A commissaire and a cop, Commissaire Gérardin and Inspector Grimaldi, questioned the dying Roland Lepetit in the presence of his mother. The nurses had told them his condition was hopeless. I quote their report; it’s been published in a book written to pull me to pieces, with a preface and therefore a guarantee by a commissaire divisionnaire, Paul Romain. Here it is. The two pigs are questioning Legrand:
“Here beside you you have the police commissaire and your mother, the holiest relationship in the world. Tell the truth. Who shot you?”
He replied, “It was Papillon Roger.”
We asked him to swear that he had really told the truth. “Yes, Monsieur, I have told you the truth.”
We withdrew, leaving the mother beside her son.
So what happened on the night of March 25, 1930, was clear and straightforward: the man who fired was Papillon Roger.
This Roland Lepetit was a pork butcher and a pimp, who put his girl friend Nini out to work for him: he lived with her at 4, rue Elysee des Beaux-Arts. He was not really a member of the underworld, but, like all those who hung around Montmartre and all the genuine crooks, he knew several Papillons. And because he was afraid they might arrest another Papillon instead of the one who had killed him, he was exact about the Christian name. For although he was fond of living outside the law, like all squares he also wanted the police to punish his enemy. A Papillon, sure, but Papillon Roger.
Everything came flooding back to me in this accursed place. I must have run through this file in my head a thousand times; I’d learned it by heart in my cell, like a Bible, because my lawyers had given it to me and I’d had time to engrave it on my mind before the trial.
So there was Lepetit’s statement before he died; and the declaration of Nini, his girl. Neither of them named me as the killer.
Now four men come upon the stage. On the night of this job they went to the Lariboisière hospital to ask:
(1) if the wounded man was in fact Roland Lepetit;
(2) what condition he was in.
The pigs were told at once, and they began a search. Since these men did not belong to the underworld and were not concealing themselves, they had come on foot and they left on foot. They were picked up as they were walking down the Avenue Rochechouart and kept in custody at the station in the XVIII arrondissement.
They were:
Georges Goldstein, 24; Roger Dorm, 24; Roger Jourmar, 21; Emile Cape, 18.
All the statements they made to the commissaire of the XVIII arrondissement station on the very day of the killing were cut and dried. Goldstein stated that in a gathering of people he had been told that a man called Lepetit had been wounded--shot three times with a revolver. Thinking it might be his friend Roland Lepetit, who was often in that district, he walked to the hospital to find out. On the way he met Dorin and then the two others and asked them to go with him. The others knew nothing about the business, and they did not know the victim.
The commissaire asked Goldstein, “Do you know Papillon?”
“Yes, a little. I’ve met him now and then. He knew Lepetit; that’s all I can tell you.”
So what of it? What does this Papillon mean? There were five or six of them in Montmartre!
Dorm’s statement: Goldstein asked him to go along to the Lariboisière to inquire after a friend whose name he did not mention. Dorm went into the hospital with him; and Goldstein asked if the Lepetit who had been brought in was seriously wounded.
“Do you know Lepetit? Do you remember Papillon Roger?” the commissaire asked.
“I don’t know Lepetit, either by name or by sight. I do know a man called Papillon, having seen him in the street. He is very well known and they say he is a terror. I know nothing more.”
The third man to be questioned, Jourmar, said that when Goldstein came out of the hospital, having gone in alone with Dorm, he said, “It’s certainly my buddy.”
So before he went in, he was not sure about it, right?
The commissaire: “Do you know Papillon Roger and a man called Lepetit?”
“I know a man called Papillon who hangs around Pigalle. The last time I saw him was about three months ago.”
The same with the fourth thief. He didn’t know Legrand. A Papillon, yes, but only by sight.
In her first statement the mother also confirmed that her son had said Papillon Roger.
So far, everything was plain, clear-cut and exact. All the chief witnesses gave their evidence in complete freedom before a local commissaire without being prompted, threatened, or guided.
