The gaping valise had spilled upon the table a fortune in metal. Hundreds of gold and silver coins, torn from their velvet cases, gleamed before Detective-Inspector Rossignol, who had just discovered, within the chambers of an absent tenant, the medals stolen some weeks earlier from the antiquarians Rollin and Feuardent. This was the first decisive clue in an affair wherein, at the outset, the investigators possessed nothing beyond a forced window and idle conjecture. Marie-François Goron, then Chief of the Sûreté, recounted this investigation in his memoirs; his chapter also traces the subsequent fortunes of the suspect under an assumed name.
In March 1888, the two antiquarians of the Rue de Louvois discovered that their apartment had been rifled. Following a painstaking examination, Goron concluded that a lone individual had committed the burglary. According to his reconstruction, the thief had gained entry to the building before the carriage-gates were bolted for the night and concealed himself in a dark closet at the foot of the stairs. Under cover of darkness, he ascended to the first floor, climbed out of a landing window, shattered a pane of glass, and forced the espagnolette bolt of the apartment. He carried off ancient gold and silver coins—Roman, Greek, Byzantine, and French. Goron estimated the value of the collection at approximately five hundred thousand francs.
The Chief of the Sûreté was at first devoid of any solid lead. He surveyed the premises, but the trace discovered there did not permit the identification of the culprit. A daily paper turned this clue into a jest concerning lentils and the tenants of the house; Goron took pains to specify that the police had neither subjected this trace to analysis nor arrested any lodger on its account. It became necessary to return to witnesses and to the circumstances surrounding the antiquities trade.
One of the antiquarians, calling at Goron’s office, recalled that during the month preceding the theft several Greeks had offered him antiquities from their native land. This recollection pointed to no specific person, yet it afforded a direction to the inquiry. The Vice-Consul of Greece in Paris, Monsieur Manoulopoulos, consented to assist the police. Upon his information, Goron had some forty of his compatriots successively shadowed. The narrative records that the inquiry disclosed nothing untoward against them; their names were never made public.
One morning, the vice-consul reported yet another young man, Raftopoulos, who had arrived in Paris a few weeks prior and resided at No. 7, Rue Pierre-Lescot. Goron immediately dispatched Sergeant Rossignol. The inspector found the concierge, who informed him that the tenant had departed to spend Holy Week in Rome, and then applied to the landlady. Goron confesses he knew not by what means Rossignol gained admittance to the room; the inspector searched the furniture and discovered in a wardrobe a heavy valise that gave forth a metallic clink. Forcing the lock, he came upon the medals and coins from the Rue de Louvois.
The greater part of the plunder was there, yet the police had not laid hands upon their man. Goron deemed it probable that Raftopoulos would return to fetch the remainder. He dispatched agents to Italy at the request of the antiquarians; they found no trace of him. In order to await him in Paris, he assumed the rent of the room on his own authority and quartered Bourlet and Harpillard therein. The two officers waited patiently for four or five days, passing the hours at cards, until at last the door opened upon a returning traveller.
The newcomer protested loudly upon finding two strangers in his chamber, crying out that there were thieves in the house. Bourlet retorted that there might indeed be one, whereupon Harpillard revealed their status as agents of the Sûreté. Raftopoulos blanched and inquired what was wanted of him. The officers commanded him to empty his pockets. He drew forth several rare coins bearing the effigy of Jérôme Napoleon, King of Westphalia, of which the antiquarians possessed a complete series. A few days earlier, a bookmaker had received a similar coin from an unknown hand. These pieces, writes Goron, fortified the evidence already amassed.
The coin passed to the bookmaker had a curious history. The memoirist explains that the Paris Mint had struck only a handful of specimens in 1852, intended as gifts for intimates of the imperial family or select high dignitaries. Rollin and Feuardent possessed the entire run. If a man had received an identical coin at the racecourse, and Raftopoulos held several more in his possession, the token served to connect the betting transaction to the booty remaining in his pocket. The former Chief of the Sûreté presents this coincidence as a material proof, allied to the medals and the watch. He does not, however, record either the bookmaker’s name or the official deposition. The reader thus apprehends the police reasoning solely through the version Goron preserved.
The interrogation brought to light other articles which, according to the narrative, originated from the apartment: a gold watch belonging to Feuardent and the glazier’s diamond used to cut the pane. Questioned regarding the coins, Raftopoulos maintained he had purchased them in Athens and Patras. He assigned the same origin to the watch, explaining that he had inadvertently carried off a diamond borrowed from a glazier to mend a window in his home in Greece. Goron deemed these explanations preposterous. He also notes paper discs placed beneath the medals, bearing inscriptions he attributed to Rollin’s hand.
At the Court of Assizes, Raftopoulos was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, a penalty Goron characterizes as lenient for a nocturnal burglary by housebreaking in an inhabited dwelling. The antiquarians bestowed twenty thousand francs to be divided among the officers; the Prefect of Police likewise permitted several functionaries to accept ancient coins mounted as cravat pins. Goron records this detail without concealing the gratuities and gifts that attended the recovery of the spoils.
The chapter does not end in Paris. Goron adds that Manoulopoulos informed him that Raftopoulos had previously broken into the Museum of Athens, where he had carried off reproductions of medals rather than the precious originals. During a subsequent journey to Athens, Goron claims to have verified this story with Monsieur Svoronos, then director of the museum and sub-director at the time of the theft. The latter displayed the original pieces preserved in their cabinets. This detail refutes a press rumour that Goron dismisses as calumny; we possess no independent Athenian source here to corroborate his narrative.
The sequel he relates unfolds in Geneva in 1894. Eleven thefts or attempted thefts were recorded there in museums and libraries. A man taken in the act gave his name as Parthénis Chrystidès and was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. Works of art subsequently discovered in his lodgings were linked to a theft at the Museum of Marseilles. The anthropometric record sent to Paris established, according to Goron, that Chrystidès was none other than Raftopoulos. The latter was condemned to ten years’ penal servitude in Marseilles, then transferred back to Geneva to serve the sentence handed down in that city.
Goron ponders at the last upon the criminal responsibility of this man and the role alienists might have played in his case. He does not advance this inquiry as a clinical diagnosis; it expresses his judgment as a memoirist confronted by repeated thefts and the baffling selection of worthless pieces. This thread leads from a valise of medals to a succession of museums plundered under shifting identities; yet the sole testimony for this continuity, within the chapter under review, remains the word of the former police chief. The details of the 1888 affair and its aftermath come down to us through him alone; no judicial dossier or museum register was consulted herein.