On the first day of 1888, as Marie-François Goron was receiving the New Year greetings of his subordinates, word was brought to him that a man arrested the previous evening in the Mail quarter had attempted the murder of a bank collection clerk. He was already being styled "a second Lacenaire." The analogy rested upon an apartment taken for the express purpose of laying in wait for a bank messenger, upon matured bills of exchange, and upon a blow struck from behind to the nape of the neck. Yet the prisoner was not Lacenaire, but a certain Lecomte, who had presented himself under the assumed name of Garnier. The affair is recounted by Goron in his memoirs, published in 1897, a decade after the event.
On November 15, 1887, a man in his thirties leased a modest second-floor lodging in the Rue Tiquetonne for five hundred francs. He claimed to trade in silks and to reside in Marseilles. He visited the premises but seldom and introduced not a single stick of furniture. He did, however, commission certain repairs from a locksmith of the Rue Beaubourg, whom he compensated by means of two bills of exchange payable on December 31. He expressly required that these notes be lodged with the Banque de France for collection. This calculation of date and place inextricably bound the day of reckoning to the anticipated arrival of a bank runner.
On December 31, the tenant, known as Garnier, appeared early at the house and informed the concierge that he would remain indoors throughout the day. Toward one o’clock in the afternoon, an employee of the Bank arrived to collect upon the two drafts. This young clerk was twenty-eight years of age; a supernumerary, he was substituting that day for an elderly colleague fallen ill. Entering the empty lodgings without suspicion, he inquired whether payment was to be made.
Garnier made a negative sign. The clerk leaned forward to remove the pin securing the notes. At that instant, his host seized him by the arm and drove a hollow bodkin—some ten centimetres in length, according to Goron—into the nape of his neck. The young man cried out for help and raised an alarm of murder. Blood flowed freely, yet the wound proved not to be fatal. Seized by panic, the assailant bolted from the chamber and locked the door behind him. A neighbour, drawn by the cries, inquired what was amiss. He replied that someone had been taken ill and that he was fetching a physician, whereupon he continued down the stair with an untroubled step.
The concierge and her son had likewise caught the outcry. The moment they saw Garnier emerge, they gave chase. The man broke into a run; the son shouted, "Stop thief!", bystanders barred the way, and the fugitive was seized at the corner of the Rue Mandar. Conducted before Police Commissary Brissaud, he maintained an unbroken silence. The bank clerk had survived, and the apprehension had followed so swiftly upon the assault that the police were able to inspect the apartment, the bills, and the weapon before their author could make good his disappearance.
Goron presents the affair as an almost literal imitation of the crime of Lacenaire, who, under a borrowed identity, had taken an apartment in the Rue Montorgueil. There, on a December 31, Lacenaire and his accomplice François Martin had likewise awaited a bank messenger arriving to collect upon forged drafts. They had struck at his neck with a sharpened cobbler's awl, but their prey had survived and raised an outcry. Both ruffians escaped, being run to earth only later following Martin's arrest for an unrelated swindle. Goron recalls that Canler, then in charge of the investigation, succeeded in uncovering the thread leading to Lacenaire and a third confederate, Avril. A distinct difference marked the two dénouements: the tenant of the Rue Tiquetonne was apprehended upon the spot, whereas Lacenaire and his associates initially slipped through the fingers of their pursuers.
The captive maintained that his name was Garnier and disclaimed all knowledge of the lodging in the Rue Tiquetonne. Nor would he answer when Goron laid before him the implement recovered from the scene. The Chief of the Sûreté suspected the identity to be fabricated, but lacked proof of the man's true name. A curious detail drew the suspect still nearer to his putative model: in the apartment, an investigator had recovered a slip of paper bearing two famous verses by Corneille. Goron adduced these lines as further evidence of a literary pose worthy of Lacenaire, though he stopped short of asserting that Lacenaire had ever quoted them. Yet literary affinity did not, in itself, constitute an identity.
Goron relates the stratagem to which he then resorted. He caused a false anthropometric file to be drawn up, asserting that Garnier stood already condemned in absentia to twenty years of penal servitude. When confronted with this purported record, the prisoner rebelled: he protested that he had never suffered a conviction and that his name was not Garnier. Pressed to divulge his true style, he retorted that he would speak only before a jury. Goron then chanced to observe a name stamped upon a trouser button and, without actually possessing the tailor's address, feigned to know it. Caught off his guard, the man at last confessed that he was Lecomte, a dry-colour merchant of the Avenue Bosquet.
He added that he did not reside above his shop, but in a garret room on the sixth floor of a house in the Chaussée-d'Antin, where his mother was concierge. Goron relates that he visited the mother to verify the son's identity. The woman, ignorant of her visitor's office, expressed only the fearful hope that her son had not vanished for want of the two thousand francs needed to settle a debt falling due; she dreaded lest he had taken his own life. Goron did not immediately enlighten her; he stated merely that her son had been arrested following a brawl and that he had come to establish his identity. On the morrow, the public journals informed her of the attempted murder.
A search of the garret yielded further traces of the crime's premeditation. Goron found volumes by Émile Gaboriau, the memoirs of Canler, and nearly every work written concerning Lacenaire. He reports further that Lecomte had inherited some few thousand francs, squandering his capital through reckless expenditures and an accumulation of unsold stock in his shop. As the close of the year drew near, he was incapable of meeting a pressing maturity. According to the confession Goron claimed to have gathered, Lecomte had months earlier observed the pouch carried by another bank messenger and conceived the notion of laying hands upon it. As his financial distress deepened, the scheme resurfaced, inflamed by the literary exemplar of Lacenaire. This account of his motives is that ascribed to the prisoner by Goron; no official transcript of his examination has been inspected here.
Before the Court of Assizes, Lecomte pleaded that he had acted under an overpowering obsession. The collection clerk had survived without permanent danger to his life. The jurors accorded the prisoner the benefit of extenuating circumstances, yet sentenced him to penal servitude for life. Goron learned subsequently that, while serving his term in the penal colony of New Caledonia, Lecomte committed a further crime for which he was put to death. The memoirist records neither the date nor the circumstances of this ultimate execution.
Thus ended the history of the man whom the newspapers had christened a "new Lacenaire" before his very name was known. The imitation provided the affair with its notoriety, but it could not supplant the material facts: the apartment, the bills of exchange, the victim, the false name, and the pursuit into the Rue Mandar formed the substantive body of Lecomte's crime. The literary comparisons and the exposition of his inner motives descend to us through Goron alone, as do the verdict and the subsequent execution. They must be received with due reserve, as neither the trial documents nor the registers of the penal colony formed part of the consulted record.