M. Bernardet had taken possession of the office of the most powerful bankers, seized their books and made them go away with him in a cab. He [Pg 12] had followed, by order, the intrigues of more than one fine lady, who owed to him her salvation. What if M. Bernardet had thought fit to speak? But he never spoke, and reporters came out worsted from any attempt at an interview with him. "An interview is silver, but silence is gold," he was wont to say, for he was not a fool.

He had assisted at spiritual séances and attended secret meetings of Anarchists. He had occupied himself with occult matters, consulting the magicians of chance, and he had at his tongue's end the list of conspirators. He knew the true names of the famous Greeks who shuffled cards as one scouts about under an assumed name. The gambling hells were all familiar to him; he knew the churches in whose dark corners associates assembled to talk of affairs, who did not wish to be seen in beer shops nor spied upon in cabarets.

Of the millions in Paris, he knew the secrets of this whirlpool of humanity.

Oh! if he had ever become prefect of police, he would have studied his Paris, not at a distance, looking up statistics in books, or from the windows of a police bureau, but in the streets, in wretched lodgings, in hovels, in the asylums of misery and of crime. But Bernardet was not ambitious. Life suited him very well as he found it. His good wife had brought to him a small dower, and Bernardet, content with this poor little fortune, found [Pg 13] that he had all the power he wanted—the power, when occasion demanded, of putting his hand on the shoulder of a former Minister and of taking a murderer by the throat.

One day a financier, threatened with imprisonment in Mazas, pleased him very much. Bernardet entered his office to arrest him. He did not wish to have a row in the bank. The police officer and banker found themselves alone, face to face, in a very small room, a private office, with heavy curtains and a thick carpet, which stifled all noise.

"Fifty thousand francs if you will let me escape," said the banker.

"Monsieur le Comte jests"——

"A hundred thousand!"

"The pleasantry is very great, but it is a pleasantry."

Then the Count, very pale, said: "And what if I crack your head?"

"My brother officers are waiting for me," Bernardet simply replied. "They know that our interview does not promise to be a long one, and this last proposition, which I wish to forget like the others, would only aggravate, I believe, if it became known, M. le Comte's case."

Two minutes afterward the banker went out, preceding Bernardet, who followed him with bared head. The banker said to his employés, in an easy [Pg 14] tone: "Good-by for the moment, Messieurs, I will return soon."

It was also Bernardet who, visiting the Bank Hauts-Plateaux, said to his chief: "Monsieur Morel, something very serious is taking place there."

"What is it, Bernardet?"

"I do not know, but there is a meeting of the bank directors, and to-day, I saw two servants carry a man in there in an invalid's chair. It was the Baron de Cheylard."

"Well?"

"Baron Cheylard, in his quality of ex-Senator of the Second Empire, of ex-President of the Council, an ex-Commissioner of Industrial Expositions, is Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. Grand Cross—that is to say, that he cannot be pursued only after a decision of the Council of the Order. And then, you understand—if the Bank of Hauts-Plateaux demands the presence of its Vice-president, the Baron of Cheylard, paralyzed, half dead"——

"It means that it has need of a thunderbolt?"

"The Grand Cross, Monsieur. They would hesitate to deliver up to us the Grand Cross."

"You are right, Bernardet. The bank must be in a bad fix. And you are a very keen observer. The mind of a literary man, Bernardet."

[Pg 15] "Oh, rather a photographic eye, Monsieur Morel. The habit of using a kodak."

Thus Bernardet passed his life in Paris. Capable of amassing a fortune in some Tricoche Agency if he had wished to exploit, for his own benefit, his keen observing powers, he thought only of doing his duty, bringing up his little girls and loving his wife. Mme. Bernardet was amazed at the astonishing stories which her husband often related to her, and very proud that he was such an able man.

M. Bernardet hurried toward M. Rovère's lodgings and Moniche trotted along beside him. As they neared the house they saw that a crowd had begun to collect.

