The Bloody Doll Read online

  [12] Elysian Fields – a literal translation of Champs-Élysées, which I have used to bring out the almost mythical quality of Benedict’s self-pity in this chapter, rather than suggest a more mundane passage along the famous Parisian avenue.

  [13] Alain Chartier – a French poet and scholar (c.. 1385-1430). The story goes that he was kissed on the lips while he slept by Margaret of Scotland, who wanted to “honour the mouth which elicited so many virtuous words.” This is highly unlikely, since Chartier was already dead by the time Margaret visited France. Source: the Catholic Encyclopedia.

  [14] Guinguette – a kind of drinking establishment, restaurant and venue for dancing, particularly popular during the 19th century. Situated in the countryside around Paris, guinguettes were considerably cheaper than their city centre counterparts because they were exempt from state taxes. This made the train journey from Paris, in order to get drunk cheaply, attractive to many Parisians – especially on Sundays.

  [15] Gustave Aimard (1818 – 1883) – was an adventure novelist: the most famous 19th century French writer of westerns. Most of his novels were about the Native American tribes.

  [16] I am not sure of the exact meaning of this reference, but the best I can suggest is: Halong Bay is in Vietnam (which used to be called French Indo-China), the name means ‘descending Dragon,’ and local legend has it that the bay is inhabited by an ancient family of dragons, who were once sent by the gods to defend it from foreign invaders. (Source: Wikipedia, treat with caution!)

  [17] From this point onwards, it becomes clear that part of Leroux’s intention with ‘The Bloody Doll’ was to write a satirical comment on the case of the serial killer Henri Désiré Landru, ‘the French Blubeard,’ whose trial, through a mixture of political intrigue and genuine public outrage, became notorious in France when it went to court in 1919. In brief summary, Landru took advantage of the chaos caused, behind the lines, in France by the First World War to charm his way into the confidences of a large number of recently bereaved widows and otherwise vulnerable women. He proceeded to rob them, murder them, and finally cremate them in a stove in a remote dwelling in the countryside outside Paris. No-one ever really found out how many Landru killed, on account of the burned remains being too difficult to identify. Like Benedict Masson in the passage above, he constantly disrupted his own trial by pleading his complete innocence, even though the police had already discovered charred human remains, items of clothing, and personal effects that were inextricably linked to several of his known victims, in his possession. He was convicted of the murders of ten women and one young man… and guillotined.

  [18] This argument is a parody of Henri Désiré Landru who, in his own defence, stated: “It is true that I knew the ladies in question, but I am un homme galant and cannot allow you to ask me questions concerning them. If they have disappeared, it is nothing to do with me. It is not for me to say what has become of them. It is for you to make the necessary search. I am innocent, I swear. When you can produce proof of what you claim, I will discuss it.” (Source: Dennis Bardens, The Ladykiller – The Crimes of Landru, the French Bluebeard, London, 1998: Senate True Crime, p.119)

  [19] Sûreté générale – a division of the French police force in the 20th Century, that investigated serious crimes: the equivalent of the British CID, or the American FBI.

  [20] Jenny l’ouvrière – the title of piece of 1890s popular fiction, typical of a genre that peddled a sentimental fantasy of the nobility of working class life to a very large readership. Romance, rather than realism, was the order of the day.

  [21] Diane de Poitiers was a powerful courtier in 16th Century France, Catherine de Medici was queen consort of France between 1547 and 1559, as the wife of King Henry II of France. The two women were cousins.

