The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (2 page)

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THE CITY OF LIGHT

O
n April 14, 1900, French president Émile-François Loubet opened the Paris Exposition Universelle, whose goal was to “reflect the bright genius of France, and show our fair country to be, today as yesterday, in the very vanguard of Progress.”
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Spread across the city, from the place de la Concorde to the Eiffel Tower, was a fantastic array of Swiss villages, Hungarian Gypsy caravans, mosques and minarets and Arab towns, as well as reproductions of the great Basilica of San Marco in Venice, a temple at Angkor Wat, and the Imperial Palaces in Peking. The expo contained displays from fifty-eight countries in 210 pavilions covering 350 acres. From April to November of that centennial year, Paris welcomed fifty million visitors from all over the world.

The star of the event was electricity, newly harnessed by science. Every evening, with a flick of a switch in the Palace of Electricity, light from fifty-seven hundred incandescent bulbs flooded the pavilions, inspiring the nickname Ville Lumière, “City of Light,” for Paris. Electricity also powered a train that circled the fair and a
trottoir roulant
(moving sidewalk) that allowed people to glide to the galleries. This newly harnessed invisible force propelled a giant Ferris wheel, carrying forty cars and twenty-four hundred people at full capacity, modeled after the original that had appeared at the Chicago World’s Fair ten years earlier. The fair was seen as a herald of the exciting and unparalleled new gifts that science would bring to the modern age.

A visitor, Pierre Laborde, a university student from Bordeaux, wrote: “You could say I’ve touched with my finger this delicious century that’s just begun. I’ve danced all the dances of the world from the Pont des Invalides to the Pont de l’Alma, and travelled by ‘moving carpet’ from a Venetian palazzo to Washington’s Capital, from an Elizabethan manor to a Byzantine church.… I’ve seen moving photographs and electrified dancing: cinematography and Loie Fuller [a red-headed American dancer who used electric lights to make her costumes glow and attempted to buy radium as a decoration because she had heard it glowed in the dark].… Life on a screen [the movies]… isn’t yet art, but it will be. And on a glass floor when the lights change color a woman becomes a flower, a butterfly, a storm, a flame from a brazier.”
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The fair was an affirmation of the new century’s glowing promise, transformed by an energy that no one could see but all could experience.

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The years in Paris from 1900 to the beginning of the First World War are often called the Belle Époque, the “beautiful time.” It was the height of a great civilization, confident, prosperous, cultured, and creative. Paris was not only the seat of the nation’s government but also the cultural focus of France — and, many felt, of the world. Within the city were the collected treasures of France — not only in museums, but within institutions of higher education, libraries, and archives. Paris was an international center for the arts of painting, dance, music, theater, and publishing. It had the foremost medical and scientific institutions of the day, and the most modern manufacturing facilities. The face of the future could be seen in Parisian leadership of such brand-new fields as motion pictures, automobile manufacturing, and aviation.

Visitors and wanderers were an essential component of this success. France’s colonial empire in Asia and Africa (a “civilizing mission,” as the French called it) brought to Paris examples of foreign cultures that understood the world in ways that were different from the European tradition. These in turn stimulated the imagination of the artists and scientists. Among the geniuses who lived in Paris in 1900 were Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne in art, Claude Debussy in music, Henri Poincaré in mathematics, Marcel Proust in literature, and the Curies, Marie and Pierre, in science. The achievements in painting during the Belle Époque can only be compared with those of Renaissance Florence when Leonardo lived there.

Among the fifty million visitors to the Paris fair was the nineteen-year-old Spaniard Pablo Ruiz, who visited the Spanish Pavilion (which resembled a Castilian castle) to see his own painting on display. Pablo was entranced with the city, its freedom, its variety, its openness to what was new and different. Like so many others, he would return and forge a new identity for himself. In his youth in Spain, the young man had learned to paint anything he could see; in Paris, he would discover how to paint things that nobody but himself saw. Forging a new identity for himself, he took his mother’s family name: Picasso.

A city of more than 2.7 million people in 1900, Paris had been the site of a settlement long before the Romans established a fort there around 300
C.E.
Yet the twentieth-century city was in many ways quite new, the creation of Baron Georges Haussmann, the first and the most powerful representative of what today are known as city planners. Serving as prefect of the Seine from 1853 to 1870, Haussmann had been entrusted by Napoleon III with the task of modernizing the city, making it grander and more beautiful. He had acted ruthlessly to fulfill his mandate. He demolished much of the ancient center of the city, wiping out whole neighborhoods on the Île de la Cité and the banks of the Seine. Paris also expanded, adding suburbs in places previously occupied by mills, grape arbors, and fields. Haussmann filled such lightly populated areas with housing for workers who had been displaced from the central city.

Drawing bold lines across the existing map of Paris, Haussmann built wide, straight, tree-lined boulevards that, fortuitously, would eventually carry multiple lanes of traffic by an invention he had not yet seen: the automobile. New bridges across the Seine and the Île de la Cité bound the Left Bank and Right Bank together and further eased traffic circulation. Safe drinking water was carried to the city through aqueducts from as far as one hundred miles away, and the new underground canals of the sewer system were regarded as so extraordinary that they became tourist attractions despite their smell. The wide streets made police surveillance easier as well, and the police force expanded to monitor Paris’s growing population.

