The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (64 page)

Le Gall's hand was on the bell.

“No!” shouted Holmes. “Wait!” Thereupon he took command of the situation while the
chef de cabinet
did his bidding. “Get this young woman dressed!”

It was easier said than done. Without going to indelicate lengths of description, I can record that Madame Steinheil had been wearing a corset, which few women could put on again without the assistance of a ladies' maid. So it was that she was helped into her outer clothes, the rest being bundled into a valise.

“Touch nothing, Watson, until I get back! Nothing!”

With that, Holmes led the poor trembling courtesan out by a side entrance into the snow. I watched them cross the lawn to the little gate, with Le Gall following. On the
chef de cabinet
's authority, the private gate at the Avenue de Marigny was opened and Madame Steinheil was put into the cab, which had been previously ordered to wait for her, with directions to the driver to proceed directly to the Impasse Ronsin.

In my friend's absence, I had found a nightshirt in the armoire. Between us, we managed to draw it over the head of the corpse and impart some decency to the mortal remains of the late Félix Faure.

“Monsieur!” Holmes spun round on Le Gall. “Have the goodness to find a priest. Any priest! The Madeleine will be your nearest church.”

Le Gall was like a man in a stupor.

“No,” he said. “There is no purpose. The President is dead and formalities must follow their course.”

“Formalities!” Holmes snapped at him, like a man waking a dreamer. “Do you not see that there is enough scandal in all this to have a revolution on the streets of Paris before tomorrow night? That is where formalities will get you! Find the first priest that you can and tell him President Faure is dying!”

Badly shaken though he was, the
chef de cabinet
went out. In five minutes Holmes and I had drawn the sheets over the body and Félix Faure lay on his back, his head on the pillow and his eyes closed. Holmes paced the room, looking here and there, as if for some lost clue to explain the tragedy. But the explanation lay only in the medical textbooks.

“Here, I think!” he said presently, picking up a small ochre-coloured bottle from the dressing-table. “What, my friend, do you make of this?”

As he held it before me, I could read only another parable of human frailty and old men's folly. There was little doubt that Félix Faure had taken a philtre of some kind which he hoped would aid his failing powers where women were concerned and which surely was the precipitating cause of his death. I thought, but did not say so, that he might have taken one of the capsules before the visit of the Prince of Monaco interrupted his intentions and had then taken another following it. For a man in his condition, it had been a most dangerous dose. Holmes took a small bag from his pocket and carefully dropped the bottle into it.

“It will not do, Watson, to leave such a thing where it may be found. The poor fellow is dead; let that be enough.”

Though little more than five minutes had passed, Le Gall was back with a young priest in a cassock, a prison chaplain who had been passing the main entrance of the palace on the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré as the
chef de cabinet
hurried towards the Madeleine. A little overawed by the magnificence of the death-chamber, the young chaplain murmured the phrases of absolution over the President's remains.

“Now,” said Holmes to Le Gall, “you will have the goodness to send for a doctor and for Madame Faure, as quickly as possible. My colleague and I will take our leave by the gate into the Avenue de Marigny.”

Le Gall, in his confusion and grief, promised that no reward we might ask was too great for having averted a scandal that would surely have led to civil disturbance and bloodshed. Even as matters stood, the Paris newspapers were not long in circulating a rumour that the President had met his death through the murderous cunning of a Judith or a Delilah employed by the fanatics of Captain Dreyfus.

“I will take no fee and no reward,” said Holmes, “unless it be a trivial souvenir of a great man.”

“Whatever you wish is yours,” Le Gall insisted.

With great delicacy, my friend lifted a little box of pale rose-coloured Sèvres
porcelaine tendre
, an exquisite thing no more than two inches square that might have been a snuff-box.

“Is that all?” the
chef de cabinet
asked, embarrassed by so slight a gift.

“Yes,” said Holmes quietly. “That is all. And now I think it best that, so far as we are concerned, we should leave Paris and this matter should be at an end.”

