Death in the City of Light: The Serial Killer of Nazi-Occupied Paris

6.

THE WOMAN WITH THE YELLOW SUITCASE

I AM A SPECIALIST IN DESTINY AND ITS MYSTERIES, BELIEVE ME. SEIZE YOUR CHANCE. IT’S HERE.

—Jean Cocteau, “Address to Young Writers,”

La Gerbe, December 5, 1940

ASTONE’S throw from Marcel Petiot’s apartment on rue Caumartin, Jean-Paul Sartre was teaching philosophy at the Lycée Condorcet. Outside of class, which was held three and a half days a week during term, Sartre enjoyed spending time in a number of cafés around town. One of his favorites, in the spring of 1944, was Saint-Germain-des-Prés’s then little-known Café de Flore, where he liked to arrive early in the morning and head for his table in the back on the second floor. There, the short, balding, and bespectacled thirty-nine-year-old sat in a red chair, puffing on his pipe and scribbling away with his fountain pen, racing to capture his thoughts in small, tidy letters. Given the wartime shortage of tobacco, Sartre would stop from time to time to retrieve cigarette butts from the floor to stuff into his pipe.

At the other end of the room, at a mahogany marble-topped table, preferably near the stove, sat his friend and lover Simone de Beauvoir. The two deliberately staked out territory at opposite ends of the café to concentrate on their work. About lunchtime, they would break for a meal, most often in Beauvoir’s corner flat on the third floor of the La Louisiane on the rue de Seine. Conversation, no surprise, flowed. “I realized,” Beauvoir once said, “that even though we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short.”

Sartre was entering into a very productive period that would ultimately send him to the heights of intellectual stardom. In the summer of 1943, he had published his monumental Being and Nothingness, a 722-page philosophical treatise about freedom and responsibility that would become a sensation in the immediate postwar period. At first, however, it was largely ignored. There had only been one review thus far, in René-Marill Albérès’s Etudes et Essais universitaires. Sartre’s friend Jean Paulhan joked that the bulky work would be useful for weighing fruits and vegetables.

That summer, Sartre had also just completed his first major play, The Flies, which was staged at the Sarah Bernhardt Theater, then renamed Theatre de la Cité by the Nazis, to remove the Jewish reference. In this play, which reinterprets the myth of the House of Atreus, young Orestes returns home to Argos amid a plague and the tyrannical rule of Aegisthus, his father’s murderer and now his mother’s lover. Orestes obtains his revenge, murdering the hated usurper and freeing the city from the curse—an appropriate subject for the Occupation that was also subtle enough in its ancient Greek setting to pass the censors.

On the opening night, which, because of electricity cuts, was actually held during the afternoon of June 2, 1943, Sartre was standing in the theater lobby, when a handsome, elegantly dressed young man with gray-green eyes walked up and introduced himself. It was Albert Camus, the twenty-nine-year-old novelist who had the previous year published his first novel, The Stranger. Camus had left his native Algeria in March 1940 to seek a cure for pulmonary tuberculosis at the mountain retreat at Le Panelier near Chambon in Vichy. In November 1942, he had become virtually stranded when the Allies invaded North Africa and the Germans seized the unoccupied zone.

Sartre had reviewed The Stranger in a mostly positive six-thousand-word essay; he was in fact one of the first people to do so, that is, except for the reviews by Camus’s friends or by journals owned by his publisher, Gallimard. The two thinkers, Sartre and Camus, shared many interests, from literature and social justice, to explorations of freedom and absurdity. But the ice really broke, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, when they discussed the theater. Sartre was writing a new play, the future No Exit, and wanted Camus to act in and direct it. Sartre insisted.

As rehearsals began over Christmas 1943, Camus joined Sartre’s circle at Café de Flore, and their friendship grew quickly enough to evoke Beauvoir’s jealousy. Later, she acknowledged that she worried about how Sartre, “the strongest heterosexual I knew,” could fall so completely for the charming stranger. “We were like two dogs circling a bone,” she said of her rival. What Beauvoir did not mention, however, was that she had also been attracted to Camus and once tried to seduce him, only to be rebuffed. “Imagine what she might say on the pillow afterwards,” Camus told his friend and fellow writer Arthur Koestler.

