“A decade passed, during which time I rose through the ranks to deputy commissioner. Shortly after New Year in 1931, a suburban policeman called in a murdered body one morning, adding that the corpse was missing its eyeballs. When I heard this, my thoughts immediately returned to the bookseller, all those years previously. The victim’s papers were still on him—he was a Belgian industrialist and notorious playboy. He owned a superb library on the subject of his beloved Belgium. He’d told his friends at the Jockey Club the evening before his death that he was in Paris to purchase, for a handsome sum, a story written in Baudelaire’s own hand during his exile in Brussels. After dinner, he’d gone to the Chabanais, a high-class brothel in the second arrondissement where he was a regular. He left the Chabanais at four in the morning but never made it back to the Hôtel George V, where he was staying. His body was found in the Bois de Vincennes by two kids the following morning.

“The story made a bit of a splash in the papers before it was hushed up. Suspicions fell on a taxi driver with a gambling problem who’d picked up our Belgian outside the brothel. But I wasn’t satisfied. I sifted through the evidence and recognized an address scribbled in his notebook—17 Quai d’Anjou. The address of the Baudelaire Society. So I paid it another visit. By this time, Artopoulos was gone. Instead, it was presided over by a woman, one whose name was familiar to me: Coco Chanel. She’d known the man socially, she said, but knew nothing of his death other than what had been printed in the dailies.

“The taxi driver was found guilty and he, too, was guillotined at dawn on Boulevard Arago, and once again I attended the execution. I was convinced that another miscarriage of justice had occurred—only I had no evidence. I decided to delve into the archives, looking for murders that had involved the gouging out of the victims’ eyes. I found several. Hippolyte Balthazar, a psychologist who worked in the military asylum at the Salpêtrière hospital, was murdered in 1917. Balthazar, it turned out, had been a prominent member of the Baudelaire Society for seventeen years. Encouraged, I looked even further back. In 1900, on a train from Nantes to Paris, Édmonde de Bressy, founder of the Baudelaire Society, and Lucien Roeg, its secretary, were both found dead in their cabins, their eyes gouged out. In the same year, Gaspard Leducq, a captain in the merchant navy, was murdered in Le Havre, eyes also removed. He had been an employee of a shipping company owned by the Artopoulos dynasty. All of these homicides remain unsolved.