One Name Too Many
Before the Assizes, the accused still held names in reserve. Prado, Linska de Castillon, Mendoza: the more one sought the man, the more titles and foreign lands interposed themselves to shield him. The fatal advantage of an obscure genealogy is that it can bear any manner of embellishment. But a woman had been murdered in the Rue Caumartin, and the question laid before the jury was not whether the prisoner at the bar was descended from princes.
Marie Aguétant had died in January 1886. Two years later, her name resurfaced in an affair wherein jewels were tracked across multiple cities, wherein women once bound to the suspect spoke out against him, and wherein a murder forgotten behind fresher headlines resumed its place in the front rank. The prisoner defended himself with sufficient fluency to sustain the spectacle. The physical evidence, fortunately, possessed less wit than he, and a far more tenacious memory.
The Visit to the Rue Caumartin
Marie was a patron of the Eden Théâtre. There she wore diamonds that the press would soon convert into a sobriquet, reducing the woman to that which glittered upon her. According to the preliminary depositions, she had quitted the establishment in the company of a gentleman clad in a light overcoat and a felt hat. They had returned to her residence in the Rue Caumartin. The housemaid had admitted them before withdrawing to the kitchen.
Later, a gentleman who maintained a liaison with Marie returned to the apartment. Finding the door locked, he was compelled to have it forced. Marie lay dead. Her jewels and certain bearer securities had vanished. The crime pointed towards an unmistakable motive—that of robbery; it had not yet bestowed a discernible countenance upon the perpetrator.
Witnesses were questioned, records compared, and a search instituted for the escort seen at her side. The investigation failed to culminate in an arrest. The proceedings terminated in a dismissal of charges before being reopened. This cessation made the victim no less dead; it marked merely that juncture at which justice lacked sufficient evidence to prosecute any specific individual.
Paris soon had other outrages to contemplate. Marie’s murder was even drawn into comparison with the Pranzini affair, so closely did certain particulars appear to answer one another. But resemblance is not identity. A passing hypothesis could not supply what the investigation was missing.
The Man Who Was Always Leaving
Prado, meanwhile, was travelling. It is only with the utmost reserve regarding his inventions that one must approach the chronicles of his youth: the countries traversed, the extraordinary marriages, the military wounds, and the secret patrimonies belong largely to an autobiography of his own manufacture. A report in The Times, reprinted in the Waikato Times, already distinguished between the episodes merely related by his own tongue and established facts. The distinction deserves to be preserved; a novelist has no call to mistake an impostor for his archivist.
In Paris, he had cohabited with Eugénie Forestier. Later, he had summoned her to Bordeaux. Mauricette Couronneau entered his life in her turn. Both women were drawn into his wanderings and the consequences of his undertakings; their subsequent depositions aided justice in turning its gaze once more towards the Rue Caumartin.
The occasion arose from another theft, involving watches and jewellery at Royan. The stolen goods circulated, confederates attempted to dispose of them, and the police picked up the scent. Prado was apprehended in Paris at the close of 1887. Contemporary press accounts record that he discharged a firearm at the officer attempting his capture. On this occasion, a hurried departure for another city had not sufficed.
He was taken for one affair. He was about to be interrogated upon a second.
The Diamonds of Madrid
The revelations of Eugénie Forestier and Mauricette Couronneau enabled the inquiry into Marie Aguétant’s death to be resumed in the spring of 1888. The testimony of women formerly intimate with the accused offered valuable intelligence; it raised likewise the question of their mutual relations, their private interests, and such duress as they might have suffered. Prado might endeavour to portray the accusation as the work of amorous spite. Yet for that defence to stand, their statements had to remain unsupported.
They did not remain so.
The investigation reached as far as Madrid. According to contemporary accounts, Prado had repaired thither shortly after the murder and pledged several pieces of jewellery. A woman connected with the pawnbroker recognised his dealings. On that occasion, true to his habit of projecting grand prospects, he was even said to have spoken of an alliance with the daughter of the house. But what mattered to the magistrates was no fresh promise: it was the photograph he had left behind.
The portrait linked the traveller directly to the stolen effects. The investigators were now able to correlate a face, an itinerary, the jewels, and the depositions. Not every piece of evidence recounted the crime in the same manner; together, they permitted the authorities to verify whether the tale unfolded by the witnesses encountered independent material traces.
Thus the prosecution’s brief was assembled far from the chamber where Marie had been discovered. A national frontier had not effaced the provenance of the diamonds. The suspect who multiplied his aliases had left behind him an unmistakable likeness.
The Women at the Bar
In November 1888, the Court of Assizes examined these matters and their ramifications. Prado retained a composure that the chroniclers noted with avid interest. He parried, contested, and manœuvred. His counsel likewise nurtured the mystery surrounding his origins. It is possible to impress an auditory with the secret of one’s birth; it is far more arduous to fashion from it an alibi.
Eugénie Forestier and Mauricette Couronneau stood indicted alongside him. They were not condemned with him. Their acquittal must remain clearly visible in the narrative, for those press accounts that portrayed them foremost as his mistresses risk confounding the man’s crime with the lives of the women who had crossed his path. The jury drew the distinction.
Prado was found guilty of the murder of Marie Aguétant and sentenced to death on 14 November. The multiplicity of his appellations had not stayed the verdict. The pictorial archives of the trial preserve sketches of the accused and the witnesses: each figure recovers therein an individual standing, which the clamour of the newspapers had so often obscured.
Rue de la Roquette
The execution took place on 28 December 1888, before the prison of La Roquette. The criminal dossier was closed; the identity of which Prado had made a theatrical stage remained in part obscure. Later narratives would continue to extract from it princes, adventurers, and state secrets. He had furnished sufficient matter to fill several romances, provided one did not require his recollections to be true.
There remains, however, a history far more precise than his legends of noble birth. A woman returns from the theatre with a caller. She is found dead; her jewels are gone. The inquiry falters, then revives through an unrelated arrest, through witness statements, and through property recovered far from Paris. It is these verifiable steps that restore Marie Aguétant to the centre of the affair. Prado had laboured mightily over his persona; he has no title to claim, into the bargain, the entirety of the narrative.