"It is known already," Moniche said. "Since I left they have begun"——

"If I enter there," interrupted the officer, "it is all right. You have a right to call any one you choose to your aid. But I am not a Magistrate. You must go for a Commissary of Police."

"Oh, M. Bernardet," Moniche exclaimed. "You are worth more than all the Commissaries put together."

"That does not make it so. A Commissary is a Commissary. Go and hunt for one."

"But since you are here"——

"But I am nothing. We must have a magistrate."

"You are not a magistrate, then?"

[Pg 16] "I am simply a police spy."

Then he crossed the street.

The neighbors had gathered about the door like a swarm of flies around a honey-comb. A rumor had spread about which brought together a crowd animated by the morbid curiosity which is aroused in some minds of the hint of a mystery, and attracted by that strange magnetism which that sinister thing, "a crime," arouses. The women talked in shrill tones, inventing strange stories and incredible theories. Some of the common people hurried up to learn the news.

At the moment Bernardet came up, followed by the concierge, a coupé stopped at the door and a tall man got out, asking:

"Where is M. Morel? I wish to see M. Morel."

The Chief had not yet been advised, and he was not there. But the tall young man suddenly recognized Bernardet, and laid hold of him, pulling him after him through the half-open door, which Moniche hastened to shut against the crowd.

"We must call some officers," Bernardet said to the concierge, "or the crowd will push in."

Mme. Moniche was standing at the foot of the staircase, surrounded by the lodgers, men and women, to whom she was recounting, for the twentieth time, the story of how she had found M. Rovère with his throat cut.

"I was going in to read the paper—the story—it [Pg 17] is very interesting, that story. The moment had come when the Baron had insulted the American colonel. M. Rovère said to me only yesterday, poor man: 'I am anxious to find out which one will be killed—the colonel or the baron.' He will never know! And it is he"——

"Mme. Moniche," interrupted Bernardet, "have you any one whom you can send for a Commissary?"

"Any one?"

"Yes," added Moniche. "M. Bernardet needs a magistrate. It is not difficult to understand."

"A Commissary?" repeated Mme. Moniche. "That is so. A Commissary; and what if I go for the Commissary myself, M. Bernardet?"

"All right, provided you do not let the crowd take the house by assault when you open the door."

"Fear nothing," the woman said, happy in having something important to do, in relating the horrible news to the Commissary how, when she was about to enter the room for the purpose of reading, the——

While she was going toward the door Bernardet slowly mounted the two flights of stairs, followed by Moniche and the tall young man who had arrived in his coupé at a gallop, in order to get the first news of the murder and make a "scoop" for his paper.

The news had traveled fast, and his paper had [Pg 18] sent him in haste to get all the details of the affair which could be obtained.

The three men reached M. Rovère's door. Moniche unlocked it and stepped back, Bernardet, with the reporter at his heels, note book in hand, entered the room.

[Pg 19]

CHAPTER III.

Nothing in the ante-chamber indicated that a tragedy had taken place there. There were pictures on the walls, pieces of faïence, some arms of rare kinds, Japanese swords and a Malay creese. Bernardet glanced at them as he passed by.

"He is in the salon," said the concierge, in a low tone.

One of the folding doors stood open, and, stopping on the threshold, in order to take in the entire aspect of the place, Bernardet saw in the centre of the room, lying on the floor in a pool of blood, the body of M. Rovère, clothed in a long, blue dressing gown, bound at the waist with a heavy cord, which lay in coils on the floor, like a serpent. The corpse was extended between the two windows, which opened on the Boulevard de Clichy, and Bernardet's first thought was that it was a miracle that the victim could have met his death in such a horrible manner, two steps from the passers-by on the street.

"Whoever struck the blow did it quickly," thought the police officer. He advanced softly toward the body, casting his eye upon the inert mass and taking in at a glance the smallest objects [Pg 20] near it and the most minute details. He bent over and studied it thoroughly.