In short, Roland was in the Clichy Bar before the tragedy, and all the people present were unknown. They may have been playing cards or dice, which meant they were acquaintances of Roland’s, but still they were unknown. What was odd, and indeed disturbing, was that they remained unknown until the very end.
Second point: Roland Lepetit was the last to leave the bar, and he left it by himself; his own girl said so. Nobody came to fetch him. A very little while after he went out, he was wounded by a man whom he positively identified on his deathbed as Papillon Roger. The man who came to tell Nini was another unknown; and he, too, was to remain so. Yet he was the one who helped Lepetit into the taxi immediately after the shooting-- an unknown man who walked along with the cab as far as the bar where he was going to warn Nini. And this essential witness was to remain unknown, although everything he had just done proved he belonged to the underworld, to Montmartre, and that he was therefore known to the pigs. Strange.
Third point: Goldstein, who was to be the prosecution’s chief witness, did not know who had been wounded and went to the Lariboisière hospital to find out whether it was his friend Lepetit.
The only clues as to this Papillon were that he was called Roger and that he was said to be a terror.
Was I a terror at twenty-four? Was I dangerous? No, but maybe I was on the way to becoming both. It’s certain that I was a tough guy, an “undesirable” then; but it’s also certain that at only twenty-four I could not have become set forever as one particular type of man. It’s also certain that at that age, having been only two years in Montmartre, I could not have been either the head of a gang or the terror of Pigalle. Certainly I disturbed public order; and certainly I was suspected of having taken part in big jobs, but nothing had ever been proved against me. Sure, they had pulled me in several times and grilled me pretty hard at 36, quai des Orfèvres, but without ever getting anything out of me, either a confession or a name. Sure, after the tragedy of my childhood, and after my time in the navy, and after the government had refused me a steady career, I had made up my mind to live outside that society of clowns and to let them know it. Sure, every time I was picked up and grilled at the Quai des Orfèvres for an important job they thought I was mixed up in, I insulted my torturers and humiliated them in every possible way, even telling them that one day I’d be in their place, the shits, and they would be in my power. So of course the pigs, humiliated through and through, might have said to themselves, “This Papillon, we’ll have to clip his wings the first chance we have.”
But still, I was only twenty-four! My life wasn’t just a matter of resentment and rancor against society and the squares who obeyed its damn-fool rules: it was also life itself, continually on the move, sending off showers of sparks. It’s true I’d pulled some serious nonsense; yes, but it was not wicked nonsense. Besides, when I was taken in there was only one conviction on my file: four months’ suspended sentence for receiving stolen goods. Did I deserve to be wiped off the face of the earth just for having humiliated the pigs and just because I might turn dangerous one day?
It all began when the criminal police took the business over. The word went round Montmartre that they were looking for all the Papillons--Little Papillon, Pussini Papillon, Papillon Trompe-la-Mort, Papillon Roger, etc.
As for me, I was just plain Papillon; or sometimes, to avoid confusion, One-Thumb Papillon. But it was no part of my way of life to hobnob with the pigs, and I moved off fast: yes, tha
t was true. I went on the run.
And why did you do that, Papi, since it wasn’t you?
You ask that now? Have you forgotten that by the time you were twenty-four you had already been tortured several times at the Quai des Orfèvres? You were never really fond of being knocked about, or of all those exquisite tortures: the way they shoved your head under the water until you were perishing for want of air and you didn’t know whether you were dead or alive; the way the pigs would give your balls five or six twists and leave them so swollen you walked like an Argentine gaucho for weeks on end; the way they crushed your nails in a paper press till the blood spurted and the nails came off; the way they beat you with a rubber truncheon that wounded your lungs, so blood poured out of your mouth; and the way those two-hundred-pound bruisers would jump up and down on your belly as if it were a trampoline. Is it your age, Papi, or have you lost your memory? There were a hundred reasons for going on the run right away. It was a break that didn’t carry you too far; since you weren’t guilty, there was no need to go abroad; just a little hideout near Paris would be enough. Soon they’d pick up the Papillon Roger in question, or at least identify him; and then fine, you’d jump into a taxi and be back in Paris. No more danger for your balls or your nails or all the rest.
