Murder in Monte Carlo Read online

  It would become the longest-serving government in the country since the collapse of the ancien régime in the revolution of 1789. A series of parliamentary acts established the constitutional laws of the new republic. At its head was a ‘President of the Republic’ and a two-chamber parliament composed of a directly elected ‘Chamber of Deputies’ and an indirectly elected Senate. There was also a ministry under a ‘President of the Council’ answerable to the President of the Republic and the Parliament.

  Governments during the Third Republic collapsed with regularity, many lasting only a few months as a result of radicals, socialists, liberals, conservatives and monarchists all vying for control. But the net result was that this often simply resulted in a formation of new alliances and ministerial shuffles and the government continued to function.

  Despite a number of scandals, including the collapse of the Panama Canal project (1893) causing huge losses to investors, the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906) and the separation of Church and State (1905), the government proved it was more than capable of weathering storms. As the first president of the Third Republic, Adolphe Thiers remarked: “Republicanism is the form of government that divides France least.”

  The Third Republic, in line with the imperialistic ethos sweeping Europe, developed a worldwide network of colonies, the largest in North Africa and Vietnam.

  TECHNOLOGY

  After the depression years, the economy of France entered a period of sustained growth in what was termed the second industrial revolution. The rail network was largely extended with the ensuing growth of services in locations along the routes. And there was a succession of inventions that fundamentally altered people’s lives for the better, including the harnessing and introduction of electricity, the combustion engine, photographs, film, the telephone and the bicycle.

  These technological advances, and there were more to come, made life easier at all levels of society. The growing command of engineering in steel was dramatically expressed by the Eiffel Tower, the Viaduc de Garabit and the Grand Palais in Paris. All this progress impacted on the population with a sense of pride, optimism and the feeling that anything was possible.

  The World Fair of 1889, when the Eiffel Tower was opened to the public, and the Universal Exhibition of 1900 put Paris and France on the European and world map as a lively and expanding place in international society. For the Universal Exhibition many new buildings were erected, often with the then-novel electric lighting. One of the main attractions was the Palais de l’Electricité, illuminated by 5,000 multicoloured lights at night and an electronic-powered triple-decker moving footpath. Paris became known as the City of Lights.

  The Universal Exhibition attracted 50 million visitors from all parts of the world and France became a hugely popular destination for tourists. A person could travel throughout Europe without a passport. The English from different social groups came to France in great numbers during this period. The winter was a popular season for visiting, to escape the bleak northern weather. People of more limited means as well as the idle rich targeted France, the former because of low prices and the good weather. The latter disported themselves on the Mediterranean coast and in particular the Côte d’Azur. There were so many English people staying in Nice that the main road along the seafront was named La Promenade des Anglais.

  Cheap coal and labour contributed to the cult of the orchid and the perfection of fruits gown under glass. And that French essential, champagne, was also perfected at the time.

  THE ARTS

  Theatre adopted new forms of presentation and shocked contemporary audiences with frank depictions of ordinary daily life and sexuality.

  Cabaret theatre was popular along with ‘salon music’, usually for solo piano and violin in the romantic style, and performed by composers at events known as salons. Operettas drew huge crowds and European literature went through a transformation with literary realism and naturalism to the fore, typified by Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant.

  Since the 18th century, Paris had been leading the way in fashion in all the courts of Europe but it was during the Belle Époque that ‘haute couture’ was ‘invented’ there and fashion began to move in a yearly cycle. Interestingly, it is an English couturier based in Paris from the late 1840’s, Charles Frederick Worth, who is considered the father of haute couture, being the first to promote the concept of dressmaker as artist – as ‘fashion designer’.

  The vogue was heavy silks and satins with wide hats festooned with flowers and feathers. Lace was applied liberally to add even more heavy-handed femininity to the S-bend corset, contorting the bosom forward and thrusting the hips back. It was no time for revealing cleavage and necklines were very high.

  At the Exhibition of 1889 Herminie Cadolle showed her new invention, the forerunner of the bra. As a simple ingenious idea for women’s comfort, she cut in two the traditional corset, initially calling it a ‘corselet gorge’. She was the first to encourage the spinners of Troye to incorporate rubber into the threads of fabric and elastic thread would soon take over from whalebones and lacing.

  By the end of the 19th century the horizons of fashion had broadened, partly due to the more stable and independent lifestyle of many well-off women who were getting the practical clothes they demanded. As yet, no fashionable lady would or could dress or undress herself without the help of a third party. The outfits of the couturiers of the time were incredibly extravagant, elaborate and labour-intensive.

  The Maison Redfern, the highly prestigious Paris fashion house – opened by yet another Englishman, couturier John Redfern in 1881 – was the first fashion establishment to offer women a tailored suit, based directly on the male version, and the elegant garment soon became part of the wardrobe of any well-dressed woman.

  Also indispensable was the designer hat. Fashionable hats at the time were either tiny little things that perched on top of the head, or large and wide-brimmed, trimmed with ribbons, flowers and feathers. Parasols were still used as decorative accessories and in the summer dripped with lace which added to the overall pretty impression.

