“Let me fill you in. The Baudelaire Society is a relic of a bygone era, when literary associations were fashionable. At its height in the 1900s, it was considered the most prestigious such association in Paris, and therefore the world. In 1923, its presidency passed to Gabrielle Chanel, a young high-society seamstress. She is now the wealthiest woman in France, and is better known as Coco. Surely you’ve heard the name?” I nodded. Massu paused, as if weighing up what to say next. “Do you know what that smell is, monsieur? It is the smell of burning paper. You will have noticed, upon your arrival, a fire in the courtyard below. Currently, in the courtyards of government buildings all over Paris, paperwork is being burned. Entire archives are going up in flames. This is all the information anyone needs to gauge how the defense of the republic is proceeding. And knowing this would naturally lead you to wonder why, at a time like this, an overworked police commissioner should take such a personal interest in a case about a murdered bouquiniste. But this is no ordinary case. Vennet is the third victim I know of to have had their eyes removed when they were killed, and each time the Baudelaire manuscript was involved. The first was in 1922. I was a neighborhood policeman assigned to assist the investigation. The victim was an antiquarian bookseller. His eye sockets were empty, his eyeballs never found. When I interviewed the widow, she mentioned that her husband had been commissioned by a new client to sell a manuscript on consignment: a previously unknown story by Baudelaire. The manuscript had vanished. The client turned out to have been the Baudelaire Society. I went to pay the Society a visit—it is headquartered in a hôtel particulier on the Île Saint-Louis. The president at the time was Aristide Artopoulos. Strange fellow—he claimed to have no recollection of the book, or of the bookseller. Eventually the suspicion of guilt fell on the bookseller’s brother-in-law, a brutal alcoholic who owed the victim some money. He was charged, found guilty, and guillotined. I attended the execution—it was in the early morning, outside the prison on Boulevard Arago, and I remember thinking that the wrong man was being executed. But such is police life, and I put the matter out of my mind.