Only this Papillon Roger was never identified. There was no culprit.
Then all at once a wanted man was produced like magic. This Papillon Roger? Simple: you just wipe out the Roger and you pick up plain Papillon, the nickname of Henri Charrière. The trick’s done: all that’s left is to pile up the evidence. It’s no longer an honest, impartial inquiry into the truth, but the total fabrication of a culprit.
Policemen, don’t you see, need to solve a murder case to deserve promotion in their very noble, very honest career. Now this Papillon has everything going for him as a culprit. He’s young, and there is something of the procurer about him... We’ll say his girl’s a whore. He’s a thief, and he’s been in trouble with the police several times; but he’s either got off on a dismissed charge or he’s been acquitted.
And then into the bargain the guy is a difficult bastard; he curses us to hell when we arrest him, he sneers at us, humiliates us, names his dog after our chief of police, and sometimes he says, “You’d be well advised to grill a little more gently, if you want to reach retirement age.” These threats of punishing us one day for our “modern” and “thoroughgoing” methods of interrogation worry us. So go right ahead, man. We’re covered on all sides.
That was the sinister beginning of it all, Papi. Twenty-four you were, when those two lousy pigs flushed you out at SaintCloud on April 10, while you were eating snails.
Oh, they went right ahead, all right! What drive, what zeal, what steadiness, what passion, what diabolical cunning it took to get you into the dock one day, and for the court to deliver that blow that knocked you out for fourteen years!
It wasn’t so easy to turn you into the guilty man, Papi. But the inspector in charge of the job, Mayzaud, a Montmartre specialist, was so eager to send you down that it was open war between him and your lawyers even in the court, with insults, complaints and foul blows; and right beside Mayzaud was the plump little Goldstein, one of those phony bastards who lick the underworld’s feet in the hope of being accepted.
Very amenable, this Goldstein! Mayzaud said he met him maybe a hundred times by chance during the inquiry. This precious witness stated on the very day of the killing that in a crowd of people he had heard someone named Roland had got three bullets in the guts, and he had then gone to the hospital to ask the exact identity of the victim. More than three weeks later, on April 18, after many contacts with Mayzaud, this same Goldstein changed his story: On the night of March 25--26, before the killing, he had met me with two unknown men. I had asked him where Lepetit was. Goldstein: “At the Clichy.” As soon as I left him, Goldstein went to warn Lepetit. While he was talking to Lepetit one of Papillon’s companions asked Lepetit to come outside. Goldstein himself went out a little later and saw Papillon and Lepetit talking quietly; but he did not linger. Later, coming back to the Place Pigalle, he once more met Papillon, who told him he had just shot Lepetit and asked him to go to the Lariboisière and see what state Lepetit was in, and to warn him to keep his mouth shut.
For of course, I, who was described to the Court as a terror, a member of the underworld all the more dangerous because of my intelligence and Cunning; of course I would hang around the Place Pigalle, right on the spot where I’d shot a guy, until Goldstein came that way again. Do I stand there like a signpost on some little Ardèche lane, so that the pigs only have to come strolling along to ask me how I’m doing?
This Goldstein was not such a fool as all that; the day after his statement he hightailed it to England.
Meanwhile I stood up for myself stoutly. “Goldstein? Don’t know him. I may have seen him; may even have exchanged a few words with him, like you do with people always around the same district, without knowing who you’re talking to.” I really could not fit a mug to that name; so much so that it was only when we were brought face to face that I succeeded in identifying him. And I was so taken aback that a little square I didn’t know should make such a detailed charge against me, that I wondered what crime he could have committed--nothing much for sure, he was such a dreary runt--for the pigs to have such a hold on him. I am still wondering; sexual offenses? Cocaine?