  The period marked the appearance of fashion magazines which were greatly sought after and had a profound effect on public taste. Talented illustrators, among them Paul Iribe, Georges Lepape and George Barbier drew exquisite fashion plates for the publications.

  So much for the buoyant carefree aspects of the Belle Époque, whose glittering surface was underpinned by the availability of cheap labour. There was a downside, of course, as there always is during a boom time.

  CRIME

  An increase in criminality at the end of the 19th century was attributed to rapid industrialisation, urbanisation and the explosion of the railway networks. This gave rise to a mindset on the part of the French public, the newspapers and some French politicians which held that criminal behaviour was innate and concentrated in certain classes of individuals.

  So to protect society these criminals were to be banished to peripheral areas. The hope was that those devoted to crime would become agents in the service of France’s larger colonial projects, as well as proving that such incarceration and punishment would be a further deterrent to crime.

  In 1885 the French Parliament passed the Relegation Act whereby petty recidivists would be exiled as relégués to French Guiana and New Caledonia after serving prison terms in France. In these colonies they would occupy an intermediary position between the few free colonists and the condemned criminals known as forçats. It would prove to be a disastrous law, leading to brutalisation of the prisoners by sadistic guards (whose conditions were hardly any better than their charges’), and an uncaring administration with poor communication with the colonial authorities.

  At home, the French took the lead in criminal investigation, forensic science and identification procedures, well ahead of the rest of the world including the much-vaunted Scotland Yard in the home of the traditional enemy, Britain. They also took the enlightened view that the background and psychology of the perpetra
tors of crime should be carefully examined and their sanity certified by qualified psychologists. The ultimate punishment for murder was the guillotine and extenuating circumstances were taken into consideration.

  Then, as now, every criminal investigation was preyed upon by the Law’s constant shadow, the Fourth Estate – Le Quatrième Pouvoir (literally, ‘The Fourth Power’).

  THE NEWSPAPERS

  Newspapers in France and England and across the Atlantic were undergoing huge changes, driven both by the new technology and increasing battles for circulation. The telegraph and the telephone were transforming news into instant global communication. Linotype was introduced in 1890, using a keyboard to select letters and set one line of hot metal type at a time, thereby facilitating production.

  There was also the emergence of what was termed ‘yellow journalism’.

  Yellow journalism is that which presents little or no legitimate or well-researched news. Techniques were the exaggeration of news events, scandalmongering and sensationalism. The term was used extensively to describe certain New York City papers about 1900 as they battled for circulation. The norm was scare headlines in big print, use of faked interviews, pseudo-science, a parade of false learning from so-called experts and dramatic sympathy with the underdog against the system. Circulation battles raged between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, and Ervin Wardman’s sedate New York Herald coined the term ‘yellow journalism’ (inspired apparently by a cartoon character The Yellow Kid which was run as a comic strip in both his rivals’ papers). Yellow journalism became a recognisable and even bold genre in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and certainly could not be called predictable, boring or uninspired.

  The New York Times established itself as the antithesis of irresponsible crass journalism. It often condemned the excesses of the genre, especially those of Hearst’s Journal. Under the ownership of Adolph Ochs who acquired the newspaper in 1896, the Times nominally sought to position itself as an impartial, fact-based model of journalism that eschewed extravagance and flamboyance in presenting the news. The Times frequently challenged the wisdom and ethics of that active journalism which often created the news as opposed to reacting to events: for example, in 1897, a journalist springing a prisoner and then reporting on the fact of it. There were no pictures or outrageous headlines in the Times – serious newspapers considered illustrations inappropriate distractions from the newspaper’s prose.

  In general there was not much difference between imaginative writing and objective reporting. Matthew Arnold coined the term ‘new journalism’ in his 1887 essay ‘Up To Easter’ to describe what he considered a more sensational and less intellectually stimulating form of journalism which appeared in newspapers in Britain, France and the United States at the end of the 19th century.

  New York Sun owner Charles Dana once described late 19th century journalism as a lawless field: “There is no system of maxims or professional rules that I know of laid down for the guidance of the journalist.”

  Leading newspapers believed that making news was a creative act. Pulitzer insisted that his reporters produce: “What is original, distinctive, dramatic, romantic, thrilling, unique, curious, humorous, odd, apt-to-be-talked-about, without impairing the confidence of the people in the truth of the character of the paper for reliability and scrupulous cleanness.”

  Dana of the Sun held a similar view: “The inimitable law of the newspaper is to be interesting. Suppose you tell all the truths of a science in a way that bores the reader; what is the good? The truths don’t stay in the mind and nobody thinks any better of you because you have told the truth tediously. The telling must be vivid and animating.”

  In other words, the truth told in flat and objective terms would be boring, supposedly, however astounding the fact.

