At the premises of Fontana, located at No. 7 Rue Beaujolais, three callers ordered a gold pen-holder and gave their true address, at No. 8 Rue de Rome. An hour later, at Boucheron’s, a ring had vanished; the husband wrote another domicile into the clerk’s memorandum-book, giving No. 25 Rue du Colisée. Yet the first merchant had preserved the memory of his patrons, and the arrival of Dautaud at his establishment restored the connection between the two houses. It was in this manner that the Gazette bound together the alleged larcenies around a chain, a ring, and two addresses, only one of which led to the lodgings of the accused.
The chronicle appeared on June 21, 1877, reporting upon a hearing held the previous day before the Correctional Tribunal of Paris, Eleventh Chamber, over which M. Brizout de Barneville presided. This was not a trial before an Assize Court. The three accused persons were convicted by this summary jurisdiction. The published account provides neither the full addresses of the defense nor the detailed reasoning of the judgment; it sets forth a police report, the speech of the prosecutor, excerpts from the interrogation, and the eventual disposition.
The journal first recorded the names in the sequence furnished by the calendar of the court: Salvador Lopez Mendez, aged twenty-nine, private secretary to General Pulgar; Carmen Lossada, aged nineteen, wife of the former; and “Virgina Palenzuela,” aged thirty, styling herself the wife of Pulgar. The latter was presented as the lawful spouse of the general, formerly the minister plenipotentiary of Venezuela in Paris. In subsequent paragraphs, she was frequently referred to as “the woman Pulgar” or as Carmen’s “aunt.” These designations refer to one and the same woman and aunt, not to a fourth prisoner. The general himself did not sit upon the dock, nor did he figure among the condemned.
The report opened with the mention of 65,000 francs in securities discovered in the lodging of the woman Pulgar. It then related the particulars of a police report read at the hearing: among the papers found in the apartment at No. 8 Rue de Rome were letters concerning the political designs of the general. That officer was then at Fort-de-France; the correspondence spoke of arms and munitions intended for Venezuela. The journal attributed to the report the suspicion that he was fomenting an insurrection. These particulars concerned an absent husband and the seized correspondence; they constituted no political charge against the three prisoners in the cause then pending.
The same report made mention of bills of exchange. The general was said to have remitted to his wife first one hundred, then two hundred pounds sterling. His relations, according to the document, had conveyed to her the previous year 2,600 pounds, valued at 65,000 francs, in four bills of exchange discovered at her lodging, which appeared never to have been negotiated. This sum answered to the figure proclaimed at the head of the article, yet the Gazette did not allege that these funds derived from theft. It reported, furthermore, a letter from several former Venezuelan dignitaries who took up the defense of the family’s honor, expressing their astonishment at the acts imputed to the Lopez-Mendez couple and to Madame Pulgar. These instruments supplied the frame within which the affair was rehearsed; they did not supplant the material accusations arising from the shops.
The first of these occurrences was fixed on the first of May, between half-past four and five in the afternoon, at Fontana’s, a jeweler of No. 7 Rue Beaujolais. Three foreigners, according to the prosecution’s statement reproduced by the Gazette, had entered to purchase a gold pen-holder. The woman Pulgar and Lopez ordered one, requested that the initials J. M. H. be engraved upon it, and gave their residence as No. 8 Rue de Rome. They left another gold pen-holder as an earnest of payment. After their departure, Fontana perceived that a gold chain valued at 250 francs, lying within a packet upon the counter, was missing. It had rested near the place where the woman Lopez had stood. The journal rehearsed here the formal words of the indictment; it did not specify the physical gesture by which the chain was supposed to have been abstracted.
An hour later, the three accused presented themselves at Boucheron’s, at No. 41 Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs. Once more they asked to examine gold pen-holders, without making any purchase. Lopez drew attention to a ring worn upon the finger of the woman Pulgar, proposing an exchange of diamonds. The clerk, Dautaud, thereupon brought forward several rings and laid one down near the spot where the woman Lopez was positioned. Her husband asked for an agenda that he might write down his address. Availing himself of the moment when the clerk had turned away, he wrote down, according to the report, the name of Lopez with the address of No. 25 Rue du Colisée.