Another place Sartre, Camus, and Beauvoir could be seen that spring was at the restaurant the Catalan, on rue des Grands-Augustins, sometimes seated at the table of their new friend, Pablo Picasso. Despite many invitations to come abroad, the Spanish artist had remained in Paris during the Nazi Occupation, painting in his two-story studio on rue Saint-Augustin, on the Left Bank. The sixty-two-year-old Picasso, with long white hair falling onto his shoulders, was surrounded by his work and his women, including his latest lover, twenty-two-year-old painter Françoise Gilot.

In the eyes of Nazi authorities, Picasso was a highly suspect artist. He had supported Spanish republicans in the Civil War, raised money for their cause, and published caricatures of the military dictator in his Dream and Lie of Franco. He had commemorated the German firebombing raid of the Basque city of Guernica on the afternoon of April 26, 1937, on a three-hundred-square-foot canvas that had dramatically raised awareness of the tragedy. Hitler, of course, had placed the painter on a list of modern degenerates, and the Nazis banned all his exhibits in Paris.

The French police had actually collected a sizable file on the Spanish painter, a dossier that was only discovered in 2003, when 140 cardboard boxes were returned to Paris from Moscow. The Russians had seized the archive in 1945 from the Germans, who in turn had taken it after the Liberation. As historians then learned, Picasso had applied for French citizenship in April 1940, but the state had rejected the application on grounds that he was suspected of being an anarchist or communist, or harboring sympathies leaning in that direction. “He has no right to be naturalized,” an official wrote on the form, and “should even be considered suspect from a national viewpoint.”

Picasso had not told even his closest friends about this request. He had, however, let them know about his fears: namely, that his authorization to remain in the country was about to expire and he had sworn never to return to Spain as long as Franco was in power. Fortunately for Picasso, a sympathetic police official intervened. “Very illegally,” Maurice Toesca wrote in his diary in September 1943, “I have prolonged his stay for three years.”

The Germans who visited Picasso’s studio during the Occupation were not the SS men who were rumored to be slashing his paintings, but instead a number of officials who admired his work. One frequent visitor was Lieutenant Gerhard Heller of the Referat Schriftum (Literature Section) of the Propaganda-Staffel. After his introduction in June 1942, Heller, a censor, would take a break from the stacks of manuscripts overflowing on the shelves, tables, chairs, and floors at his office at 52 Champs-Élysées to climb the spiral staircase, heart beating with excitement at another chance to observe the most infamous example of modern degenerate art at work.

As usual, Picasso was experimenting with color, texture, and form. In addition to woodcuts and pen-and-ink drawings, he worked on cardboard, matchboxes, cigarette boxes, even food, like a piece of bread—a reflection of his creative zeal as well as the shortage of canvases under the Occupation. Many of the objects of his paintings—sausages, legs of lamb, grand buffet tables, and the empty cooking pot—reflect the preoccupations and hardships of the period, as did the death’s-heads and grotesque monsters reminiscent of his early cubist days. Even his choice of colors, more black, gray, and beige, seemed to parallel the drab palette of the Occupation.

Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, and the literary world of the Left Bank were gearing up for a novel event: a new play scheduled to debut on March 19, 1944. The author was Pablo Picasso. The Nazis had refused to allow him to exhibit his paintings in Paris, but they had said nothing about plays.

AFTER leaving Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, Massu and his colleagues reached Auxerre on Monday, March 13, about one o’clock in the afternoon. Along the way, they had stopped by a roadside restaurant, where they encountered a scarcity of food options and jokingly complained about the difficulty, as policemen, of cashing their ration tickets on the black market.

After finishing their coffee, or “roasted barley,” the officers visited the police station, informing the local authorities of the objectives of their mission and obtaining reinforcements to watch railway stations and quays for possible escape. Both Dr. Petiot and Madame Petiot were officially “in flight.”

The rue des Lombards address listed on the note attached to the door at rue Le Sueur belonged to Marcel Petiot’s younger brother, Maurice, who owned a number of properties. He lived, however, in an apartment above his electronics shop on 56 rue du Pont with his wife and two kids, thirteen-year-old Ghylaine and eight-year-old Daniel. A third minor was staying in there: Marcel and Georgette’s son, Gérard, who was studying at the nearby sixteenth-century school, Lycée Jacques Amyot.

