When Jeanne caught sight of the trunk in the newspaper, she brought her hand down upon the engraving with such sudden violence that her coffee spilled across the tablecloth. Her sister fancied she had just read of some catastrophe; nor was she entirely mistaken, for Jeanne had long been acquainted with that sort of catastrophe that crosses a threshold disguised as respectable luggage.
“You will ruin your eyes again with those tales.”
Jeanne made no answer. Beneath the engraver’s strokes, she was searching for a repair that no ordinary observer would have had reason to discern: a reinforced corner, a seam drawn slightly askew—the small imperfection she invariably committed whenever the leather proved stubborn and the master denied her the time to begin anew. The engraving afforded no certainty whatever. That was precisely what frightened her; she might have spent the entire day contemplating a likeness too vague to compel her to speak, yet distinct enough to banish all sleep.
A Dead Man’s Journey
The summer of 1889 had witnessed the disappearance from Paris of a bailiff named Gouffé. Soon afterward, at Millery, near Lyon, searchers discovered a corpse alongside the fragments of a wooden trunk that had served to convey it. Between the missing man and the nameless dead, a link had to be forged; between that link and the persons who had arranged the journey, there remained a distance that railways alone could scarcely measure.
The newspapers supplied Parisians with the means to follow this pursuit without ever rising from their tables. They displayed the trunk, the countenances of the investigators, and soon those of the suspects; every likeness promised to bring the reader closer to a secret to which the morrow’s engravings would add some fresh circumstance. In the household of Jeanne’s sister, the illustrated supplement was purchased for the children, who preferred the colored plates. Afterward, it was folded and slipped beneath the sewing basket.
The seamstress withdrew the journal from that very repository. Ever since leaving the workshop, she had not laid hand to leather goods; she mended household linens and ordinary garments, earned less, and counted herself fortunate, for a man she wished to forget remained ignorant of her new address.
If the trunk was indeed the one she believed she recognized, that very man had brought it in for repair.
A Workwoman Had Seen Nothing
At the workshop, several months earlier, he had demanded but one thing: that the task be completed before nightfall. The master had pledged her labor. Jeanne had worked beside the window, the trunk propped upon a chair; the client, having returned before his hour, had stood just behind her shoulder, watching the stitches fall into line.
“Do you know me?” he had asked.
She had known him under another name, in a season when she still fancied that a man changed his temper more readily than his identity. She had kept her head bowed and pulled the thread taut.
“I know my work.”
He had laughed, paid in coin, and left upon the bench a sum that the master snatched from her fingers before she could resolve to refuse it. The man had departed with his baggage; Jeanne had quitted the workshop a week later. No one had linked the two departures. The humble enjoy that melancholy advantage: their decisions arouse little curiosity, so long as they do not disrupt the labor of others.
Now, upon her sister’s table, an engraving restored the entire workshop to her senses: the smell of the hide, the ill-fitting window-sash, the heavy presence of that man at her back. What she did not know was whether the recollection bore the slightest relation to the crime.
She might be mistaken. She desired it so fervently that she understood, at last, why she must go and verify the truth.
The Address
The clerk to whom she first addressed herself inquired after the owner’s name. She gave the one he had used when she knew him. The man searched through a ledger, shook his head, and asked whether she possessed a receipt. She had never seen such a thing; working women do not carry the accounts of the establishments that employ them in their aprons.
A second official entered while she was gathering her things. He noticed the folded newspaper upon her knees and asked why she had brought it. Thereupon she spoke of the mended corner, the seam, the client who had returned before his time. He did not promise her that she had identified the right trunk. He asked for the address of the workshop.
It was that very reserve that persuaded her to give her own address as well.
While Jeanne waited, the Gouffé affair ran its course: the identification of the remains, the manhunt for Michel Eyraud and Gabrielle Bompard, their flight, and then the young woman’s return to Paris, where she surrendered to the police in January 1890. Eyraud was subsequently apprehended in Havana. The names that the press had scattered across borders returned at last into the hands of justice.
At Jeanne’s lodgings, the newspaper continued to arrive. Her sister no longer reproached her for reading it; she merely refrained from asking what she still expected from a case in which, people said, the culprits had already been found.
What Does Not Travel
Eyraud was executed in 1891. The illustrators, who had furnished the public with portraits of the suspects, now presented that of the executioner; it seemed a tale could reach no conclusion until every person who had discharged a role within it had shown his face.
Jeanne figured in no print. The repair she had thought she recognized had not sufficed to make her a heroine; her deposition had been merely one lead among many, examined and then consigned to its proper obscurity. She felt a quiet relief, until the day a letter reached her sister’s door.
The envelope bore her former name. Within, there was neither threat nor explanation—only the receipted bill from a leather workshop, and two words penned in a hand she recognized without any aid from the gazettes: “Work paid.”
She took the letter, descended the stairs, and walked toward the office where they had once consented to hear her. This time, she did not ask herself whether what she knew was of sufficient weight. She had understood that a trunk might complete its journey long before the secrets of those who bore it ever reached their end.