A few months before the start of this saga, I was promoted to team manager and I only had to manage the data and dispatch the work. I was based on the Île de la Cité, where they handled indictable offences, and every now and then I would drop in to Boulevard des Italiens to visit my friend Hildegarde, who was assigned to white-collar offences.
Once the file digitisation was completed for the week, we might duplicate a few CD-ROMs to read at home on the weekend, like you would a novel. Hildegarde found it more entertaining than television shows like Faites entrer l’accusé or Complément d’enquête. For my part – if the cops transcribing the statements had any sort of artistic sensibility – it would remind me of those nineteenth-century novels I was so fond of and which I’d studied in such detail for my thesis, Social Rancour and the Proletariat of the Quill in the Nineteenth Century. Much like them, they would recount the unremitting effects of greed on the fate of their characters: bankruptcy, jealousy, fraud, unexplained wealth, unlawful acquisition of an interest, misappropriation of public funds, despoliation, tax evasion – all they ever talked about was money.
The author Octave Mirbeau, who at some point in his life had a job similar to mine, had one of his characters say:
I would copy out the registers at the notary’s office and be intrigued by the endless procession of acts of passion, crimes and murders inspired by man’s desire to own a field.
Well, I got the same feeling from reading those scanned proceedings. Dealers would beat each other up over a swiped bar of hash or a territorial dispute; somebody would torture for a credit card PIN or kill for a handbag . . . And the happiness you thought was warranted by the superiority of your spirit was to one day own a Porsche Panamera with all the bells and whistles so you had bragging rights outside your housing block. In the supposedly astute criminality on display at Hildegarde’s office, the violence was perhaps not quite as obvious, but its consequences could prove considerably more devastating, with the shutting down of companies, staff hung out to dry, or millions in VAT fraud. The objectives were still more or less the same: parade around in a Porsche at Gstaad or in the streets of Blanc-Mesnil. I couldn’t tell you which was more vulgar.
Those hungry for sensationalism would immediately conclude that the two of us were making money from the files we got hold of which were making a splash in the media:
Where could the leak have come from? How did journalists get their hands on documents from an investigation that were subject to confidentiality, despite nobody else having had access to it? An enquiry has just been launched by the public prosecutor.
Everybody was open to suspicion – judges, cops, lawyers – but who for a second would have suspected the two halfwits from reprographics? Definitely not the inbred judge with the narrow shoulders covered in dandruff who supervised our department and whom you’d see once a quarter at most. In the unlikely event we were suspected, there would have been nobody better placed than the two of us playing the mentally deficient. It was so unoriginal.
As for the interview records of those people paid thirty times the minimum wage who didn’t even know the address of their place of work or of those comfortably housed in company apartments with parquetry floors and moulded ceilings for the rent of a place in a suburban housing estate – fans of the droit du seigneur or merely those who used their position to subsidise their restaurant meals, their taxis, their renovations or their electoral campaigns – we never took advantage of any of those sickening transcripts. Firstly, because with our overly recognisable physiques we would have been busted in no time when we showed our faces to carry out the transaction. And secondly, because the press didn’t even have the means to pay its journalists appropriately, so you can imagine what they’d pay their sources . . .
So, Hildegarde and I didn’t sell them, but from time to time we might have slipped them into an envelope addressed, for example, to Le Canard, or to Libération, Mediapart or to Le Figaro, depending on the political stripes of the subject of our opprobrium. We would do it just out of malicious delight, to see how it sowed the seeds of panic in people busy running around a stack of dominoes they had spent months building and which was in the process of collapsing before their very eyes. To watch the little black rectangles fall with no more effort required than that first flick, each domino bringing with it another one twice the size as it all came tumbling down. We had a blast watching these chain reactions of disgrace and the heads that went rolling into the sawdust. Enthralling soap operas that kept us on the edge of our seats for weeks. Better than a Netflix series. We had ourselves some pretty sweet TV dinners there on my girlfriend’s sofa, watching the news on loop.
Brest
14 July 1870
If there had not been any sign of life from Jules for the preceding three weeks, it was because he was having a fine time entertaining himself.
Ah, Brest!
Brest and her twenty-five thousand soldiers. Brest and her one thousand prostitutes. He was convinced that even the sea breeze in Brest had something of a whiff of vulva.
When there had been discussion of someone being sent off to find a man to buy for his numbskull of a brother-in-law, he had immediately volunteered, spying an opportunity to get away from the de Rigny family. He had suggested Toulon, but his wife, Berthe, had vetoed that idea, saying the place was too dangerous. So, on the pretext of having friends there, he had proposed Brest, which was quite some distance from Paris yet had a direct train connection.
Jules had always frequented whorehouses and he had to admit it had not been the same for a number of years now. The notion of a seminal drain where one would go to satisfy one’s physiological needs was no longer alluring. The modern man was looking for new offerings; he wanted to be listened to, he was looking for Love. Everyone wanted their working-class girl, their own little grisette, fourteen to nineteen years old, in her cheap furnished apartment, and preferably with her mother around to keep her clean. As for the brothels, with their trinkets and chinoiseries, their wall hangings and their scrubbed girls, they had become so desperately petty bourgeois. Jules found it all profoundly unappealing, rugged man that he was, used to the virile atmosphere of the garrison.
His thing was the streetwalkers: those grubby girls who would stand next to building sites and vacant lots and lift their petticoats in the shadow of the walls of Paris. Their animal odour, their slovenliness, reminded him of his own primitive self, his lost barbarism. Girls like that were to be found everywhere in Brest, by the hundreds even, in the Seven-Saints quarter or perched on the ramparts. They were even in the fields, where they set up signs with their name. He was especially fond of the girls from Léon. Their earthiness, their simple nature so characteristic of Bretonne peasant girls and accentuated by the fact they understood barely three words of French; all of it he found enormously exciting. He also found them more spontaneous, less mechanical than the Parisian girls, who made it a point of honour to let you know how bored they were while you were screwing them. A Léon girl, for her part, displayed an apparently sincere erotic delight. And all that quite cheaply. No, truly, Jules was keeping himself most entertained.
At the end of his three weeks of debauchery, a letter that had been left for him at the hotel’s reception called Jules to task: What progress has there been in the purchase of Auguste’s replacement? he was being asked by his father-in-law.