The Dream Killer of Paris Read Free Page A

evening began to fall, started looking for a hotel.
    Having briefly studied the neighbourhood, I decided on an establishment in Rue de la Verrerie next to the church of Saint-Merri where the writer of the future had been christened, and a stone’s throw from the building in Rue Saint-Martin where he’d been born on 22 May 1808.
    I went up to my room to drop off my luggage. The walls and ceiling were crisscrossed with beams and the rustic furniture didn’t seem to have been replaced since the days of Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne .
    It was the perfect place for me. Here I could easily immerse myself in the writer’s work, wander where he had wandered at night, try to understand what had been going through his mind and perhaps even establish the exact circumstances of his death.
    ‘I am the other,’ he had written in the margin of a book 4 .
    I wanted to be him for a few days.
     
    The next day, Wednesday 17 October, after a disturbed night of fraught and chaotic dreams which I was unable to remember upon waking, and a quick morning stroll on the banks of the Seine, I spent much of the day in my room, reading Nerval’s biography. It was long past midday when I eventually decided to go out for lunch at the Café des Innocents. A hundred and fifty years earlier it had been the site of a cemetery of the same name. At the end of the fourteenth century, on a panel there Nicolas Flamel (him again) had had a ‘man in black’ drawn on one of its pillars, directly facing the alchemic figures supposedly taken from the book of Abraham the Jew.
    In Paris, more than anywhere else, history had left its mark on the present. For those who were able to see , reality consisted of more than just the fieeting con tours of beings and things. Wherever the eyes of those who could see fell, on the corner of every street, on nearly every wall, between every join in the cobblestones, they could perceive another layer beneath the superficial layer of reality. It looked similar but was very different and slightly out of step, a little like the anaglyphs whose technique Louis Lumière was refining in his workshops in order to screen three-dimensional films. Perhaps one day, simply wearing a pair of stereoscopic glasses in the street would make a new view of life possible – richer, more profound, more real, carved out of the depths of time, where past and present would be visible simultaneously.
    After lunch I pushed the remains of my meal away and openedAristide Marie’s book, which I always had with me. On one of the last pages, an extract from the register of the morgue (then located north-east of Pont Saint-Michel on Rue du Marché-Neuf ) was reproduced with the observations made by the state pathologist, Dr Devergie, on 26 January. Also reproduced was the complete text of the death certificate drawn up on 29 January at the town hall in the ninth arrondissement. These were about the only facts available. Thirty pages earlier, in a very obscure sentence, Aristide Marie intimated that documents from the investigation had been destroyed. What had happened? Was there any hope of ever finding them again?
    For now, I intended to visit the archives of the new Forensic Institute at Place Mazas near Quai de la Rapée.
    As the weather remained fine, I decided to walk along the Seine. Emerging on to Rue de Rivoli, I had just reached Tour Saint-Jacques, in front of Cavelier’s statue of Pascal, when I heard someone behind me calling my name.
    ‘Singleton! Singleton! Is that you?’
    ‘Inspector Fourier!’ I exclaimed, delighted to see the familiar face of the detective from the Sûreté, who was striding towards me.
    ‘Ah, my friend!’ he cried breathlessly, warmly shaking my outstretched hand. ‘But it’s Superintendent now, you know. I’ve been promoted!’
    ‘Of course, how could I have forgotten! This summer the Daily Mail reported at length on the exploits of Superintendent Fourier. That great figure of the Paris police force who managed to