  [22] Empouse – the word usually refers to a female vampire as per the following definition, that comes from the Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology: ‘In Greek, the word empouse translates as “vampire,” but technically, it is considered a demon by the ancient Greeks’ own mythological standards of classification. They define a demon as any creature born in another world that can appear in ours as a being of flesh. Nevertheless, the word was completely understood to mean a vampire, therefore, the empouse is considered by some to be the oldest recorded vampire myth… In Greek mythology… empousaias, as they are referred to collectively, are born the red-headed daughters of the witch goddess Hecate and act as her attendants. Their legs are mule like and shod with bronze shoes. Along with its powers of illusion and shape-shifting, an empouse will also use its persuasive abilities to convince a man to have sexual relations with it. However, during the act it will drain him of his life and, on occasion, make a meal of his flesh, much like a succubus.’ (Source: http://vampmyth.com). As we now know: the Marquis is, actually, a brucolac…

  [23] Count Ugolino della Gherardesca – ‘the Cannibal Count’ – 13th Century Italian politician who passed into literary and folk legend on account of being condemned to the second ring of the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno on the accusation of treason and of having, reluctantly, eaten his children while imprisoned in a Pisan tower.

  [24] Pompadour – a hairstyle named after Jeanne Antoinette Poisson (1721-1764), Marquise de Pompadour, a famous actress and mistress of Louis XV, in which the hair is swept up and combed back, high over the forehead. The male version of this is the quiff.

  [25] Carabosse – the wicked fairy godmother in ‘Sleeping Beauty.’

  [26] Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre: an 18th Century French novelist, botanist and student of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was an early advocate of vegetarianism, and held an arch-Romantic notion that nature is essentially good and harmonious until corrupted by the secular and episcopal authorities. In this passage, Saint-Pierre’s name is used as a foil to that of Emile Henry (an anarchist terrorist, condemned to death for throwing a bomb into the ironically-named Café Terminus in Paris in 1894, who defended himself with the words: “there are no innocent bourgeois”) and Jean Hiroux (a mythical figure, a murderer of widows, who went to the guillotine with displays of defiant humour). See: Roger Bellet : Le sang de la guillotine et la mythologie de Jean Hiroux (1840-1870). In: Romantisme, 1981, n°31.

  [27] Celui-là est mon frère: Benedict is quoting from Matthew 25 – ‘Celui-là est mon frère, ma sœur, ma mère.’ In the English Standard version, Christ says ‘Here are my mother and my brethren.’ It is part of the prelude to a sermon on the Final Judgement. (Source: www.biblegateway.com)

  [28] The ‘Gentleman of Paris:’ the nickname of Charles-Henri Sanson, the High Executioner of the First Republic, who guillotined nearly 3,000 people (including King Louis XVI in 1793). Here, it is being used as a general nickname for the executioner.

  [29] Paul Verlaine, Promenade Sentimentale, from: Poèmes Saturniens, my translation, SM.

  Translator’s Afterword

  An Imaginary Solution to the Case of Henri Désiré Landru

  A Nation of Widows – the social history of the First World War is usually narrated from the tragic and heroic point of view of doomed young men who volunteered, or were conscripted, in immense numbers from the factories and farms of Europe, Asia, Australasia, Africa and North America, to face almost certain death in the trenches of Flanders and France.

  The French army had more men under its command than any other country involved, and it suffered a proportionate share of the casualties. More than 1,000,000 of its soldiers were killed, with at least 300,000 of that number butchered in the ceaseless attritional battles around Verdun – the town, surrounded by a ring of fortresses, that acquired the macabre nickname the Mincing Machine from the French poilus.

  The horrors of the Western Front were indisputable – the massive artillery barrages, poison gas attacks and sub-suicidal infantry assaults on deeply-entrenched defensive positions – but total warfare, with its punitive air raids and systematic extermination of non-combatants (although it was in its experimental sequences in Africa, the Balka
ns and Russia) was still a strategy for the most part reserved for the near future. Warfare was still more or less strictly limited to military objectives. In France there were zones, even in Paris – which was never seriously threatened by the German army after its advance was brought to an abrupt halt, along the banks of the Marne, in the autumn of 1914 – where life and business went on almost without interruption.

  There was a second, untold, humdrum tragedy that unfolded in these commercially untroubled zones on the domestic front, the main by-product of the perpetual motion of the mincing machine: the manufacture of widows and orphans at the rate of several thousand per day. Unfortunately for them, in context of a more rigidly patriarchal society than the one that began to emerge after the war had ended, this rendered them vulnerable to exploitation by legitimate commerce and its illicit double, a thriving black market. To Henri Désiré Landru, these daily bereavements were an invitation.

