The chimney of No. 21 rue Le Sueur had often smoked annoyingly. But never had the fumes seemed such a nauseating insult to solid Parisian nostrils. A housewife across the street finally lost patience, phoned the police.
Dutifully a policeman came, found No. 21's door locked, the chimney still belching. Dutifully he summoned firemen. Together they broke into the house and into a stench so sickening that they vomited.
In No. 21's cellar they stumbled over a bag holding two human heads and a mutilated leg. They found another bag stuffed with a cloven corpse. In No. 21's furnace they found four charred female bodies. In No. 21's closets they picked up assorted limbs and 30 pairs of women's shoes. In No. 21's courtyard they dug into a lime-filled pit, hauled up the residue of 13 cadavers. But nowhere did they find the fiend responsible for France's goriest mass murder since whisker-ruffed Henri Désiré Landru, the 1920s' Bluebeard of Gambais, slaughtered ten women, a boy.
In rue Caumariin. At week's end the police had not yet caught up with the Bluebeard of rue Le Sueur. But they thought they knew who he was: Dr. Marcel Petiot, who lived with his wife and son in genteel rue Caumartin, rented the house on rue Le Sueur as a "laboratory." Police said that Petiot had lived a delinquent childhood (letter stealing, perversion), had once been fined for improper dealing in narcotics. They whispered that his rue Caumartin office was well-known among women of the Paris demimonde. In Paris Soir a Madame Parisinot told how she had recently called on Dr. Petiot for treatment of a swollen wrist. Like the Bluebeard of the fairy tale (see cut), the Bluebeard of the rue Le Sueur had a magnetic eye. But otherwise, with his lime-stained hands and rough work clothes, he looked like a bricklayer.
The press gave further details of the missing doctor. In No. 21, he gave his victims fatal injections, chained them to the wall of a soundproof "death chamber," watched their last agonies through a peephole.
On the Boulevards. Pasty-faced workers found war news crowded from the headlines by the rue Le Sueur crime. In underheated rooms and overcrowded subways, clerks and salesgirls read the gory details. Fleshy black-marketeers and their flashy molls exchanged sadistic tidbits over champagne and caviar.
Through the gossip ran a feeling of something fishy. The suspicious wondered: Could Bluebeard Petiot be a fiction invented to distract the people?