So it seemed to be. There were riots by an unthinking mob, encouraged in the right-wing press, who accused the
Dreyfusards
of murdering their President, but there was no revolution. Félix Faure was mourned and buried by the better part of his compatriots with a dignity befitting his rank. Dreyfus himself was still condemned to remain worse than a slave for life in the tropical hell of Devil's Island. Marguerite Steinheil and the “Secret History of the Third Republic” were two subjects which Holmes swore he never wished to hear mentioned again.

We gave our notice to the Hôtel Lutétia next day. As Holmes said several times, we had been made fools of by Madame Steinheil and had wasted valuable words on Professor Bertillon. Worst of all, the death of Félix Faure in the arms of his young mistress had perhaps dashed all hope among those who sought justice for Dreyfus. As our last resort, Holmes swore that nothing would do but he must go to Berlin and confront Colonel Schwartzkoppen. He would have confronted Kaiser Wilhelm himself, in his present mood, had he been granted an audience.

Two days later, on a dull February morning, our train pulled out from the Gare de L'Est, among the departure boards for Vienna and Prague, Munich and Berlin, under the long span of the shabby Rue Lafayette with its workshops and warehouses. Holmes stared out at the open ironwork of bridges that carried the grey streets of La Chapelle and La Villette above the broad expanse of railway tracks. In the grey light of winter we entered a canyon below tall stone houses with peeling shutters and mansard roofs; the darkness of a tunnel enclosed us.

“And this,” said Holmes at last, “is to be our reward. Let it take a place among our curios, Watson.”

He held lightly between his finger and thumb the little box of Sèvres porcelain. In his other hand lay several capsules, the contents of that box.

“The evil potion,” I said without thinking.

“Not the most evil, however,” Holmes remarked. “Not evil enough, perhaps, to kill a man. Think how easy even that would be to someone who knew the weakness of Félix Faure
and had the opportunity of access to him. Empty capsules may be bought from any pharmacy. They may be filled with anything, from stimulants for an old man's lust to the most deadly and instant poison. Dr. Neill Cream, the Lambeth Poisoner seven years ago, was just such a killer.”

“You think she poisoned him?”

He shook his head. “No, Watson. Not she. But what might not a man with evil in his mind do if he could fill one capsule with an instant poison and slip it among the others? Sooner or later his victim would take it. And when that victim was found dead with his mistress, as Félix Faure was found dead, would not his loyal servants act just as we have done? Who would demand an autopsy upon the body of a dead president in those circumstances? We believed that he had died from a foolish act of his own which would not bear the light of public scrutiny. Suppose it was worse—suppose it was poison. A murderer would scarcely need to cover his tracks, when we were eager to do it for him.”

“Then it truly was his assassination that she feared!”

Holmes shrugged. “She had better fear for herself. If Félix Faure died by the hands of his enemies, the documents which those enemies feared are now in the hands of Marguerite Steinheil. I do not think, Watson, that I should care greatly to be in that young woman's shoes in the years to come.”

I thought that it was one of our worst defeats, complete as it was rare. We had lost both battles with Alphonse Bertillon. We had failed to save Félix Faure from destruction or self-destruction, whichever it might be. We had not been the triumphant saviours of Alfred Dreyfus. Even Colonel Schwartzkoppen returned the card of Sherlock Holmes with his pencilled regrets that official duties in Pomerania made a personal meeting impossible. Sometimes, in the months that followed, I wondered what had become of Félix Faure's “Secret History of France under the Third Republic.” Did it ever exist? What did that matter now? The man to whom it would have been a shield was dead. His enemies might be uneasy at its existence but they would surely hesitate to commit murder as the price of its destruction. Though I read the daily news from Paris, I did not hear that Madame Steinheil had been murdered.

So we returned to London and I indulged Holmes so far as not to mention either Alphonse Bertillon or Marguerite Steinheil unless he did so first, which he did seldom and briefly. Yet the next twelve months saw a remarkable advance in the fortunes of Alfred Dreyfus. His persecutors had overreached themselves by arresting and imprisoning Colonel Picquart, Holmes's friend who was now head of counter-intelligence in the Deuxième Bureau. Picquart's crime had been to question the authorship of the treasonable letter to Colonel Schwartzkoppen.