Lining the boulevards were fine theaters, expensive restaurants, shops, cafés, and music halls. Elegant apartments with balconies offered housing to the very rich on broad avenues such as the Champs-Élysées. As dynamos brought electricity to all parts of Paris, it became possible to install electric-powered elevators in buildings, reversing the traditional Parisian order of living. Formerly the poor had to climb stairs to their upper-story apartments; now the rich could ride there in comfort to enjoy the beautiful views. Construction began on even taller buildings, called
à l’américaine
after the home of the skyscraper. Some people feared that these new outsize structures would destroy the proportions of the city and even hurt the tourist trade. “When Paris resembles Chicago and New York,” a newspaper editor warned his fellow Parisians, “the American women we want so much to attract, won’t come here anymore.”
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He needn’t have worried. Paris was a shopper’s mecca. Recently opened were huge department stores called
grands magasins,
such as Au Bon Marché and Galeries Lafayette, with multistory connected galleries that attracted shoppers from all over the world.

The American writer Theodore Dreiser was in Paris at the turn of the century and described its mode of life: “He [the Parisian] lives by the way,” he wrote, “out of books, restaurants, theaters, boulevards, and the spectacle of life generally. The Parisians move briskly, and they come out where they can see one another — out into the great wide-sidewalked boulevards and the thousands upon thousands of cafés, and make themselves comfortable and talkative and gay. It is obvious that everybody is having a good time, not merely trying to have it; that they are enjoying the wine-like air, the
brasseries,
the net-like movements of the cabs, the dancing lights of the roadways, and the flare of the shops. It may be chill or drizzling in Paris, but you scarcely feel it. Rain can scarcely drive the people off the streets… for there are crowds whether it rains or not, and they are not despondent.”
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Indeed, after the theft of the
Mona Lisa,
many people joked that the woman in the painting had gone out for a night on the town. If she had, she would have fit right into the scenes on either bank of the Seine, for the French capital was a magnet for the beautiful, wealthy, talented, and creative the world over. Gertrude Stein, an American who arrived in the city in 1903, wrote, “Paris was where the twentieth century was.”
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Many came to Paris because of the city’s bohemian neighborhoods, where artists and writers congregated to be on the cutting edge. Though Paris was a rich city, it was possible to live quite cheaply, if one could endure hardship. In 1891, Maria Sklodowska (who would later become the wife and scientific partner of Pierre Curie) arrived in Paris from her native Poland, then under Russian control, to study at the Sorbonne. “The room I lived in,” she recalled, “was… very cold in winter, for it was insufficiently heated by a small stove which often lacked coal. During a particularly rigorous winter, it was not unusual for the water to freeze in the basin in the night; to be able to sleep I was obliged to pile all my clothes on the bedcovers. In the same room I prepared my meals with the aid of an alcohol lamp and a few kitchen utensils. These meals were often reduced to bread with a cup of chocolate, eggs or fruit. I had no help in housekeeping and I myself carried the little coal I used up the six flights.”
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Another of the city’s residents was Guillaume Apollinaire, who was to become the great friend and publicizer of Picasso. Born out of wedlock in 1880 to a Polish woman in Rome (he himself spread stories that his father was a cardinal or perhaps even a pope), he formally bore an impressive collection of names: Guillaume Albert Wladimir Alexandre Apollinaire de Kostrowitsky. Along with a younger brother, he and his mother lived for a time in Monte Carlo, Cannes, Nice, and several other French cities, giving Guillaume a cosmopolitan air that would serve him well — although he recalled they frequently had to sneak out of hotels in the middle of the night when they could not pay the bill. Though Apollinaire was too poor to take the required courses for a university degree, he was able to find a job as a tutor with a wealthy family. A sojourn in Germany and then an unrequited passion for a young Englishwoman inspired him to begin writing poems. He settled in Paris, living in his mother’s house in the suburb of Le Vésinet but spending his time in Montmartre, like so many other aspiring artists. Working as a bank clerk, he contributed poems and articles to small literary journals and even edited one himself. He also wrote two elegant pornographic novels, which brought an offer from a publisher to edit and write introductions to a series of classic erotic works. Carrying all this off with aplomb and dignity, Guillaume soon became a familiar figure in the cafés of Montmartre.

Another arrival who had invented her own identity in Paris was Gabrielle Chanel, later known to the world as Coco. Born in a poorhouse in the town of Saumur on the Loire River, she spent her teen years in an orphanage after her mother died and her father deserted his children. Chanel devoured romance novels, whose plots she later incorporated into her own life story. After she became a famous couturier, a friend suggested that psychotherapy might help her to be more honest about her humble origins. Chanel replied with a laugh, “I — who never told the truth to my priest?”
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Like many who came to Paris, her life was a work of art, a blend of fact and fiction, assembled as she chose.