  During a time when by-lines were scarce, anonymous reporters wrote and figured themselves into the news stories. Sun reporter Julian Ralph stated: “The reporter is a modern knight errant, whose work brings him in contact with a wide and varied collection of peoples, subjects and situations.”

  The main currents of the 19th century news ran through the telegraph wires, but first of all were collected by the intrepid reporters. When the wires companies, like Reuters Associated Press and the Press Association arrived in the latter half of the century, the reporters were reined in to an extent – there was at least some degree of censorship in operation. Now as a result the reporters were hunting in packs, because no individuals could hold up the lines. When on foreign duty information had to be shared. The day of the intrepid lone reporter was largely over. The reporters delivered copy to the telegraph office and their reports largely were syndicated through the agencies. It did not entirely wipe out the rush for the exclusive but technology helped on one hand and limited on the other.

  By 1907, and before global news communication was a fact of life, the Monte Carlo Trunk Murder provided a classical example. But news reports far away from the ground in Marseilles and Monte Carlo proved that the newspapers and the reporters could rapidly follow up every lead in any country which had historical association through the travels of the perpetrators in the case.

  This case burned the wires from France to England, Australia, New York and Ireland, serving at a relatively early stage of proceedings to prompt these remarks from a clearly tetchy Irish Times leader writer in an editorial:

  One would be justified after perusal of last week’s newspapers to conclude that the personages implicated in the Monte Carlo murder mystery are the most important people in the world at present. Every petty and morbid detail in connection with the crime is set forth with wearying minuteness. Surely there are other topics just as interesting and decidedly more edifying to which this space might be devoted. The literary productions known as ‘penny horribles’ are mild and harmless when compared with the way in which the most disgusting crimes are dished up for the public by the average newspaper.

  The editor of the paper begged to disagree, however, for the newspaper carried extensive reports of the crime supplied largely by Reuters and the Press Association correspondents in Paris, Marseilles and Monte Carlo as did its sober counterpart the New York Times. Then, as now, reporting was characterised by a mixture of speculation, inventiveness and hard fact.

  In that boom era of the Belle Époque in Europe, the Gilded Age in the United States and late Victorian Britain, murder of a certain kind was big news as was financial speculation on stocks and shares, both of which entailed a gamble which would decide success or ruin. As long as the Wheel of Fortune is spinning in the right direction, society is gripped by euphoria, an irrational exuberance which precludes any chance of the sequence ending. The lessons of the past are smothered by this optimism; history is of no consequence. All that matters is the rosy future. Gainsayers are thrust aside, prophets of doom cast out – those most apt to remember simple truths like that of Ovid on the matter of fortune: “The goddess who admits by her unsteady wheel her own fickleness; she always has its apex beneath her swaying foot.”

  In Monte Carlo in August 1907 the gaming rooms of the splendid casino were packed with the rich, the famous, the beautiful, the desperate, all hoping to break the bank before it broke them.

  And in that other great casino, thousands of miles across the Atlantic, their counterparts were engaged in a similar exercise on the New York Stock Exchange. By the end of the first week and beginning of the second, unwelcome attention would be drawn to both houses of chance by the tragedy that always lurks in the midst of gamblers playing for stakes that have gone far beyond their control.

  In both instances the fallout would reach a dramatic climax in November and December of that year.

  On August 7th, the New York Times carried this report:

  W. S. Alley A Suicide

  Lost All In Stocks

  The “Rocking Chair Fleet” on the piazza of the Larchmount Yacht Club, rocked away last night without its principal and chief mem
ber, its veritable Pooh Bah, William Alley.

  Life at Larchmount, where Mr Alley lived the year round with his family, was placid and sweet. His house was within a toss of a stone from the sound, where in his palmy days, his champion sloop, the Schemer, showed her neat lines to him from his own piazza of a morning. But life in Wall Street, where Mr Alley strove to increase his fortune, proved a tempest he could not weather. His father before him, George B. Alley, had accumulated a large fortune and had died after a successful life, leaving much wealth to his family.

  But “Bill” Alley as his fellow yachtsmen and members of “The Rocking Chair” coterie knew him hit the market at the wrong angle all the time.

  Yesterday Wall Street heard that “Bill” Alley was dead.

  “How?” was asked by broker after broker, for all of them knew he had been compelled to sacrifice his seat on the Exchange and that not only was every dollar of his money gone, but that he was also burdened with debt.

  “Blew out his brains!” was the reply of those who had come to town from Larchmount. “In the club last night. He slipped away from the crowd and finished in a quiet corner.”

  Mr Alley left his home, a short distance from the club on Monday afternoon and spent the cool, early evening chatting with friends in the club and on the piazzas. He appeared in good humour, and a number of friends commented on his courage in standing up under the disasters he had met on the Street.

  Then he excused himself, returned to a distant corner, where nobody could interfere with him, pulled a revolver from his pocket and shot himself through the right temple. He was still living when the club attendants and friends reached him. They hurried him to the New Rochelle Hospital but he died there five minutes after he had been put to bed.