  L’homme aux finances – were it not for the opportunities for profit afforded by the First World War to entrepreneurs and criminals alike, Henri Désiré Landru would most likely never have risen above the level of an extremely minor annoyance to the French police.

  He was born in 1869 in the Belleville district of Paris, but was brought up on the Île de Saint-Louis. His father, in search of elevation to the superficial heights of petit bourgeois respectability, moved the family to this quiet Parisian backwater, the place evoked nostalgically by Leroux as a Romantic anachronism in the first few paragraphs of The Bloody Doll, where he earned a living as a salesman in a bookshop called Masson’s on the rue de Vaugirard. Henri was an unremarkable boy in most ways; an average scholar, with neither major talents nor failings, he was set apart only by his possession of a fine singing voice. According to Dennis Bardens, the young Landru, who attended a school run by monks, sang so beautifully in the choir of l’Église de Saint-Louis en Île that he was permitted to serve at mass as a sub-deacon. After a brief a spell of military service that ended in 1890, he worked as an accountant’s apprentice, acquiring a talent for keeping meticulously-detailed accounts. His passion for recording such information, in relation to criminal transactions, would be his undoing in the end.

  By 1914, Landru was no more than a 45 year-old swindler, dealer in stolen goods and petty thief. He was already well-known to the police as a minor face in the criminal underworld of Montmartre and the Latin Quarter – where he moved in complex circles of thieves, card sharps, confidence tricksters, fences, prostitutes and brothel madames. From this stratum of society, Landru would sometimes employ young girls to pose as his daughters when he went to meet his future victims.

  The war suited Landru’s modus operandi – factories and workshops continued to produce goods that were not necessarily intended for the war effort; shops, cafés, bars and guinguettes still opened for their convivial business; newspapers continued to be printed; and the police force was notable for its almost complete absence.

  Death in the Matrimonial Column – Henri Désiré Landru placed advertisements in the ‘Matrimonial’ columns of several newspapers:

  Widower, with two children, aged forty-three, possessing comfortable income, affectionate, serious, and moving in good society, desires to meet widow of similar status, with a view to matrimony.

  Advertisements like this caused an enormous volume of correspondence to circulate at the time, as a growing number of women struggled to come to terms with loneliness and the financial consequences of their bereavement. It was not difficult for Landru to use this fact as an opportunity to target widows – as suggested earlier, this was a social group whose numbers were rising all the time. Landru’s notebooks gave brief details of his meetings with his correspondents, at the rate of several per day. It must have taken a great feat of memory and personal organisation to fulfil all of these appointments.

  Landru’s primary motive was profit: any woman who responded to one of his advertisements interested him, irrespective of age, beauty (or perceived lack of beauty), on condition that she possessed sufficient property or money (or both). The immediate idea appears to have been to turn the administrative chaos caused by the war to his advantage. Most of the police force, especially the feared paramilitary formations of the gendarmerie, were serving at the front – which made it simple for a sly and resourceful crook like Landru to get away with a multitude of crimes, under a multitude of aliases, in several locations in Paris and its suburbs.

  He would write passionate love-letters to the unsuspecting women who answered his advertisements, copied in an immaculate hand from a standard manual on the correct way to address and seduce a paramour. Although far from what anyone would call handsome, he was polite and charming. He looked respectable enough dressed in his smart suit, with a bowler hat and a neatly-trimmed beard, but: sometimes the promises of a face can be deceptive. By all accounts, either from the few who would admit to knowing him, or from the two known survivors of his machinations, or from those of observers at his trial, he had an unsettling, almost hypnotic stare.