The home address was the one that police discovered had first been scribbled on the note and then erased. The detectives were eager to visit, but they first checked out the owner, Maurice Petiot, a thirty-seven-year-old electrician by trade who, in his photograph, looked like a taller, darker, and more handsome version of his older brother. Maurice had struggled financially for a number of years and had declared bankruptcy. More recently, his business had improved dramatically and he had begun investing in properties in the region.

When police arrived at his shop, its shelves stocked with a range of radio and electronic goods in high demand due to the popularity of the BBC and Radio Berlin, Maurice Petiot was not there. His wife, the thirty-one-year-old Marie Angèle Le Guyader Petiot, or Monique, received the officers cordially. She allowed them to look around the premises without a permit. She also agreed, when asked, to escort the detectives three blocks away, to the property at 18 rue des Lombards.

What Massu and his team found was a small château. Built atop a hill, with a gate and metal grilles over the windows, the estate had a labyrinthine cellar with two long corridors that connected into a series of Roman catacombs. How could Maurice Petiot afford this property? Clearly the profits from selling radio and electronics equipment would not have sufficed. Monique explained that the building had been purchased by her father-in-law, Felix Petiot, in the name of her son Daniel.

No one lived at the estate, Monique Petiot said. Indeed, despite its grand exterior, the inside was dusty and untidy, with broken panels and furniture sometimes piled in heaps in the corners, strangely reminiscent of rue Le Sueur. Upstairs, the state of disuse also resembled the Paris town house. There was, as Pierre Malo of Le Matin would later describe it, “the most extraordinary collection of works of art and garbage that it is possible to imagine.” The property, however, did not seem as uninhabited as Monique Petiot claimed.

In a small room on the ground floor near the staircase was a bed with the covers pulled back and the sheets ruffled. Massu asked who had slept there. Was it Marcel or Georgette Petiot? Monique shook her head, saying only that the guest was a family friend, a forty-seven-year-old businessman named Albert Neuhausen, who lived in Courson-les-Carrières, a small town about ten miles south. She had forgotten to mention that.

The inspectors made the short drive to verify the claim. Neuhausen, also in the electronics business, admitted that he knew Maurice and Monique Petiot well. Yes, he had recently stayed with them, he said, as he often did when he took the train to Paris.

Neuhausen had something else to tell the detectives. Although he did not know Dr. Petiot well and certainly had no information on his whereabouts, Neuhausen admitted seeing the murder suspect on the morning of Saturday, March 11. Neuhausen had been in Paris on business, and as a favor for Monique, he had stopped by Petiot’s apartment on rue Caumartin about eleven o’clock to fetch a pair of shoes for Gérard.

“We spoke of things without importance,” Neuhausen said. “The doctor gave me the shoes for his son and a quarter of an hour later, I left.” He took the 5:20 train at Gare de Lyon, arriving at Auxerre at 9:40, and while he had intended to bike home, it was raining and he decided to stay the night at rue des Lombards, just as Monique said. He told detectives that this was all he knew about the matter.

ON Tuesday, March 14, an investigator spotted an attractive woman in a black skirt and a black astrakhan coat, carrying an expensive yellow leather suitcase. She was standing on the platform waiting for a train at the Auxerre station. Slim and petite, she had deep brown eyes and black shoulder-length hair with a few locks falling onto her forehead. She was just four months shy of her fortieth birthday, though she looked much younger. When the policeman approached, the woman did not deny her identity. “I have done nothing wrong,” Georgette Petiot protested, before collapsing on the platform. Two gendarmes carried her out of the station. One young man assisted the police, crying all the while. This was her son, Gérard.

Massu, informed of the arrest, returned at once to the Auxerre police station. Georgette was taken to his car. Already in the vehicle was her brother-in-law Maurice, who had been apprehended the previous night when he returned home from the nearby villages of Cheney and Joigny. Georgette rested her head on his shoulder. Her “short sobs” broke up the otherwise silent ride back to Paris.