Without him, without his successive statements, which added new material to the pigs’ case every time he opened his trap, without him nothing held together. Nothing.
And now there appeared something that at first sight looked miraculous but later turned out to be exceedingly dangerous-- indeed fatal. A diabolical police plot, a horrible trap that I and my lawyers fell into headfirst. I thought it meant safety, but it was disaster. Because there was nothing solid in the file: Goldstein’s successive bits of evidence were all very improbable. The file had so little body to it that my alleged killing lacked even a motive. Since I had no cause to dislike the victim, and since I was not raving mad, I was as out of place in this job as a hair in the soup; and any jury at all, even one made up of the dullest idiots on earth, could hardly fail to realize it.
So the police invented a motive; and the one who provided it was a pig who had been working Montmartre for the last ten years, Inspector Mazillier.
One of my lawyers, Maitre Eeffey, liked wandering about Montmartre in his free time; and he met this pig, .who told him he knew what had really happened bn the night of March 25--26, and that he was prepared to tell--implying that what he had to say would be in my favor. We said to ourselves, either he’s motivated by professional honesty or else--which is more likely-- there’s some rivalry between Mayzaud and him.
And we called him as a witness. We did.
But what Mazillier had to say was not at all what we had expected. He stated that he knew me well and that I had done him many favors. Then he added, “Thanks to the information provided by Charrière I have been able to carry out several arrests. As for the circumstances in connection with the murder, I know nothing about them. But I have heard it said [Lord, how many “I have heard it said”s we had during my trial!] that Charrière was the object of ill will on the part of persons unknown to me who disapproved of his relations with the police.”
And there was the reason for the murder! I’d killed Roland Lepetit during a quarrel because he was spreading it around Montmartre that I squealed, that I was an informer.
When was this statement of Inspector Mazillier’s made? April 14. And when did Goldstein make his, the one that contradicted his statement on the day of the killing? April 18, four days after Mazillier’s.
When the court of first instance was presented with this padded, elastic evidence, this mass of rumors, lies and prompted statements, they sensed there was something fishy about the whole thing. Because although you often put them all into the same bag, Papi, as if judges, pigs, jurymen, the law and the prison administration were all part of th
e same conspiracy you must admit that there have been some exceedingly honest judges.
As a result, the first court refused to send me before the assizes with that phony file, and sent all the evidence back to the investigating magistrate, insisting upon further inquiry.
The pigs were utterly infuriated; they found witnesses everywhere--in prison, just about to be let out or just having been let out. But the further inquiry produced nothing, absolutely nothing, not the slightest clue or the least suggestion of new and serious evidence.
In the end, without anything fresh--still a bad bouillabaisse made with all the wrong fish--the file was at last allowed to be sent up to the assizes.
And now came the clap of thunder. Something happened that is almost never seen in the legal world: the public prosecutor, the man whose job it is to protect society by putting as many defendants as possible behind bars--the public prosecutor who had been given the brief to act against me, took it with the tips of his fingers, as though he were holding it with tongs, and put it back on the desk, saying, “I won’t act in this case. It smells fishy and prefabricated: give it to someone else.”
How splendid he looked, Maître Raymond Hubert, when he came to tell me this extraordinary news at the Conciergerie! “Can you imagine it, Charrière! Your file is so unconvincing, a prosecutor has refused to have anything to do with it and has asked for the brief to be given to someone else!”
.... It was cool that night on the bench in the Boulevard de Clichy. I walked up and down under the shadow of the trees; I did not want to walk into the light for fear of interrupting the magic lantern as it projected these pictures from thirty-seven years ago. I turned up the collar of my overcoat, and pushed back my hat a little, to air my head. I Sat down again, pulled my coat over my legs, and then, with my back to the avenue, I slid my legs over the bench and sat the other way around, my arms leaning on the back as they had leant on the rail of the dock during my first trial in July, 1931.