Of the two men who had fabricated evidence against Captain Dreyfus, Colonel Hubert Henry cut his own throat with a razor on the day after his arrest. Lemercier-Picard anticipated his own arrest by hanging himself in his room. Among such events, the entire French civil judiciary demanded a retrial of Dreyfus, a call that the new President, Émile Loubet, dared not resist. At Rennes, to which he was brought haggard and white-haired from five years on Devil's Island, a military tribunal confirmed the guilt of Dreyfus but set him free. Frail but resolute, he promised to fight them until his innocence was recognised.

Time passed and Alfred Dreyfus won his last battle. His ally, Colonel Picquart, set free and vindicated, was about to become Minister of War in a new government led by Georges Clemenceau as Prime Minister, a man who had also demanded justice for Dreyfus.

“I fear,” said Holmes, laying down his morning
Times
, in which he had just read the news, “that our friend Picquart will find nothing in the files to incriminate the persecutors of Alfred
Dreyfus. The defeated party will have gone through the secret papers at the Élysée Palace and elsewhere with a fine comb to remove and destroy whatever might be used against them. More's the pity.”

Had he really not seen it?

“You forget the secret history,” I said gently. “That is not in the Élysée Palace but, if it exists, in the Impasse Ronsin.”

He sighed, shook the paper out, and returned to it. The name of “that young woman” was not mentioned after all.

“Yes,” he said quietly, “I daresay you are right. Perhaps the Impasse Ronsin is where that strange concoction of fact and imagination had best remain.”

It was a matter of mere days before the wire came from Marguerite Steinheil, imploring the assistance of the great detective. She was in the prison of St. Lazare, awaiting trial for her life, on charges of having murdered both her mother and her husband on the night of 30 May. Had this been a fictional romance, I could not have believed such a thing. Next day, however, a brief report by the Paris correspondent of
The Times
assured us of its truth.

I quite expected that Holmes would decline to leave Baker Street. However, he withdrew to his room and I was presently serenaded by the sounds of cupboards and drawers being opened and closed, luggage being thrown about. I went to the door. Without question, he was packing all that he might need for Paris.

“You are going?” I said.

“We are going, Watson. By the night ferry.”

“After the manner in which she made fools of us?”

“She?” He straightened up and looked at me. “She?”

“Marguerite Steinheil.”

“Madame Steinheil!” Holmes raised his voice loud enough to bring Mrs. Hudson quite half-way up the stairs. “I care nothing for Madame Steinheil! They may guillotine her tomorrow at dawn, so far as that goes!”

“Then why?”

He opened a drawer and took out a shirt, each movement tense with exasperation.

“Why?” He looked at me grimly. “To seize an opportunity which will in all probability never present itself again. To settle a final account with Professor Alphonse Bertillon. That is why!” With that he slammed shut the lid of the case and locked it.

After all that, it was sweet as a nut, as the saying goes—one of the neatest of conclusions. Best of all, Holmes won the contest against Bertillon: game, set, and match.

The Impasse Ronsin behind the shabby Rue de Vaugirard had changed by scarcely a brick or a pane of glass since we last saw it. The double murder had occurred on the night of 30–31 May. On the following morning, Rémy Couillard, the Steinheils' valet, entered the upper floor, where Marguerite Steinheil, her husband, and her mother—Madame Japy—slept in three separate rooms. The valet found the rooms silent and ransacked. Adolphe Steinheil lay dead in the doorway of his bathroom, kneeling forward as if he had died without a struggle as the cord was tightened round his throat. Madame Japy, the mother, had died upon her bed. The old woman had been gagged with such violence that a broken false tooth was found in the back of her throat. It was certain that she must have suffocated before the noose was drawn round her neck.

Marguerite Steinheil was found tied to her bed, bound and gagged but still alive. She told a confused story of having woken in the night to be confronted by three men and a woman in black ecclesiastical habits of some kind, the woman and one of the men having red hair.

“Where is your family's money?” they demanded. “Where are your jewels? Tell us or we will kill you and them as well!”