After their departure, Boucheron discovered that a ring set with a sapphire and bordered with brilliants, valued at 1,500 francs, was gone. Dautaud had chanced to observe in the hands of the woman Pulgar an address card from Fontana; thither he hastened. Thus it was that the first jeweler was able to instruct the authorities as to where the visitors had their dwelling. The police were notified, and the three individuals were placed under surveillance. The spurious information left behind at Boucheron’s had failed to sever the thread connecting the two visits.
On the morning of May 3, Lopez carried the sapphire ring to Coutreau, a jeweler established at No. 36 Boulevard des Italiens. He represented that the jewel came from Italy, requesting that the hoop be altered to match the size of another ring which he produced as a model. A constable who had shadowed him stepped into the shop after his exit; Dautaud identified the property. Lopez was taken into custody that very day. The Gazette supplied no narrative of the apprehension of the two women; it noted merely that domiciliary searches were subsequently conducted in the apartment on the Rue de Rome.
These investigations brought to light, in the chambers of the Lopez couple and of the woman Pulgar, numerous articles identified by Parisian shopkeepers. The store inspector of the Bon Marché identified a cravat and a lace collar, together valued at twenty francs; the woman Lopez declared she had stolen them alone. The director of the Magasins de la Paix recognized stockings and handkerchiefs to the value of sixty francs, which she likewise maintained she had taken without assistance. At a watchmaker’s upon the Boulevard de Sébastopol, a gold watch worth 250 francs was identified. The woman Lopez confessed to having purloined it in the presence of her husband and her aunt, on an occasion when they had entered the shop together to purchase a musical box.
At the Louvre, silk hose, an opera-glass, and a fan were recognized, which the young woman had allegedly abstracted while in the company of her aunt. At Agnel’s, in the Rue du Quatre-Septembre, she acknowledged having taken toilet articles valued at 190 francs. An ivory purse worth twenty-five francs had been stolen on May 3 from Madame Pezet, in the Galerie de Valois, while her aunt accompanied her. Finally, the woman Lopez admitted to having taken a scarf from the Printemps department store, where it was recovered from her possession. These goods bore diverse values; the sum of 65,000 francs cited at the beginning must not be confounded with this inventory of recovered property.
The stance assumed by the young wife, as reported in the press, was that her husband and her aunt were entirely innocent of the thefts and that she had acted alone. She affirmed that she had led them to believe she bought the objects with her own savings. The assistant prosecutor, M. La Fuye, countered this defense by pointing to the presence of the other prisoners within the shops and the contradictions surrounding the recovered merchandise. The tradesmen appeared at the bar to verify the losses sustained in their establishments. The chronicle reflected the posture of the prosecution; it did not permit every instance of presence to be translated into an observed criminal act.
A sworn interpreter assisted during the interrogations. The Gazette published several extracts from the examinations to which the young woman had been subjected during the preliminary inquiry. Touching upon the watch, she recounted that her aunt had asked whence it came, whereupon she admitted having taken it from the shop where the aunt had bought the musical box; the aunt was said to have expressed her disapproval. Her husband, she added, had learned of the circumstance several days later and had severely reprimanded her, declaring that he would no longer suffer her to go abroad unattended lest she be arrested. In other printed answers, she stated that she had shown her aunt, within their carriage, the articles taken from the shops. These were passages excerpted from the official interrogation as printed by the Gazette, and not a dialogue reconstructed for dramatic effect.
The public prosecutor called for exemplary rigor against the three prisoners. Maître Georges Lachaud appeared for the two women; Maître Decoux Lagoutte represented Lopez. The Gazette did not reproduce their pleadings. It recorded only the outcome: the Tribunal sentenced Carmen Lossada, named in the article as the woman Lopez, to eight months’ imprisonment. Salvador Lopez Mendez and Virgina Palenzuela, styled the woman Pulgar, each received a sentence of one year and one day. All three were placed under police surveillance for a term of five years.
The Rue de Rome had guided the officers to the bedchambers where the stolen effects were found and claimed by their lawful owners. The chain missing from Fontana’s and the ring retrieved at Coutreau’s had inexorably led back from the suspects’ wanderings to a single address: that which they had openly furnished in the first jeweler's shop.