  In 1921, a Paris newspaper called Le Journal, on the assumption that a soon-to-be acephalic Landru would be in no position to sue them for publishing libellous remarks, printed this reading of his physiognomy from a Monsieur Pactat, a renowned follower of the discredited science of phrenology:

  ‘The osseology of the skull of l’homme aux finance s is significant. Its form is clearly conoidal, which indicates sanguinary and brutal instincts, but of a practical nature withal, a man of strongly developed business talent, active and enterprising. Were it not for a protruberance which is very marked on the forehead, the head would show a perfectly balanced brain, but the forehead is receding, and this indicates a far from strong intelligence. It also shows idealism and obstinacy. The man might have died for an ideal, but he has no generous instincts. The eyes are remarkably fixed, showing a very strong will. The bushy eyebrows show determination and decision and indicate a domineering, irascible and unsociable character. The profile of the nose shows courage. The open nostrils are excessively sensual and lascivious. So is the mouth.’ (Bardens, pp109-110)

  Modern readers ought to greet these observations with a certain cynicism: how much of this information was a posteriori already in the public domain, as details of Landru’s horrific crimes filtered into common knowledge? But they do provide us with an interesting description of the sinister, and strangely comical, face of the ‘French Bluebeard.’

  M. Pactat believed that it was Landru’s ‘strange eyes’ that attracted his victims, who were seduced with promises of matrimonial security, defrauded of all their savings and valuable property, lured to a secluded villa in the countryside around Paris, presumably murdered (we can only speculate how), dismembered, and cremated in the villa’s iron stove…

  (Landru made use of two rural villas:

  The first was at Vernouillet – a small, unremarkable, two-storied building set behind a high wall. There were four windows on the front of the building but, crucially for Landru’s sanguinary intentions, the room beyond these windows was invisible from the street.

  The second was in Gambais – near a church and a cemetery, it was almost completely concealed by trees. Its windows were fastened by heavy, steel shutters. Nearby was a pond in a desolate, lonely place, known only to poachers which [Bardens] was shallow around its borders and twenty feet deep in the middle).

  …I say presumably murdered because no major remains of any of the missing women were ever found: only ashes and bits of personal effects found burned to cinders in Landru’s stove, or personal property stored in one of his retail outlets. Even as far as many of their relatives were concerned, among the fluid and chaotic population movements that took place in response to the movements of the Western Front, they had simply disappeared – although some still feared for the whereabouts of their lost relatives, and harried the authorities to search for them. One of them knew exactly where, and at whom, the police ought to be looking (although she did not know his real name).


  Landru was arrested in possession of stolen property belonging to one of the missing women after the sister of Célestine Buisson (who turned out to have been Landru’s 8th victim) persuaded the police to raid one of his numerous addresses in connection with her sibling’s disappearance, shortly after she began a relationship with Landru in one of his numerous aliases. The police found enough evidence to charge him with embezzlement, but it was not yet obvious that the case against him was about to escalate into a murder investigation. More sinister discoveries were to follow when their lines of inquiry led inevitably to his other properties. He refused to admit to any kind of wrongdoing. This was a stance that he maintained throughout his trial in 1921.

  Several villagers in Gambais reported to the authorities that they had noticed nauseating smells coming from Landru’s little house, a stench that some did not hesitate to identify as that of burning meat and fat, while unearthly lights flickered behind the slats in the shutters that covered the rear windows of the villa; and the garden vanished under a filthy, choking, swirling cloud of ash, oily and chymical-black, chasing up to the sky.

  When the police searched the villa at Gambais, they found a heavy iron stove (Landru’s crematorium), a collection of hacksaws and a billhook. In its garden, they found charred scraps of bone, teeth, a fragment of fused glass and a hairpin. They found little or no blood, and nothing to connect any of these fragments to the missing women. In the absence of bloodstains, they could not corroborate the theory that Landru had used the hacksaws to dismember the corpses of his victims before burning them in the stove, unless it could be proved that Landru had taken his customary meticulous care to clean the area of human viscera, not to mention the congealed fat that would have coated the inside of the chimney through which the nauseating black smoke would exit the building. The key to the whole case came into the possession of the police when they found one of Landru’s notebooks.